Safety guidelines for autonomous mobility and delivery on the Uber Platform

Uber’s Vision for Autonomous Mobility & Delivery

Uber’s mission is to reimagine the way the world moves for the better, and autonomous vehicles (AVs) are part of that vision. We expect AVs to increasingly contribute to Uber’s business over time, as part of a hybrid network featuring AVs operating alongside conventional vehicles. This hybrid network approach has the potential to expand transport and delivery access, further promote safety, and unlock new use cases. We intend to ensure Uber continues to provide the best mobility and delivery offerings in a future with AVs.

Our approach is to partner with autonomous vehicle developers, fleet operators, and cities to help connect consumers with AV services that:

• Create new opportunities and improve productivity for our customers and partners
• Meet our own robust expectations for security, privacy, and safety
• Promote equity and positive environmental outcomes in our communities

Standing Up for Safety

Our partners develop and build the technology required to power autonomous vehicles with safety as a priority. Uber has also implemented a comprehensive safety programme, in which we review potential partners’ approaches to safety before they deploy and operate on the Uber network across mobility and delivery use cases.

Introducing Uber’s updated safety guidelines for autonomous mobility and delivery on the Uber Platform

At Uber, safety isn’t just a box we tick; it’s a value woven into everything we do. Since launching our Safety Guidelines for Autonomous Mobility Providers three years ago, this framework has guided every automated vehicle operating on our platform, helping to ensure consistency, accountability, and public trust as new mobility and delivery technologies have come online. Today, we’re pleased to share an evolution of that proven foundation, an update shaped by years of operational insight and the onboarding of new autonomous modalities. This expanded scope embraces emerging technologies, delivery methods, and safety domains while remaining rooted in the principles that already define how we operate safely at scale.

Regulations for automated vehicles continue to develop, and we welcome that progress. Compliance has never been our limit; it’s our starting point. Our guidelines operate alongside regulatory frameworks and industry best practices to ensure consistency across partners, technologies, and regions. This is how we hold ourselves and our partners to a higher standard, grounded not just in policy but in our responsibility to the people and communities we serve.

Preparing for the next chapter

As AV technology progresses, so too must our framework, providing clarity where it matters most, taking nuances into account, and extending it to new areas. Together, these updates reinforce a framework that’s already effective, ensuring we remain proactive as technology and expectations change.  The Autonomous Mobility & Delivery Safety Guidelines have been updated to reflect: 

• New AI standards
• Advances in AV industry safety standards
• Food safety for pavement robots
• Delivery drone safety 

Uber’s updated Safety Guidelines for Autonomous Mobility & Delivery Providers reflect three years of real-world AV deployment experience and closer collaboration with industry standards bodies, including the AVSC, SAE, IEEE, and ISO. The new edition strengthens expectations for how partners demonstrate their safety approach, improves transparency across testing and validation practices, and introduces expanded guidance for emerging modalities such as airspace delivery. These updates, shaped by evolving technology, regulatory progress, and Uber’s active role in defining best practices, highlight our commitment to safety, accountability, and the responsible growth of autonomous services on the Uber platform.

Safety programme for Autonomous Mobility & Delivery

For non-autonomous vehicles, federal regulatory standards govern vehicle design and state and local rules govern vehicle fleet operations. Except in a few locations, regulatory frameworks governing the commercial operations of AVs are still being developed.

While regulations continue to evolve, Uber can take its own steps to develop an understanding of how our potential partners plan to approach AV safety for any operations involving the Uber platform.

As such, the aim of the AM&D Safety Programme is to implement a safety framework that:

• defines a comprehensive and pragmatic strategy for understanding how potential partners would approach the safety of any operations on the Uber platform,
• creates a consistent assessment process, rooted in applicable industry safety standards and best practices, 
• establishes the baseline for automated and autonomous robots and vehicles to deploy and continue operation on the Uber network across mobility and delivery use cases.

The programme is organised into three phases: first, planning, then demonstration, and ultimately operation, with clear reporting on safety performance. This programme identifies the AV fleet partner obligations that are expected to be met at each step of the way.

Safety Plan Assessment Framework

Although the use of a Safety Plan in Uber’s safety programme is consistent across operators, we recognise that partner approaches to safety may vary significantly from one to the next. As a result, the Uber AM&D safety assessment does not prescribe a single safety standard or a singular metric and threshold against which the safety performance of all partners is measured. Rather, the AM&D Safety team seeks to assess each partner’s Safety Plan on its own terms, with reference to the particular partner’s planned scope of operations. The safety plan assessment framework is organised into three safety components that complement each other and ensure that Uber is assessing a partner’s comprehensive approach to safety rather than only assessing individual topics such as safety metrics or verification and validation approaches.

Collaboration as the way forward

We know that safety innovation doesn’t happen in isolation. It’s built through collaboration across our cross-functional stakeholders, including AV developers, AV fleet operators, OEMs, regulators, researchers, and users. And that’s what we’re committed to.

The ideal environment for deploying autonomous vehicles is one founded on trust, transparency, and shared responsibility. That’s what we’re building at Uber, every day, with every partner, in every community we serve.

Ultimately, this collaborative work should support the safe commercialisation of AVs by promoting a transparent, consistent, thorough approach to safety across partners on our platform.