2024 was a productive year at Aurora. We achieved critical milestones with partners and customers and advanced toward the commercial launch of our autonomous trucking service, planned for April 2025.  Let’s take a look back at some of our biggest wins and proudest moments from an exciting year.

Final Safety Checks

At Aurora, safety is personal. As we plan for our driverless launch, our Safety Case for our autonomous trucking product is 97% complete (as of October) for our first route, Dallas to Houston. What gets us to 100%? Validation of several surface street capabilities (that were intentionally sequenced later in our plans), rarer construction situations, and a handful of vehicle claims. 

But don’t take our word for it – our approach to safety was audited by TÜV SÜD, a global leader in safety testing, inspecting, and certification. We passed their tests with flying colors. 

Strong Customer Demand 

Uber Freight, Schneider, Hirschbach, among others have all signed up for our commercial driverless service, which makes them the first freight companies to adopt this groundbreaking technology.

With Uber Freight, we introduced a first-of-its-kind Premier Autonomy Program, which sets aside over a billion driverless miles for Uber Freight carriers through 2030. With our current roster of customers, our expected launch capacity is now fully contracted. 

Showing it’s Real

We invited reporters, safety officials, regulators, and investors to watch the Aurora Driver perform critical safety maneuvers without a driver, including interacting with emergency vehicles, responding quickly to obscured pedestrians, a tire blowout, and more. These folks also experienced a driverless truck ride for the first time, which means President Obama is no longer the only one who can say he’s been in one of our driverless vehicles!  

Green Light in the Lone Star State and Beyond

As we plan for our Dallas-Houston launch route, we are good to go in Texas! Texas state regulations light a clear path for deployment of our driverless trucks, and the Lone Star State’s high freight volumes make it a great place to grow our business.

As we plan for U.S. expansion, we’re excited that most states welcome the safety and efficiency benefits of autonomous trucks.

Next Stop: Phoenix

To deliver a valuable product, we’re hyper-focused on opening the lanes that matter most to our customers. At our annual Partner Summit, we announced we intend to go driverless on a new Fort Worth-Phoenix route in 2025. In fact, we recently mapped the nearly 900-mile round trip from El Paso to Phoenix and the Aurora Driver executed its first autonomous run, nearly disengagement-free – all in two weeks. 

Industry-Leading Partnerships

We believe the only way to deliver reliable and redundant autonomous vehicles at scale is through an ecosystem of partners. The average class 8 truck has over 10,000 parts, making it critical to work alongside truck manufacturers and suppliers to ensure they have the required redundancies for high-volume production.

Volvo Autonomous Solutions debuted the Volvo VNL Autonomous, powered by the Aurora Driver in May.  These trucks are being built at Volvo’s New River Valley Plant and are autonomously hauling freight for DHL between Aurora’s terminals in Texas, alongside our PACCAR Peterbilt 579 trucks. 

In addition to working with our OEM partners, we continue to make progress with Continental, our tier 1 manufacturer partner. Continental plans to start testing prototypes of the industrialized Aurora Driver hardware kit next year, which is set to go into production in 2027.  

Fueled for Growth

We raised $483 million from some of Wall Street’s largest institutional investors, giving us runway well into 2026. We believe this is a testament to investors’ confidence in Aurora’s ability to deliver a valuable product and evolve the freight industry for the better. 

In short, it’s been an incredible year. Delivering a product the world has never seen before is no easy task – it’s the challenge of a generation for a reason. But at Aurora, we have the vision, partners, and path to market to make this transformative technology a reality. 

Onward to 2025!

PS: Make sure to find us at CES! We’ll be in Continental’s booth showing off the Volvo VNL Autonomous, powered by the Aurora Driver. And our very own Sterling Anderson will be joining Volvo executives for their keynote on January 8 at the Venetian.