At Aurora, we’re committed to prioritizing safety and transparency in how we develop and deploy our self-driving products. As part of our commitment to sharing our work with regulators, shareholders, and the general public, we’re releasing an updated Safety Report, our 2022 Voluntary Safety Self-Assessment (VSSA).
The U.S. Department of Transportation and the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) encourage autonomous vehicle developers to share their safety approaches in these VSSA reports, and this release marks our third edition VSSA for our self-driving technology.
Our Safety Report opens with a letter from our CEO and co-founder Chris Urmson, highlighting Aurora’s recent safety progress and our commitment to the safe deployment of autonomous vehicles. Read his letter below, and check out the full report for more details.
A Letter from Aurora CEO and Co-Founder Chris Urmson
At Aurora, we are focused on a single mission: to deliver the benefits of self-driving technology safely, quickly and broadly. Accomplishing this mission requires excellence in many domains: robotics, product development, logistics, public policy and more. Across all of these areas, we put safety first.
We’re building self-driving products to change the way people and goods move for the better. We work to build a transportation ecosystem that is reliable, efficient, and less expensive because we reject the status quo of over 40,000 annual roadway deaths. We refuse to choose between saving lives and delivering value.
We’ve chosen to take a safety approach that is built around responsibility, transparency and accountability, and think about safety throughout our business. As you’ll see in this assessment, our five pillars — Proficiency, Fail Safe, Continuous Improvement, Resilience and Trustworthiness — span not just our product, but our development process and our business and involve engagement with important stakeholders.
Since 2016, the U.S. Department of Transportation has asked that autonomous vehicle companies explain how they prioritize safety through Voluntary Safety Self Assessments. This transparency is invaluable for earning public trust and, since our early days, Aurora has routinely shared our safety approach via regular public blog posts and updates to our safety report. This year our report discusses how we are moving closer to driverless operations and launching our commercial self-driving products through innovations like our Virtual Testing Suite, Fault Management System, and more.
With this report, we’re making a crucial pledge to continue to intertwine our safety, development, and deployment workstreams: Aurora will not launch our autonomous trucking product until our Safety Case for our initial driverless operations is complete. We see this as the highest safety bar in our industry, and one that helps ensure our complete product, including software, hardware, and services, is ready for commercial operations.
Building autonomous vehicles safely is neither simple nor easy. By implementing a thorough, thoughtful safety approach, we set a high standard for our industry as it defines the next century of transportation innovation.
We embrace the responsibility to build this technology safely.
Chris Urmson
CEO & Co-founder, Aurora
