Short News Update from Aurora Innovation, the Autonomous Truck System company.

They have gone 'Driver Out'.

Aurora Innovation sent out a release on their website this morning which ought to give all truckers cause for concern.

https://ir.aurora.tech/news-events/press-releases/detail/119/aurora-begins-commercial-driverless-trucking-in-texas

After missing previous goals for going ‘full driverless’ or ‘driver out’ last year, Aurora has now put some miles down with their system on the Interstate sans chauffeur, or without a safety driver, as has been SOP during the past couple of years of running these trucks.

DALLAS--(BUSINESS WIRE)-- Aurora Innovation, Inc. (NASDAQ: AUR) has successfully launched its commercial self-driving trucking service in Texas. Following the closure of its safety case, Aurora began regular driverless customer deliveries between Dallas and Houston this week. To date, the Aurora Driver has completed over 1,200 miles without a driver. The milestone makes Aurora the first company to operate a commercial self-driving service with heavy-duty trucks on public roads. Aurora plans to expand its driverless service to El Paso, Texas and Phoenix, Arizona by the end of 2025.

I haven’t got much time for writing today, but I will quote one more paragraph from their article and offer a couple of comments.

Aurora’s flagship product, the Aurora Driver, is an SAE L4 self-driving system that is first being deployed in long-haul trucking. Trucking is a trillion dollar industry in the U.S. but it faces challenges, including an aging driver population with high turnover rates, skyrocketing operating costs, and underutilized assets. These intensify every year, making the value proposition of autonomy – a solution that will offer safe, reliable capacity without an impact to jobs – highly attractive to the trucking industry.

First - ‘high turnover rates’.

Aurora ought be congratulated for no longer pushing the driver shortage narrative and recalibrating their PR to reflect the fact that no one with two brain cells to rub together believes that crap anymore. Though, in Aurora’s case, they’ve been using the driver shortage lie in various of their investment prospectus; though its too late for America’s truckers, perhaps its not too late for the Securities and Exchange Commission.

Second - ‘without an impact to jobs.’

This is such unbelievable bullshit that it should be considered offensive by everyone who reads it. The collective sum of trucker’s annual salaries in the United States of America is estimated to be a $200 billion or more bag. The entire point of this technology is to come for that bag, and replace human drivers with a cheaper subscription service for the robots, and relocate our wages into their pockets.


It was not a mistake or coincidence that they made this announcement on May 1.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Workers'_Day

It ought be noted by my readers that I have attempted to engage a couple of different Aurora employees for interviews over the years, and to a person, they have not responded.

Record Scratch!

I had just hit send on this short missive when I was informed that another piece I had written on autonomous truck systems for my friends at The American Conservative had dropped yesterday. I was not aware that the edits were complete and that it had went live, so I was unable to edit the piece to reflect today’s news.

Anyhow -

https://www.theamericanconservative.com/whats-behind-truckings-rush-to-automation/

Some snippets -

Earlier this month, Aurora Innovation, a leader in the development of autonomous truck systems, which is to say “driverless” big rigs, announced “plans to allow its self-driving trucks to operate without a driver in inclement weather after launching commercial trips this year in Texas.”

If that sounds somewhat alarming, that’s because it is—Aurora and the small handful of other companies racing to replace America’s truck drivers have been required to have a human “safety driver” on board those rigs during testing on public roads. Aurora has had their systems deployed for quite some time now, especially on two corridors in Texas: along Interstate 45 between Houston and Dallas, and between Fort Worth and El Paso along Interstates 20 and 10. In the same neighborhood of West Texas, Kodiak Robotics has already unleashed their driverless system on the much less traveled oilfield access roads in the deserts above the Permian Basin, where their suite of technology has been paired with Peterbilt tractor units hauling frac sand to drilling sites.

In April of 2023, Aurora was making bold claims about removing safety drivers and going full autonomous by the end of 2024. Later in 2023, they announced the launch of testing on Interstate 45, not long after also announcing that they expected to raise over $800 million in additional investment capital. Despite all the announcements and testing, Aurora had yet to meet their projected 2024 deadline for going “driver out,” the phrase used in the industry for full autonomous operation.

In the race between these automated systems companies to get their trucks to market, we must also ask: Is Aurora rushing the deployment of their trucks to keep investors happy? Are these trucks really as safe as they say they are? Or is the desire to be the iPhone of automated trucks going to exact a toll in lives and jobs?

The whole thing is worth a read, and again, what timing that it came out yesterday before this announcement from Aurora.

While I’ve got you here, and in case you missed it, I did a deep dive on the differences in Aurora’s messaging about their technology between various audiences, and it is probably worth a read in light of today’s news.

Previous to that piece, I also made an examination of an interview that Aurora CEO Chris Urmson gave to the pretty huge podcast “On with Kara Swisher” a couple of years ago. This is also worth a read today.

I’ll be back with more to say on this topic soon.

Questions, comments, suggestions, corrections and Hate Mail are welcomed and strongly encouraged - gordilocks@protonmail.com