Aurora, the driverless truck company founded by former members of Google’s pioneering self-driving car team, is branching out. Ahead of its quarterly earnings report today, the company announced that a new software update will enable it to triple its driverless network to a total of 10 routes in South America.
Currently, Aurora has 10 autonomous trucks without safety monitors driving routes between Dallas, Houston, Fort Worth and El Paso. The company has released three previous software updates: the first to authorize driverless trips between Dallas and Houston; another to authorize driving at night; and third to expand its network to include routes to El Paso.
With this new update, Aurora will begin operating trips between Fort Worth and Phoenix that take more than 15 hours to complete. Legally, human truck drivers are limited to 11 hours of driving a day, within a 14-hour duty limit, before they are required to take a break. An autonomous truck is not subject to these same restrictions. Additional routes include: Dallas and Houston; Fort Worth and El Paso; El Paso and Phoenix; Fort Worth and Phoenix; and Dallas and Laredo.
The company is also using AI to create new maps for its autonomous driving systems, with the goal of reducing the time between testing, validation and commercial operation. According to Arora:
After a single manual drive, cloud-based algorithms are able to generate semantic components, which helps create new maps with little or no human assistance. Map automation significantly reduces the time to map new routes, positioning Aurora to accelerate the rollout of new routes and customer endpoints this year.
Aurora is still operating trucks with safety monitors for many of its customers, including Hirschbach Motor Lines, Detmar Logistics and “one of the leading carriers in the US from its Phoenix facility”. Aurora CEO Chris Urmson previously said the company complied with partners’ requests to put safety drivers in the cab as a matter of optics, not as an indicator of technological regression. From an operational perspective, this has no impact on Aurora’s progress.
The company is also adding a new semi truck model based on the International LT to its fleet, along with its new hardware suite priced at half the existing stack. Aurora says it will launch a new truck without safety monitors in the second quarter of 2026. And the company expects to have 200 driverless trucks in operation by the end of the year.
Finally, Arora said its cash position has improved. Previously, Urmson said Aurora had about $1.6 billion in the bank, enough to last through the second half of 2027. Now, the company says it expects to achieve positive free cash flow by 2028, indicating that Aurora will generate more money than losses from its business operations.
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