AUTONEWS

Autonomous truck company Aurora delays hauling freight without human drivers until April

Autonomous vehicle technology startup Aurora Innovation is targeting April 2025 for commercial deployment of its autonomous trucks, pushing its timeline back by about a quarter. The company had originally planned to launch by the end of 2024. The company said it delayed the launch so it can continue to validate its self-driving technology. 

“While this is modestly later than we had intended, this timing remains within the margin of error we have anticipated and conveyed throughout 2024,” Aurora CEO and co-founder Chris Urmson wrote in his third-quarter earnings shareholder letter. “With our intention to introduce the Aurora Driver with a crawl, walk, run approach, this shift to our timeline will have a negligible financial impact.”

Aurora will go to market as a carrier, but its end goal is to pursue a driver-as-a-service model, wherein carriers purchase trucks with the Aurora Driver tech on board and then offer their services via those trucks to shippers. 

One of the ways Aurora measures the performance and commercial readiness of its Aurora Driver is its use of on-site support, which the company says will be the most expensive support provided. As of the end of the third-quarter, the Aurora Driver was delivering commercial loads without the support of a remote human 80% of the time, which is up 75% from the second-quarter. The goal is to reach 90% by commercial launch in the spring. 

The startup intends to deploy up to 10 driverless trucks during commercial launch, with the goal of increasing to tens of trucks by the end of 2025.

Aurora has been testing commercial loads with pilot customers including FedEx, Werner, Schneider, Hirschbach, Uber Freight, and others. The company schedules roughly 160 commercial loads per week, which Aurora says is more than double the volume from last year. As of October 27, 2024, Aurora’s trucks have autonomously delivered more than 8,200 loads and driven over 2.2 million commercial miles – but all with a human behind the wheel.

Aurora, a pre-revenue company building pioneer tech, recorded an operating expense of $196 million in the third quarter, including stock-based compensation of $35 million. That’s less than the $212 million it spent in the same period last year, which Aurora says demonstrates its commitment to being frugal on its path to commercialization. 

The company told investors on its third-quarter earnings conference call that it has made progress toward ensuring its trucks will operate safely.

Remaining obstacles are "primarily in the areas of some elements of surface street driving and some elements of construction that we see on the freeway," CEO Chris Urmson said. "We want to have extremely high confidence in the system as we as we go forward."

The company will start with about 10 autonomous tractor-trailers and move to "tens" of trucks by the end of next year, Urmson said.

"This shift to our timeline will have a negligible financial impact and does not affect our scaling efforts on our path to self-funding," Urmson said.

Aurora also intends to haul freight without human drivers from Fort Worth, Texas, to Phoenix later in 2025, Urmson said.

Aurora in August added nearly $500 million to its balance sheet with a capital raise in August, which the company expects to fund the initial phases of its strategy to scale up driverless trucking.

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