A commercial-ready terminal for self-driving trucks has opened its doors in Dallas ahead of a planned deployment of an autonomous trucking product in Texas.
Pittsburgh-based Aurora Innovation Inc. (Nasdaq: AUR) announced that its new South Dallas Terminal will serve as a blueprint for all future terminals where trucks powered by the company's AV technology can come for loading, refueling and inspection-based needs. Aurora's Houston terminal equivalent will reach this stage in the third quarter of 2023, the company said.
For now, these trucks will still be driven by human operators until the company ships its autonomous trucking subscription platform called Aurora Horizon by the end of 2024. The company plans to launch Aurora Horizon with its partners along the Interstate 45 corridor in between Houston and Dallas, one of the main routes the company has been testing on extensively over the years.
Aurora said its commercial-ready terminal in Dallas will set the standard for these types of commercial operations to come.
"Self-driving technology will fundamentally transform how we move goods," Kendra Phillips, vice president of service delivery at Aurora, said in a prepared statement. "It's incredibly exciting to lead the way for how to deliver commercial driverless operations to our customers and the broader industry."
Aurora actively hauls 50 customer loads per week with its shipping partners across two routes in Texas as part of a pilot program of its autonomous trucking platform. These routes will be among the first to go fully autonomous when Aurora pulls its drivers from its cabs upon the launch of Aurora Horizon.
Aurora announced its Houston-Dallas pilot program in September 2021 with Memphis, Tennessee-based transportation and logistics giant FedEx Corp. (NYSE: FDX) and Paccar (Nasdaq: PCAR), a Bellevue, Washington-based designer and maker of large semi-trucks. Autonomously enabled trucks started hauling FedEx loads along the 500-mile stretch of I-45, and the partnership added a 600-mile route between Fort Worth and El Paso in May 2022.
In summer 2022, Aurora added national trucking firm Schneider National Inc. (NYSE: SNDR) as another commercial pilot partner to further test out and validate autonomous freight-hauling capabilities between Houston and Dallas.
