At Nuro, we recognize that autonomous vehicles (AVs) will be judged by a higher standard than human drivers, and rightly so. Safety isn’t just about statistics or technical benchmarks. It’s about trust. AVs are only safe enough when everyone in and around them trusts that they are safe.
That’s why safety isn’t a slogan or a checkbox at Nuro—it’s embedded into the foundation of our culture. It shapes how we think, how we build, and how we operate.
But autonomy exists in a complex, dynamic ecosystem. Each deployment operates in a different environment and set of conditions. The safety considerations for training an autonomous vehicle’s AI model are different from those for maintaining its high-voltage EV system. And the operational safety practices—be they at a closed-course testing facility or on public roads with safety drivers behind the wheel—present different considerations still.
So how do we build a single safety system that accounts for all of this?
Our answer is a Federated Safety System—a structure that unites all teams under a shared Safety Management System (SMS), while empowering each group to manage their specialized safety responsibilities.
This is a visual representation of Federated Safety at Nuro. It shows how we are structured as a company, ensuring safety is everyone’s responsibility.
We’ve organized our safety efforts across six key domains:
Systems Safety
Autonomy Safety
Public Trust
Operations Safety
Organizational Safety
Environmental, Health, and Safety
Each is responsible for its own safety management while staying aligned to our central SMS framework. Our Safety Risk Management (SRM) and Safety Assurance (SA) processes—modeled after the FAA’s Order 8040.4C—run through all of them, helping us reduce risk, close gaps, and improve performance holistically.
This federated, cooperative model ensures everyone has a stake in improving safety—and lessons learned in one area can benefit the whole company.
Nuro’s SMS is the backbone of our safety philosophy. It is formally integrated into every aspect of our work and is built around four foundational components:
Company Policy
Our leadership sets a clear tone from the top: safety is our first principle, and our commitments reflect that.
Risk Management
We proactively identify, analyze, and mitigate safety risks, drawing insights from every phase of development and operations.
Safety Assurance
We verify that our safety controls, processes, and practices are effective—and that we consistently meet or exceed industry standards.
Safety Promotion
We cultivate a just, informed, and proactive culture through training, open communication, and shared responsibility.
These components guide every team, every decision, and every release—helping us build safer systems that scale.
This approach gives us the best of both worlds: agility and alignment. Teams have the flexibility to tailor their safety practices to their unique challenges. But everything still feeds into a shared system with consistent expectations, oversight, and accountability.
The power of this approach is that it creates an integrated, end-to-end safety system across every product and service. What we learn in testing feeds directly into development requirements. Each product, update, or service integrates with our processes from the start, ensuring that safety is built in, not bolted on. And because this model is iterative, every generation builds on the last. Over time, that leads to scalable, continuous safety improvement across Nuro’s entire portfolio.
A good example of this federated model in action is our safety case development process.
Whenever we build a new product, our teams integrate operational learnings and risk assessments from across the company into the design phase. These insights inform both our engineering and operational safety requirements.
The result is a safety case that is:
Coherent across domains
Grounded in real-world risk data
Validated by our shared standards
By treating safety case development as a cross-functional effort—not a siloed exercise—we ensure that our claims are robust, our documentation is consistent, and our safety culture stays strong.
Autonomy requires trust—and trust requires safety. At Nuro, we’re meeting that challenge with a federated system that empowers every team, integrates every insight, and keeps safety at the center of everything we do.
Because safety isn’t one team’s job. It’s all of ours.
