What’s with those weird-looking cars on San Diego streets?

There’s another tech company tooling around San Diego.

Nuro, an autonomous driving technology company based in Silicon Valley, has deployed a test car onto the streets of Hillcrest, Little Italy, Bankers Hill and portions of downtown and Golden Hill.

The vehicle is not driverless; the Toyota Prius hybrid that Nuro is using has a human behind the wheel who is trained to operate it.

Equipped with sensors that include radar, lidar and cameras on the roof, the car is collecting data as part of a larger testing program Nuro has in place in selected cities across the country to help accelerate a self-driving future.

The vehicle gathers virtually countless data inputs such as traffic lights, stop signs, driving patterns and safety points, and then process the information “into a single view of the world around it,” said David Salguero, Nuro’s head of communications.

“The cars have onboard processing and storage, and then we use cloud computing to take that data and train our model,” he said.

Nuro chose San Diego as one of its test sites because the city combines urban, coastal and residential neighborhoods with a transportation network that serves drivers, cyclists, pedestrians and public transit.

But that does not mean the company has plans to launch autonomous service in the San Diego area.

Rather, Nuro makes money by developing self-driving tech and then licensing it to automakers and mobility platforms. Those partners then make the decision whether to bring autonomous driving — be it commercial fleets, robotaxis or even personal car services — into a given area.

In cities such as San Diego, “we are starting to build the foundation so that if and when our partners want to deploy there, we’ve already laid a lot of the groundwork,” Salguero said. “It’s kind of like digging the well before you’re thirsty, as it were.”

Nuro’s work thus far is highly targeted, so it only requires a single vehicle in San Diego that will operate for about 10 days, covering a focused five-square-mile area.

“We’ll be back for the next stage of testing down the line and will have more to share then,” Salguero said.

At least one other autonomous driving company has also taken to the streets of San Diego.

Waymo earlier this year started conducting test drives with humans behind the wheel in similar neighborhoods, as well as Route 163 and Interstate 5.

“This testing will show us where we should further tune our perception models before expanding to new cities,” a spokesperson for the Bay Area company owned by Google parent Alphabet Inc., told the Union-Tribune in February.

Waymo has already deployed driverless cars/taxis in parts of San Francisco, Silicon Valley, Phoenix and Los Angeles but the company has not announced any plans to roll out service in the San Diego area.

“This testing will show us where we should further tune our perception models before expanding to new cities,” the Waymo spokesperson said.

Waymo rides are also available in Atlanta and Austin, Texas, through the Uber app, and the company has announced plans to expand to Miami and Washington D.C.

Autonomous driving has moved from concept to reality in recent years, with many transportation experts predicting a revolutionary change in the auto industry.

Tesla has implemented autopilot and self-driving features on its vehicles that include traffic-aware cruise control, semi-autonomous navigation, response to traffic lights and the ability to summon the car from a parking space. Tesla CEO Elon Musk says he’s staking his company’s future on investments in robotics, autonomous vehicles technology and artificial intelligence.

Supporters of self-driving technology say it allows drivers who, for instance, are stuck in traffic jams to spend their time on more productive tasks. Plus, autonomy can provide access to consumers who otherwise may not have access to reliable transportation.

“For example, many folks are approaching their 80s or people who at some point are no longer able to drive but live in a suburb where you have to rely on an automobile to get around,” Salguero of Nuro said. “At a certain point when autonomy is more ubiquitous and reasonably priced, they can either rely on robotaxis or on autonomous solutions in their own vehicle to get them where they need to go. That’s the vision we see for the future.”

Backers also predict an autonomous future will improve road safety and help prevent car accidents. But some consumers are leery.

Tesla is facing dozens of lawsuits tied to its autopilot and self-driving features. Last month, Waymo issued a recall after a glitch in part of its self-driving software reportedly caused some vehicles to crash into low-visibility barriers like chains and gates. The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration said the problem affected 1,212 vehicles.

A survey released by AAA in February said that six in 10 drivers in the U.S. are afraid to ride in self-driving vehicles — although the percentage who say they are fine riding in them increased from 9% last year to 13% this year.

“For Nuro specifically, we do a lot of testing, we do a lot of validation and we do so much work before our cars are ever out on public streets,” Salguero said. “Safety’s really at the core of everything we do … So the one thing I would say to that person who was worried about self-driving cars is that it is up to Nuro and the industry to earn that trust from them.”

Salguero said Nuro’s vehicles have logged 1.2 million miles in auto-mode without any at-fault incidents.

Created in 2016 and counting about 700 employees, Nuro raised $106 million in its latest funding round, boosting its valuation to about $6 billion.

Waymo, after banking $5.6 billion in fresh capital last November, is currently valued at more than  $45 billion.