Partnerships accelerate Aurora goals on dual fronts

In the span of three weeks, Aurora has laid the groundwork for its self-driving future.

The tech startup, which has resisted tying itself too closely to any one partner, inked what it called a "long-term agreement" with two big ones last week. Aurora joined Toyota Motor Corp. and Denso Corp. in an effort to engineer self-driving minivans which will be at least partially deployed on Uber's ride-hailing network.

This partnership is likely to stick. The global automaker and its key affiliate supplier had invested $667 million in Uber's Advanced Technologies Group nearly two years before it was acquired by Aurora last month. In that latter deal, Uber pitched in $400 million to acquire a 26 percent stake in Aurora.

While the financial terms of last week's agreement were not disclosed, suffice to say the companies are tied together.

The robotaxi partnership arrives only weeks after Aurora established another long-term partnership, this one with PACCAR that involves developing self-driving trucks, the area of autonomy in which Aurora says it will first commercialize a product.

But the company is now more multidimensional. Enabled by the flurry of recent partnerships, it has planks in place for both its passenger-carrying and cargo-hauling businesses.

"Aurora's belief has been, as a company, to focus on the thing we do best in the world, and then work in partnerships with others to bring that to the market and serve our customers," Aurora co-founder Chris Urmson said on a recent Shift podcast.

Where the partnerships are more notable, perhaps, is robotaxis. The decision to work with an established company such as Uber, rather than forge its own ride-hailing network, stands in contrast to competitors such as Waymo and Zoox. Aurora's approach falls more along the same lines of the joint venture between Aptiv and Hyundai, called Motional, which intends to deploy robotaxis on Lyft's ride-hailing network in 2023.

It's a sensible strategy, says Mike Ramsey, a senior analyst at global technology consulting firm Gartner Inc.

"I think the deal is really evidence of the logical progression of key skills," he said. "Uber is an amazing network. Toyota is a great manufacturer. And Aurora has great technology that neither of the other two can seem to match on their own. It would be really hard for Toyota to do all three. Or Uber or Aurora. Waymo's decision to do its own ride-hailing application may not last forever. But it works for them now, and they have the capital to keep it going."

For Aurora, that logical progression will soon involve testing robotaxis on highways and at speeds exceeding 50 mph. While self-driving taxis are typically thought of as urban vehicles — and no doubt that's where its customer base lies — the company still needs to connect riders to airports and suburbs.

Urmson said a "significant fraction" of today's ride-hailing market requires the ability to drive faster than 50 mph.

Exactly how Aurora refines that higher-speed capability remains to be seen. But it surely involves the use of the company's FirstLight lidar, a frequency-modulated, continuous- wave lidar sensor that company co-founder Sterling Anderson says has assured autonomous-trucking capabilities at highway speeds that require longer range.

"Until we had unlocked that technical challenge, we were not prepared to declare trucking as our first product," Anderson said in January.

The acquisition of lidar company Blackmore in 2019 laid the foundation for the FirstLight lidar. "That acquisition got us that multi-modal sensing, and we were suddenly in a position to go after trucking with foundational technology in place, and maybe uniquely so."

And now perhaps robotaxis, as well.

An Aurora spokesperson said the company expected the development processes of trucks and taxis to overlap, with advances on each side complementing the other. "Our ride-sharing vehicles will leverage on-highway advances pioneered and refined by our next-generation trucks, while our trucks will piggyback on the off-highway and surface-street driving first developed for rides."