Hertz and Uber Team Up to Build a Fleet of Self-Driving Cars

Hertz and Uber announced they are partnering to manage fleets of vehicles for Uber's ride-hailing and self-driving car services. Hertz created a new company called Oro Mobility to handle this work. At the same time, Uber also announced partnerships with two other companies, Lucid Motors and Nuro, to build the self-driving cars themselves. Uber's investor relations site and Lucid Motors' investor relations announced the deals within days of each other.

Think of it this way: building self-driving cars is one job, but running a fleet of them is another. Uber is splitting these tasks between different partners instead of trying to do everything itself.

What Oro Mobility Will Do

Oro Mobility is Hertz's new division focused on managing vehicle fleets for ride-hailing and self-driving services across several U.S. cities. It will handle buying vehicles, maintaining them, keeping them clean, managing charging stations, and making sure everything follows local laws.

Hertz already knows how to do these things for its rental car business. Now it will apply the same skills to help Uber. Uber will provide the app and the system for matching riders with cars. Hertz will handle keeping those cars running and ready.

This makes sense because managing a large fleet of self-driving cars requires more attention than managing cars driven by individual people. Self-driving cars need their software updated regularly, their sensors checked, and their brakes and computers inspected more often. Someone needs to coordinate all of that across many vehicles, in many cities, following different rules in each place.

A Divided Approach

Uber is splitting the work in two directions. Lucid Motors and Nuro will focus on building the self-driving technology and the car itself. Oro Mobility and Hertz will focus on operating and maintaining those cars once they are built.

This mirrors a pattern we have seen before in technology. When smartphones became common, manufacturers, software companies, and app creators each focused on what they did best instead of one company trying to build everything. The same is happening with self-driving cars now.

Companies that tried to build self-driving cars from the ground up on their own, like Waymo and Cruise, found that managing large fleets of vehicles is completely different from inventing the technology. It turns out you need different skills. Building the car is one expertise. Running 1,000 of them across a city is another. This deal reflects that lesson.

Why This Matters

The partnerships show that self-driving cars will not arrive as a single breakthrough. Instead, they will arrive as a network of companies each doing their part: one company focuses on the technology, another on the vehicles, and another on the operations.

For Hertz, this is a chance to stay relevant as the car rental business changes. Cars are becoming shared rather than owned, and self-driving will accelerate that shift. By getting into fleet management for self-driving services now, Hertz can build a new business before the technology is fully ready.

For Uber, the partnerships mean it can focus on its strengths—the app, the routing algorithms, connecting riders to cars—while letting other companies handle what they do better. This usually allows companies to move faster and avoid becoming experts in too many different areas at once.

The broader context here is that the self-driving car industry is starting to mature. For the first time, companies are coordinating their efforts and dividing the work before the technology is fully proven, rather than each trying to go it alone. This is a sign that the industry believes self-driving cars will arrive sooner rather than later, and that the hard part now is not inventing them but operating them at scale in cities across the country.