Aurora Innovation delays commercial autonomous truck launch to 2025

Autonomous vehicle technology startup Aurora Innovation is targeting commercial deployment of its autonomous trucks for April 2025, pushing the timeline forward by a couple of quarter. The company originally planned to launch in late 2024. The company said it delayed the launch so it could proceed to test its autonomous driving technology.

“While this is slightly later than we had planned, this timeline is within the margin of error that we have anticipated and communicated through 2024,” Aurora CEO and co-founder Chris Urmson wrote within the report. earnings for the third quarter shareholder’s letter. “Since our intention is to introduce the Aurora driver with a crawl, walk and run approach, this change on our timeline will have a negligible financial impact.”

Aurora will enter the market as a carrier, but its ultimate goal is to introduce a driver-as-a-service model during which carriers purchase trucks with Aurora Driver technology on board after which offer their services through those trucks to shippers.

One way Aurora measures Aurora Driver performance and commercial readiness is thru on-site support, which the corporate expects might be the costliest support it provides. At the tip of the third quarter, Aurora Driver was delivering commercial loads without distant human support 80% of the time, a 75% increase over the second quarter. The goal is to reach 90% before commercial launch within the spring.

The startup intends to deploy up to 10 autonomous trucks during its commercial launch, and by the tip of 2025 it is predicted to increase them to several dozen.

Aurora has been testing commercial loads with pilot customers including FedEx, Werner, Schneider, Hirschbach, Uber Freight and others. The company is planning about 160 commercial loads per week, which Aurora said is greater than double last yr’s volume. As of October 27, 2024, Aurora trucks have autonomously delivered over 8,200 loads and traveled over 2.2 million commercial miles – all with a human behind the wheel.

Aurora, a pioneering pre-revenue construction technology company, reported third-quarter operating expenses of $196 million, including stock-based compensation of $35 million. That’s down from the $212 million it spent in the course of the same period last yr, which Aurora says shows its commitment to a lean path to commercialization.

The startup ended the quarter with $1.4 billion in money and investments after raising nearly half a billion dollars in August, which should get Aurora off the bottom in 2026 and fund the initial stages of scaling and getting to a spot of sustainability.