Tie-up between Aurora and Volvo is latest in flurry of partnerships as pace of robotaxi development falters.
Whatever type of vehicle arrives at the Bay Area headquarters of Aurora, an autonomous start-up backed by Amazon and Sequoia, the team can have it running without a driver in just 12 weeks.
The transformation involves pulling apart the dashboard, equipping the vehicle with a stack of sensors and computer systems, then installing “a single umbilical” cord to facilitate communication between the vehicle and the self-driving technology, said Sterling Anderson, co-founder and chief product officer.
“If we had to redevelop significant chunks of [the system] for every vehicle we put it in, it would be enormously inefficient,” he said of the one-size-fits-all technology.
Aurora has now integrated its robotic “Driver” into eight types of vehicle since its founding in 2017. But its system is proving most successful in heavy-duty trucks, which have suddenly emerged as a main battleground for autonomous technology as the mass rollout of robotaxis falters.
On Tuesday, Aurora announced it had signed a multiyear partnership with Volvo Trucks — a win that comes just two months after the company struck a similar partnership with Paccar, the maker of Peterbilt and Kenworth heavy-duty trucks.
Paccar and Volvo are two of the big four truck manufacturers in the world, with a combined market share in the US of more than 50 per cent. Partnering both underscores that Aurora is now a big force in driverless trucking, where it expects to have its first commercial product.
‘A massive opportunity’
The business case for disrupting the $800bn US trucking market is clear. Two-thirds of America’s consumer goods are transported to market by trucks, but labour laws limiting drivers’ working shifts to a maximum of 11 hours mean that longer journeys must often be broken up across several days.
The trucking industry is also fragmented, with 200,000 companies spread across the US. Ninety-five per cent of these have fewer than 100 trucks, according to Bob Biesterfeld, chief executive of CH Robinson, a leading freight group and brokerage.
He said that on average, 20 per cent of miles driven are empty. “They are still generating things like gas emissions and pollution but they are not generating revenue, so it’s highly inefficient,” Biesterfeld said.
Experts say the potential for automation to change the landscape and drive consolidation could be easily as big as for cars. “Trucks drive 170bn miles on highways every year,” said Nancy Sun, chief engineer at Ike, a driverless trucks start-up acquired in December by robotic delivery group Nuro.
“This is a smaller number than passenger car miles but still a massive opportunity . . . And the industry is already well set up to adopt the technology through fleet operations.” Until recently, Silicon Valley has been slow to react to the opportunity.
Since Google launched its self-driving car project in 2009, robotaxis have been the sector’s focal point, leading to years of consolidation as every major carmaker — and a few large tech groups including Apple, Amazon and Microsoft — looked for a partner. In trucking, by contrast, all the big partnerships have been signed in the past eight months.
TuSimple, a leading driverless trucking start-up that filed for an IPO last week, partnered Volkswagen unit Traton in September. It is backed by Chinese internet group Sina, US chipmaker Nvidia and carrier UPS. Waymo, which started out as the Google self-driving project, inked a deal in October with Daimler, the world’s biggest truckmaker.
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