The checkered flags are waving for an autonomous vehicle developer after it said it crossed a metaphorical product finish line on Monday as it now shifts to refine its technology ahead of a commercial launch next year.
Strip District-based Aurora Innovation Inc. said its Aurora Driver product is officially "feature complete" and that all of its previously-touted self-driving abilities are now capable of being carried out on public roads. Testing supervisors will remain in the cabin for now as Aurora (NASDAQ: AUR) said it will spend the next year and a half refining the various hardware and software components that make up its autonomous Aurora Driver platform before its targeted commercial deployment by late 2024.
"If our product were a symphony, the last several years of our development had us selecting the genre, writing the music, finding and training the band, selecting the venue, and even practicing in front of live audiences," Sterling Anderson, co-founder and chief product officer at Aurora, said in a prepared statement. "The phase we’ve now entered is that of adjusting the dynamics of the piece and proving to ourselves that our product is well-tuned to its audience."
Aurora first intends to launch the commercial trucking-based subscription model, dubbed Aurora Horizon, of Aurora Driver with its partners along a highway corridor in Texas between Dallas and Houston, one of the main routes the company has been testing on extensively over the years.
"To return to the symphony analogy, our next phase fine-tunes the dynamics of our performance in preparation for the grand opening," Sterling said. "I can’t wait for you to see it."
For Aurora, the company's "feature complete" accomplishment comes during what has become a challenging time for the autonomous vehicle industry amid broader economic headwinds that are affecting large swaths of the nation's tech industry.
The October 2022 shuttering of Aurora's AV peer and Strip District neighbor Argo AI LLC served as the first major indicator of this but others have felt similar pressure in other ways. In February, Lawrenceville-based AV trucking startup Locomation Inc. cut about 70% of its staff.
Additionally, Aurora has seen its stock plummet by more than 87% since its IPO on Nov. 4, 2021, where shares opened at $11.25 a piece. Shares are currently trading at about $1.34 each.
