Aurora-Continental team move closer to launching autonomous trucking commercialization

Self-driving tech company Aurora Innovation and global supplier Continental firmed up fresh details behind their autonomous trucking partnership.

The two companies said Friday they've completed the architecture, specs and requirements for the self-driving system's hardware, which Continental will develop and manufacture starting in 2027.

Aurora and Continental commenced their partnership last April, and their work toward manufacturing at scale signals incremental progress amid industry consolidation and pronounced headwinds in the broader self-driving industry.

"If you are going to do it right, this is how you do it," Richard Bishop, analyst and principal at truck-focused Bishop Consulting, told Automotive News.

Their work together is not the only tie-up between self-driving tech companies and traditional manufacturers. Daimler acquired Torc Robotics in 2019 with ambitions to build "million-mile vehicles," and self-driving truck company Gatik has partnered with Isuzu.

Aurora intends to begin commercial driverless operations in Texas by the end of this year, then gradually build toward that end goal with Continental.

"Aurora is showing the world the long road and the serious hard work that has to happen," Bishop said. "First, you get to safe autonomy with a platform that's probably not cost-optimized. Then you get toward volume production, the real deal."

Both companies intend to exhibit together at CES next week.

Part of Aurora and Continental's work toward the 2027 start of production includes developing an updated fallback system, a backup computer that would take control in the event of an outage with the primary one.

The two companies further outlined the path ahead. With a system architecture finished, they intend to build initial versions for testing at Continental's new facility in New Braunfels, Texas, and later across its manufacturing footprint through 2025.

In 2026, Continental is expected to industrialize and validate Aurora's hardware and fallback system. Both will then be shipped to Aurora's manufacturing partners, Kenworth and Peterbilt corporate parent Paccar and Volvo, for integration into autonomous-ready vehicles.

Both Aurora and Continental will develop a service playbook and maintenance network for Aurora's customers in this same time frame.

The road map represents an "intriguing" march toward manufacturing at meaningful scale, said Michael Ramsey, a senior analyst at research firm Gartner Inc.

They've "created something akin to the hardware and operating system pairing," he said. "The trucking companies have an off-the-shelf way of integrating it into their vehicles with a known cost and level of support. There are still a lot of operational challenges that will persist and questions about how well the system will work in the real world."

Some competitors faltered before reaching a point where they could ponder such questions.

Waymo placed its self-driving trucking program on hiatus last year while companies like Embark and Locomation shuttered operations. In December, TuSimple laid off the majority of its workforce and began looking for a buyer for its U.S. business. It intends to run self-driving operations in China.

Aurora and a handful of others have avoided such pitfalls. Aurora raised $853 million last August to help carry it through its planned launch at the end of this year. Along with Continental, it has now put further details on the blueprint for the road ahead.

"Achieving this milestone puts us on a credible path to deploy easy-to-service autonomous trucking systems that customers demand," Philipp von Hirschheydt, executive board member for the automotive sector at Continental, said in a statement.