is transportation editor with 10+ years of experience who covers EVs, public transportation, and aviation. His work has appeared in The New York Daily News and City & State.
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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.
But in a recent interview, Urmson insists that having safety drivers in the cab is a matter of optics, not an indicator of technological regression. Operationally, it has no bearing on Aurora’s progress.
“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.”
Slow and steady
Driverless trucks were once expected to precede robotaxis and personally owned autonomous vehicles in mass adoption, considering that highways are vastly less complex than city and residential streets. But self-driving truck operators have run into hurdles involving the technology and regulation that have delayed their public debut. Some companies, like Embark Trucks, TuSimple, and Locomation, have gone out of business, while others have cut plans to deploy driverless trucks as timelines have stretched into the future and funding has dried up.
Moreover, public opinion toward autonomous vehicles has trended downward, thanks in part to missteps of companies like Tesla and Cruise. But like Waymo, Aurora has placed its hopes on a measured, conservative approach to commercialization, as well as an emphasis on safety.
Urmson, who once led the Google self-driving car project that would eventually become Waymo, said the assumption that trucks would be easier to automate than passenger cars was always a fallacy. While highways appear simpler, they involve higher speeds and less frequent but more dangerous anomalies, and they require much more powerful sensors, like lidar that can see objects 400 meters away compared to around 150 meters for a city environment. Waymo, for example, has yet to open up highway driving to its customers in all the cities in which it operates.
Aurora Innovation CEO Chris Urmson. Image: Aurora
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