Uber taps Hertz to clean, charge, and fix its Lucid Motors robotaxis
The companies announced Thursday that Hertz will provide “day-to-day vehicle asset management, including charging, maintenance, repairs, cleaning, and depot staffing.” The service, announced last year, is supposed to launch by the end of 2026 in the San Francisco Bay Area, using Lucid’s Gravity SUVs and Nuro’s self-driving tech.
Hertz is handling this work through a newly-established affiliate it’s calling Oro Mobility, which the rental company says will “provide integrated fleet management solutions across a range of mobility segments.”
“As the industry transitions from personally owned vehicles to commercially operated driver-led and autonomous fleets, Oro aims to fill a critical orchestration and operations gap,” the Hertz press release reads.
This is not the first time Hertz, which went through a bankruptcy restructuring process in 2020, has followed new mobility trends.
The company made a big splash in 2021 when it announced it was buying 100,000 EVs from Tesla, news that helped Elon Musk’s car company reach a $1 trillion valuation for the first time (and helped Hertz’s image as it emerged from bankruptcy). Hertz also announced plans in 2022 to buy up to 175,000 EVs from General Motors, and another 65,000 from Polestar.
None of those deals were ever fully realized, and Hertz started a fire sale of the EVs it had bought in early 2024. It did that in part because of higher-than-expected maintenance costs due to Uber drivers renting the EVs, and because Tesla slashed prices to stave off competition and boost sales.
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Starting up a fleet management and operations arm, though, should be closer to Hertz’s core competencies as a rental car giant. Competitors like Avis are already doing this kind of work for Waymo. And with robotaxi companies seemingly keen to use third parties to manage this piece of the puzzle, Hertz could build a decent business with Oro.
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