After a launch in one U.S. city, Dallas, last month, Uber is preparing to roll out its own network of robotaxis available through its app with the cooperation of various autonomous vehicle partners. To accomplish that, however, it’s banking on what it says is the essential part of autonomy: data.

Uber announced Tuesday its new AV Labs division that it says will manage data from Uber trips across all roads in all cities and airports the company serves for its robotaxi partners to access and use as they deploy vehicles. Last month, Uber announced its first robotaxi route, starting with a 9-square-mile area in Dallas, a partnership with the autonomous car and robot maker Avride. Humans will still be behind the wheel, but truly driverless rides are planned for a later, unspecified date.

Unlike Waymo, Amazon’s Zoox and Tesla, Uber no longer has plans to use its own vehicles for robotaxi trips for the public, instead relying on smaller companies to handle the technology development. Customers can request a ride from a robotaxi or one of Uber’s existing services through the company’s app, depending on availability in the area they’re trying to travel in.

The intention with AV Labs is to bring together engineers and researchers with data on Uber usage and, “turn real-world operations into high-quality data that helps autonomous systems learn faster and perform better.” Much of that has become more important because of some high-profile issues that Waymo has experienced so far with traffic patterns during traffic light failures in San Francisco, passing school buses illegally in Austin and even problems charging in Santa Monica.

Uber announced a deal last summer to add at least 20,000 Lucid Gravity electric SUVs with a Nuro-developed Level 4 human-less driving system. At CES 2026 earlier this month, it announced that it would test the modified Lucid Gravity-derived robotaxi in the San Francisco area later this year. The six-passenger vehicle would also use Nvidia’s Drive Hyperion platform.