Autonomous vehicle technology company Aurora Innovation plans to expand on the success of its first driverless commercial launch and add night driving to its operations.
Aurora said Thursday that in the second half of 2025, it will start sending its self-driving trucks out at night and during adverse weather conditions like rain or heavy wind. The company, which provided the update in its first-quarter shareholder letter, also plans to expand its driverless trucking route beyond Dallas to Houston, and into El Paso and Phoenix.
“We’d like to have a high return on asset for every truck that we have, and so we’ll try to drive efficiency to get as many miles on as many trucks as fast as possible,” Aurora CFO Dave Maday said Thursday during the company’s first-quarter earnings call. “We should be able to double our drive time as soon as we unlock night. And that’s our next key milestone.”
Aurora already runs freight with self-driving trucks in those conditions, but with a human safety operator behind the wheel. The company said it has completed more than 4,000 miles in a single self-driving truck without a driver running freight for its launch customers Hirschbach Motor Lines and Uber Freight.
In the week since Aurora’s commercial launch, the company has already expanded to two driverless trucks operating on a daily basis and says it expects to operate “tens of trucks” by the end of 2025.
See here and here for some background. I have to say, I guess I had assumed that this was an actual fleet, not just one and now two trucks doing all the work. The promise that there will be “tens of trucks” by the end of the year just struck me as having big Tobias Funke energy, which gave me the kind of laugh we all need these days.
Anyway. I don’t mean to mock, this is quite an accomplishment, even if it’s at a smaller scale than I had been envisioning. The mentions of El Paso and Phoenix no doubt mean that I-10, and probably I-20 if they’re going to and from Dallas, will be added to the route list. More opportunities to see them for yourself, if you happen to be on the right patch of road at the right time.