Robotic vehicle firm plans to put facility at Vegas Speedway
ASSOCIATED PRESS
In this 2018 file image, Fry’s customer service representative Yuri Alvarado puts groceries into the self-driving Nuro vehicle parked outside a Fry’s supermarket, which is owned by Kroger, as part of a pilot program for grocery deliveries in Scottsdale, Ariz. Nuro, the robotics company that develops driverless vehicles for on-road grocery, pizza and prescription deliveries says it will spend $40 million to put a manufacturing facility at the Las Vegas Motor Speedway.
LAS VEGAS >> A robotics company that produces driverless vehicles for over-the-road grocery, pizza and prescription deliveries said today it intends to spend $40 million to put a manufacturing facility at the Las Vegas Motor Speedway.
Nuro, a firm founded in 2016 and based in Mountain View, California, announced it will build an end-of-line manufacturing facility and a closed test track at the Las Vegas-area raceway for the company’s next-generation autonomous vehicle.
Gov. Steve Sisolak and U.S. Sen. Jacky Rosen joined Nuro co-founder Jiajun Zhu to announce the project, which in March received about $170,500 in tax abatements over 10 years from the Nevada Governor’s Office of Economic Development.
Zhu pointed in a statement to partnerships his company has with pizza giant Domino’s, supermarket owner Kroger and delivery company FedEx, and operating in California’s Silicon Valley, Houston and the Phoenix area.
“We are now able to invest in the infrastructure to build tens of thousands of robots,” he said.
Sisolak, a Democrat, pointed to a company promise that a $10 million capital investment will create 250 skilled tech-sector jobs during the next decade in southern Nevada.
The remaining $30 million investment would go toward long-term leases at the manufacturing and testing sites. Sisolak said the project could generate $2.2 billion in total economic value over 10 years.
“It’s one thing to introduce new jobs to the state — and it’s another thing to introduce high-quality careers to our community,” Sisolak said.
Nuro is privately held and headed by Zhu and Dave Ferguson, two engineers in Google’s self-driving Waymo car project.
The company received National Highway Traffic Safety Administration authorization in February 2020 to test up to 5,000 of its R2 autonomous robots delivering pharmacy items in Houston and groceries in Scottsdale, Arizona. The vehicles have package compartments, four-wheels, no pedals and no steering wheel.
Nuro said it intends by next year, with help from Los Angeles-based truck and bus builder BYD North America, to produce its third-generation autonomous vehicle at the Las Vegas facility. It said the 80-acre (32.4-hectare) site will be the first end-of-line manufacturing facility for autonomous delivery vehicles in the United States.
