Autonomy without the costume.
Ride is specified as a fully autonomous, robotaxi-class service: no human driver in the vehicle. That is an architecture and a regulatory mountain, not a present authorization. This page states the safety language we will be held to — and what we do not claim.
What this page is not.
It is not a published ISO 26262 safety case, not an SOTIF (ISO 21448) complete analysis, not an NHTSA crash-avoidance dossier, and not a substitute for a CPUC or ASTRA filing. No miles, disengagement rates, or “safer than a human” comparisons are offered, because we will not invent a record.
When a genuine safety case exists, it will be versioned and pointed to from /licenses/operating with a status other than Not filed.
The vehicle only drives where the domain is written.
An operational design domain is a bounded set of conditions: geography, weather, speed, time of day, road types, construction, and emergency scenes. Outside the ODD, the correct behavior is to refuse the trip, pullover, or fall back to a minimal-risk condition — not to “try.” Ride will not market an unbounded citywide robotaxi while the ODD is a slide.
Accept, carry, close
Assignment only if energy, maps, sensors, and assistance load are inside limits. Cabin help remains available.
Refuse or minimal-risk
No heroic traversal of an unmapped flood, an unhandled construction pattern, or a sensor-blind storm. Remote assistance may authorize a pullover; it does not rewrite physics.
A desk, not a hidden driver.
Remote assistance is a trained operations function: confirm a scene, authorize a low-speed nudge where regulation allows, dispatch field support, talk to the cabin, call emergency services. It is not advertised as continuous teleoperation of city driving. Staffing ratios, training, and recording will be part of any real safety case — they are not invented here.
Passengers should assume a help path exists in-app and in-cabin hardware. They should not assume a person is “driving from a warehouse.”
Sensors exist to drive, not to build a dossier on you.
Cameras, lidar/radar as equipped, IMU, GNSS, cabin microphones only if a safety or assistance feature requires them and notice is given. Autonomy learning uses trip and sensor logs under the bases described in the Privacy Policy template. Ride is not a face-recognition product and not a law-enforcement camera network.
- Cabin audio/video: off by default except incident, assistance, or explicit safety modes.
- Exterior perception: retained under stated periods; not sold as a brokerage.
- Emergency override: may share location with responders when you or the desk invoke help.
When something breaks, the record should hold.
Collision, cabin emergency, or suspected tampering: the vehicle seeks a minimal-risk condition; assistance and emergency services are contacted as appropriate; logs needed for the investigation are preserved. Post-quantum receipts, if issued, bind a trip hash — they do not encrypt the cabin and they do not replace a police report.