Nuro, a company that spun out of Google's self-driving project, abandoned autonomous delivery in 2024. Instead, it chose to enter the robotaxi market. The move is ambitious: a partnership with Uber and Lucid aims to deploy tens of thousands of autonomous vehicles across the United States. Yet Waymo leads the sector with over 3,000 driverless cars in at least 10 American cities.
Nuro isn't positioning itself as a head-on challenger. Instead, it follows a second mover logic: let the pioneer define the market, then step in with structural advantages: lower costs, mature technology, and other people's mistakes already priced in. This dynamic is anything but new. In fact, it repeats across many digital and physical industries. For Italian SMEs working in last-mile logistics or urban transport, the Nuro case offers a concrete strategic lesson.
At SHM Studio, we analyze the timeline of this move, the short-term winners and losers, and the operational implications for Italian businesses moving into automation. In particular, we want to understand how the second-mover model can inspire digital and technological positioning choices well beyond the automotive sector.
Timeline of a pivot: from delivery robot to robotaxi
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