During his keynote address at CES 2025, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang announced a three-way, long-term strategic partnership with his company, Aurora Innovation, and Continental to deploy driverless trucks at scale powered by the next-generation Nvidia system-on-a-chip (SoC). Nvidia’s Drive Thor and DriveOS will be integrated into the Aurora Driver, an SAE Level 4 autonomous driving system that Continental plans to mass-manufacture in 2027.

“Delivering one driverless truck will be monumental,” said Chris Urmson, CEO and Co-founder at Aurora. “Deploying thousands will change the way we live. Nvidia is the market leader in accelerated computing, and they’ll strengthen our ecosystem of partners and our ability to deliver safe and reliable driverless trucks to our customers at scale.”

Autonomous truck technology leader Aurora is in the final stages of validating its Driver for operations on public roads. It plans to launch its driverless trucking service in Texas in April 2025.

“Developing, industrializing, and manufacturing powerful self-driving hardware at commercial scale requires unique and unparalleled expertise,” said Aruna Anand, President & CEO for Automotive at Continental North America. “Our industry-first collaboration with Aurora and Nvidia to deliver driverless trucks positions Continental at the forefront of this cutting-edge technology and will drive value to our business.”

Continental is developing a reliable, serviceable, cost-efficient generation of the Aurora Driver hardware, specifically for high-volume manufacturing. The company is also developing a specialized independent secondary system that can take over operation if a failure occurs in the primary computer.

“The combination of Nvidia’s automotive-grade Drive Thor platform with Aurora’s advanced self-driving trucking technology and Continental’s manufacturing and integration expertise is set to help drive the future of autonomous trucking, helping make roads safer while driving up operational efficiency,” said Rishi Dhall, Vice President of Automotive at Nvidia.

Nvidia will power the primary computer of the Aurora Driver with a dual Nvidia Drive Thor SoC configuration that runs DriveOS. Built on the Nvidia Blackwell architecture, Drive Thor is designed to accelerate inference tasks critical for autonomous vehicles to understand and navigate the world around them. As Continental and Aurora prepare to manufacture self-driving hardware at scale in 2027, production samples of Drive Thor are coming in the first half of 2025.

The Aurora Driver is equipped with sensors including lidar, radar, and cameras, enabling it to safely operate at highway speeds. Verifiable AI enables the system to quickly adapt to new operating domains while being validated through Aurora’s Safety Case, which the company says is an essential tool for regulatory trust and public acceptance.

With the start of production planned for 2027, Continental will test prototypes of the future hardware kit in the coming months. The company will then integrate Drive Thor with DriveOS into the primary Aurora Driver computer at its manufacturing facilities and ship the full hardware kit to Aurora’s truck OEM partners for integration into their trucks.

At last year’s CES, Continental and Aurora announced they had achieved a key development milestone to commercialize autonomous trucks at scale by finalizing the design and architecture of the future fallback system and hardware of the Aurora Driver. The finalized hardware design came less than a year after the companies entered an industry-first partnership aimed at high-volume manufacturing of autonomous trucking systems.

Introducing new hardware to the market is complex and time-intensive, often taking years from initial design to the start of production. Recognizing this challenge early on, Aurora teamed with Continental to develop reliable, serviceable, cost-efficient autonomous hardware kits for mass production. With Continental’s automotive development and manufacturing expertise, the future Aurora Driver will be designed to deliver customer value for one million miles.

“Technologies for autonomous mobility present the biggest opportunity to transform driving behavior since the creation of the automobile,” said Philipp von Hirschheydt, Executive Board member for the Automotive Group sector at Continental, last year. “Achieving this milestone puts us on a credible path to deploy easy-to-service autonomous trucking systems that customers demand.”

Continental’s CES booth will feature an early prototype of the Aurora Driver hardware and Aurora OEM partner Volvo Trucks’ VNL Autonomous truck—the flagship model of Volvo’s autonomous technology platform designed to support diverse use cases, advanced technologies, and integration with the Aurora Driver.