A future where thousands of self-driving trucks deliver goods autonomously due to technology created and built by Aurora Innovation Inc. has received its most defined timeline yet.
On Friday, the Pittsburgh-based autonomous vehicle (AV) developer announced a key milestone with German automotive parts maker Continental AG, Aurora's exclusive partner it first selected in April 2023 for the first scalable buildout of the Aurora Driver, a term that refers to the hardware and software system that's looking to bring self-driving tech to vehicles at scale.
As part of this latest milestone, Continental will produce thousands of self-driving units developed by Aurora (NASDAQ: AUR) beginning in 2027. These units will then be shipped to original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) like Paccar and Volvo, which produce the actual tractor vehicle featured in a tractor-trailer consist.
Continental, which has invested $300 million into its own manufacturing efforts so that it can build these units, will also provide service to these vehicles as part of its partnership with Aurora.
"Technologies for autonomous mobility present the biggest opportunity to transform driving behavior since the creation of the automobile," Philipp von Hirschheydt, executive board member for the automotive group sector at Continental, said in a statement. "Achieving this milestone puts us on a credible path to deploy easy-to-service autonomous trucking systems that customers demand."
Work for Aurora continues on updating its industrialized fallback system of redundancies that will take over in the event a humanless truck needs to pause or halt operations while on active roadways. Aurora will pursue this work alongside Continental's engineering team.
"From day one, we knew we’d need to build a strong ecosystem of partners to bring this technology to market safely and at a commercial scale," Chris Urmson, co-founder and CEO of Aurora, said in a prepared statement. "Finalizing the design of our future hardware is a meaningful step toward making the unit economics of the Aurora Driver compelling and building a business for the long-term."
This partnership is separate from and does not affect Aurora's timeline to begin commercial operations of its self-driving technology, which is still on track to begin before the end of 2024, according to Rachel Chibidakis, a spokesperson for Aurora. The company has pushed that timeline back in the past, though it is actively running self-driving trucks along Texas highways as part of its daily testing operations and Chibidakis said removing the driver from the vehicle so it can do this work autonomously is still the plan that's set to occur before the end of the year.
"Our work with Continental creates the foundation for how we will deploy thousands of autonomous trucks and become a profitable company in the years to come," Chibidakis said in an email statement. "You might be asking: why are we thinking about scale when we don't have one driverless truck on the road yet? Again, bringing automotive-grade hardware to market takes years."
Last July, Aurora raised $820 million in new capital that granted the company the ability to sustain operations "well into 2025" and beyond the launch of its autonomous trucking product in late 2024.
"This capital raise represents a tremendous endorsement and the market’s faith in Aurora’s ability to deliver," Urmson said at the time. "Our position continues to strengthen as we execute and build our coalition of partners."
Aurora employs about 1,800 people throughout the country, about 800 of whom report to its Pittsburgh offices on Smallman Street in the Strip District.
