Aurora will have ‘hundreds’ of driverless trucks on the road by the end of 2026, CEO says
TL;DR
Aurora delayed its driverless truck launch to 2025 but CEO Chris Urmson says safety drivers are for optics, not tech issues, and plans hundreds of trucks by 2026.
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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 th …