"It's been a year of progress and delays for Aurora, the Pittsburgh-based autonomous trucking company founded by Chris Urmson. After promising to launch commercial driverless truck operations in 2024, the company was forced to push the start date until April 2025. A few weeks later, however, it was forced to put safety drivers back in the cabs at the request of the trucks' manufacturer."
""2025 for us was really about how do we build it to the point where it's scalable, and set ourselves up in '26 so we can scale across the Sun Belt," he says. "Some things move a little faster, some things move a little slower, but it's lining up in a way where '26 is going to be this year where we go from a handful of trucks today to hundreds of trucks by the end of next year.""
Aurora experienced both progress and delays in its autonomous trucking program, moving a promised 2024 launch to April 2025 and then temporarily reinstating safety drivers at manufacturer request. The company characterizes safety drivers' presence as an optics issue rather than a technological regression. Aurora intends to use 2025 to develop scalable operations and to prepare for expansion across the Sun Belt in 2026. The planned growth aims to increase the fleet from a handful of trucks to hundreds by the end of 2026. Autonomous trucking continues to face technological, regulatory, and manufacturing hurdles that have delayed wider deployment.
Read at The Verge
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