Lucid Motors presents a robotic taxi concept called “Lunar”

Lucid Motors debuted a robotaxi it calls the “Lucid Lunar,” which it showed off at its investor day on Thursday in New York City.

The company said that it is a two-seater vehicle without a steering wheel or pedals, designed to be built on the same basic platform that Lucid Motors is developing for its upcoming “mid-sized” series of electric cars.

Interim CEO Mark Winterhoff said Lucid was already “working” on Lunar and that it would debut after the company launches its medium-sized vehicles, but the company later clarified to TechCrunch that there is no active development happening on custom robots — yet.

Lucid Motors also said Thursday that it is close to reaching an agreement with Uber to collaborate on developing a robotaxi based on one of the mid-sized vehicles Lucid has in the pipeline. Lucid Motors is currently working with self-driving vehicle company Nuro to build a self-driving version of its Gravity SUV that will launch on the Uber network by the end of this year in the San Francisco area. Nuro and Lucid have not confirmed whether this new car will use Nuro technology.

The announcements came toward the end of Lucid’s investor day, but showed that the company is increasingly focused on trying to build a business around self-driving that can complement its electric vehicle sales. At one point during the presentation, Lucid Motors showed a bar chart showing how it expects revenue from its robotaxi partnership to significantly outperform the money it makes from licensing electric vehicle technology, although there is no mark on the Y-axis.

Lucid is also looking to make some money with its partial autonomy play. The company revealed that it plans to offer monthly subscriptions for DreamDrive Pro that scale with increasing capacity starting in the first half of 2027. Owners can pay $69 per month for the lowest level of driver assistance, or up to $199 per month for self-driving capability that won’t require the driver to take over at any time. (It should be noted that Lucid Motors has not yet developed this more advanced capability, nor has any other automaker.)

The company shared a slide on Thursday saying Autonomous subscriptions “are the biggest software monetization opportunity.” It’s something Tesla has been doing for a while with its Full Self-Driving (supervised) program, an approach similar to what Rivian announced at its “Autonomy and AI Day” in late December.

Also like Rivian, Lucid Motors is working on its own in-cabin AI assistant. The company aims to have the Assistant be able to do simple tasks like turning the air conditioning on or down, or handle complex queries like finding “something unique to do, maybe off the beaten path, maybe with some kind of nautical vibe.” It is not clear how successful this will be at this time; Lucid Motors’ attempt to show Assistant live during the event failed, and the company instead showed a pre-recorded video.

The rest of Lucid’s events focused largely on the company’s attempts to lower the cost of manufacturing its cars, as well as its efforts to push the limits of the efficiency of its electric powertrain system. These will be critical components to making midsize vehicles affordable (presumably starting around $50,000) when the first ones hit the market by the end of this year. The company revealed that one of them will be known as Lucid Cosmos, and the second vehicle will be called Lucid Earth. The third name was not announced on Thursday.