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.

Former NFL quarterback and civil rights activist Colin Kaepernick took the stage at TechCrunch Disrupt 2024 on Wednesday to discuss the challenges people face when trying to disrupt – each in the world of technology and beyond.

“One of the biggest challenges you’re probably going to face when you try to disrupt something – or you try to do something you’re passionate about and you end up disrupting something in the process, is that you’re going to encounter a lot of resistance,” Kaepernick said. “There are going to be hard times and in those moments you want to have people you can lean on, people who can support you and that really gives you that resilience.”

Kaepernick isn’t any stranger to disrupting the establishment, having made national headlines in 2016 when he took a knee to protest racial injustice. The former NFL star says that while he faced quite a lot of resistance, he also saw the have to create a greater and more equitable future.

“When you do that and you see such a strong reaction, you really gain perspective and insight,” Kaepernick said. “We have a protracted road ahead of us. But on the other hand, what I learned during this era, there are also many individuals who wish to go this great distance with you, and I feel the most beautiful thing about it’s that there was resistance to there was also quite a lot of organization.”

As someone who has had 1000’s of stories written about him, he now desires to help creators take control of their narratives with Lumi. The startup’s goal is to empower creators by helping them create and publish stories and content on their very own.

As for founders trying to pivot and explore their passions, Kaepernick had some advice.

“Do you do your homework and know why you do what you do,” he said. “And secondly, once you know it, go after it with passion and go after it with everything you have and take people with you. I wouldn’t be sitting here today, and none of you would know me at all, if it weren’t for the many people who have helped me, and that includes everyone from my wife to family and friends, teammates, coaches, some of them investors and advisors , whom I met along the way. So keep these people with you because it builds us up and makes us sustainable in the long run.”

Zoox co-founder and CTO Jesse Levinson doesn’t imagine Tesla will launch a robot transportation service in California (or anywhere else) next 12 months, despite what Elon Musk recently claimed.

“The fundamental problem is that they don’t have the technology that works,” Levinson said Wednesday at the TechCrunch Disrupt 2024 conference. “I also want to make a distinction between a driver-assist system that drives most of the time — except when it doesn’t work, and then you have to take over — compared to a system that is so reliable and robust that no person is needed.”

Levinson went further and specifically noted Tesla’s decision to rely solely on cameras to support its driver assistance system. “Our perspective is that it really will take much more hardware than Tesla installs in its vehicles to build a robotaxi that is not only as safe, but especially safer than a human,” he said.

Levinson’s comments come just weeks after Musk unveiled a prototype of Tesla’s so-called robotics “Cybercab.” Musk also announced at the Cybercab conference that Tesla wants to start out enabling Model 3 sedans and Model Y SUVs to operate as robots in California and Texas by the end of 2025.

Levinson said he uses Tesla’s self-driving (supervised) software “every few weeks.” And while he called it “impressive,” he also said he found it “a little stressful.”

“He usually does something good and then he kind of lulls you into a false sense of complacency and then he does something bad,” he said. “You think: Oh my God!”

Levinson further added that he believes FSD is “about 100 times less safe than a human if you look at all publicly available metrics.” (Tesla releases quarterly safety reports claim that driver assistance systems cause fewer accidents than cars without them – although these are self-reported statistics criticized as selective.)

The comments about Tesla got here as Levinson announced that Zoox will launch a custom-built robotaxi in the San Francisco and Las Vegas markets in the coming weeks. The company plans to make them available in the Early Rider program in 2025.