Aurora Makes Major Progress in 2021 Toward Commercializing Self-Driving Technology

 Industry-leading partnerships and pilots, and cutting-edge products define path to market

Through its cutting-edge technology and industry-leading partnerships, self-driving company Aurora is building a generational business that aims to transform how goods and people move through the world. In 2021 alone, the company has made major advancements toward delivering its vision for how self-driving technology comes to market.

Across the four quadrants of vehicle manufacturer and network user, Aurora is now partnered with one of the largest transportation and logistics companies in the world with FedEx, the number one ride hailing platform on the planet with Uber, the number one global vehicle OEM on the planet with Toyota, and two of the top three North American OEM's in trucking with Volvo and PACCAR. Aurora believes there is no stronger ecosystem of partnerships to bring this technology to market in the AV industry. Aurora plans to merge with the special purpose acquisition company (SPAC) Reinvent Technology Partners Y (NASDAQ: RTPY) and expects to list on Nasdaq with the ticker symbol AUR on November 4.

With its flagship product the Aurora Driver – which is designed to enable driverless operation of any vehicle platform, from class 8 trucks to passenger vehicles – Aurora plans to launch its autonomous commercial trucking business Aurora Horizon by late 2023, followed by its driverless ride-hailing business, Aurora Connect, in 2024. Aurora plans to offer a Driver-as-a-Service business model, where fleet owners purchase Aurora-powered vehicles, subscribe to use the Aurora Driver, and utilize Aurora-certified fleet service partners to operate autonomous mobility and logistics services.

Aurora’s recent milestones define the critical steps for delivering self-driving products at scale:

Depth and Breadth of Expertise: Welcoming Uber ATG to Aurora

At close to 1,600 people, Aurora has an industry-leading self-driving team with nearly 200 Ph.Ds and over 1,100 pending and issued patents worldwide. Building on its expertise, in January, Aurora welcomed Uber ATG’s team and technology, integrating their expertise in engineering, safety, ride-sharing, and more into the company’s long-term vision, value, and plans for autonomous vehicle deployment.

Industry-First Collaboration: Hauling Commercial Goods with FedEx and PACCAR

The company showed how the Aurora Driver can be seamlessly integrated into freight operations via an industry-first collaboration with FedEx and PACCAR. Through this pilot, Aurora-powered PACCAR trucks are regularly and autonomously hauling FedEx loads in Texas between Dallas and Houston – a 500-mile round trip. Aurora believes this collaboration demonstrates the value of self-driving technology as the economy faces a supply chain crisis, making the need for dynamic logistics solutions more important than ever.

Autonomous Trucking in 2023: Building Volvo’s First-Ever Commercial Autonomous Truck for the U.S. Market

After partnering with Volvo in March, Aurora developed the trucking leader’s first-ever prototype truck for autonomous commercial freight operations in North America – the Aurora-powered Volvo VNL. As Volvo’s flagship long-haul model, and the first vehicle in Volvo’s fleet to be designed from the ground up to operate with the Aurora Driver, this represents a significant step toward building and deploying autonomous commercial L4 Class 8 trucks at scale for Volvo Autonomous Solutions customers in North America. With productive partnerships with key trucking leaders underway, Aurora is already delivering value to two of the top three truck manufacturers in the United States.

Autonomous Ride-Hailing in 2024: Developing the Aurora-Powered Toyota Sienna

Just months after announcing a long-term, strategic partnership with Toyota, Aurora unveiled the Aurora-powered Toyota Sienna – a custom-built vehicle designed specifically for autonomous ride-hailing. Benefiting from Toyota’s position as the global leader in vehicle manufacturing and Aurora’s relationship with Uber, the world’s top ride-hailing platform, the Aurora-powered Toyota Sienna is already being tested and validated for planned commercial deployment in 2024.

Path to Profitability: Aurora Horizon and Aurora Connect Product Subscription Services

Showing how self-driving systems are not only developed but how they will be commercialized, Aurora introduced application-specific product suites built to integrate into customers’ businesses and grow their operations. Aurora Horizon is intended to provide freight carriers and private fleets with reliable, scalable self-driving technology powered by the Aurora Driver alongside powerful tools to integrate autonomous vehicles into existing operations. Aurora Connect is designed to enable Aurora-powered vehicles to integrate with ride-hailing networks and transport passengers safely and comfortably. Aurora plans to support both services with Aurora Beacon, the mission control system that will facilitate dispatching, routing, monitoring of vehicle health, and incident response, as well as Aurora Shield, which will provide roadside assistance that maximizes uptime of vehicles equipped with the Aurora Driver.

Next-Generation Hardware: Unlocking Commercialization of Self-Driving Tech

Aurora introduced its next-generation hardware kit, which debuted in commercial pilots this year and laid the foundation for the company’s trucking and ride-hailing services. This new technology fuses Aurora’s and Uber ATG’s hardware into a single, optimized, deeply integrated system – combining cutting-edge camera, radar, and lidar sensors with a new powerhouse computer to create what Aurora believes to be a feature-complete, safer, and more reliable driver.

Accelerating Work with Partners: Implementing the Aurora Driver Development Program

On the heels of announcing partnerships with Volvo, PACCAR, Toyota, and more, Aurora shared the Aurora Driver Development Program – the structured approach for the creation of Aurora-powered vehicles. Refined in collaboration with half a dozen OEMs and through the integration of the Aurora Driver into eight distinct vehicle platforms, this process details how Aurora builds, refines, pilots, validates, launches, and scales deployment of self-driving technology.

Faster, Safer Autonomous Vehicle Development: Rapidly Scaling Simulation Work

While simulation has always been at the core of development of the Aurora Driver, this year saw these efforts expand at a massive scale. Aurora expects to have driven the equivalent of over 9 billion simulated miles by the end of the year – 6 billion of these in 2021 alone. Aurora continues to scale up its Virtual Testing Suite, running millions of daily tests to rapidly add capabilities to the Aurora Driver.

Robust Approach to Safety: Publishing the Self-Driving Industry’s Only Public Safety Case Framework

Aurora has made safety a core part of its mission since the company’s founding and, in 2021, shared the self-driving industry’s first-ever Safety Case Framework to address both autonomous trucking and passenger mobility. This framework, which is the only one published by a currently operating self-driving company, is an imperative component for any business planning to deliver commercial-ready autonomous vehicles at scale by operating on public roads without a safety driver. The Safety Case Framework builds on Aurora’s robust safety playbook, which includes a Safety Management System that governs organizational safety practices, a Safety Advisory Board composed of established experts from safety-critical industries, and a 2021 Voluntary Safety Self-Assessment.

Tangible Technical Progress: Demonstrating the Aurora Driver on Texas Highways

With Aurora-powered trucks already hauling goods on Texas highways, the company invited guests to its Palmer, Texas terminal to experience self-driving technology first-hand with autonomous rides in self-driving Peterbilt 579 trucks on a stretch of Interstate 45 – which is driven by more than 8,500 conventional trucks per day. Aurora also highlighted how the company’s foundational investments in engineering, machine learning, and artificial intelligence accelerate and strengthen progress in hardware, perception, simulations, mapping, forecasting, and data – helping to enable commercial deployment of autonomous vehicles at scale.

These milestones show Aurora’s significant momentum toward deployment of autonomous vehicles at scale for freight and passenger mobility. As Aurora refines its technology in advance of planned commercial deployment in 2023, it will continue to progress with both customers and partners.

Source: Aurora media announcement