Aurora Innovation, Inc. launched its commercial autonomous trucking service this week following the closure of its safety case, beginning driverless customer deliveries between Dallas and Houston. This milestone made it the first company to operate a commercial self-driving service with heavy-duty trucks on public roads.

The Aurora Driver, its flagship product, has completed over 1200 mi (1930 km) without a driver. The company plans to expand its driverless service to El Paso, TX, and Phoenix, AZ, by the end of 2025.

“We founded Aurora to deliver the benefits of self-driving technology safely, quickly, and broadly,” said Chris Urmson, CEO and co-founder of Aurora. “Now, we are the first company to successfully and safely operate a commercial driverless trucking service on public roads. Riding in the back seat for our inaugural trip was an honor of a lifetime—the Aurora Driver performed perfectly, and it’s a moment I’ll never forget. Our commitment to building a transformative technology, earning trust, and assembling a strong ecosystem of customers and partners has made this pivotal milestone possible,” added Urmson.

The Aurora Driver, an SAE Level 4 automated driving system, is first being deployed in long-haul trucking to address the challenges facing the trillion-dollar industry in the U.S. of an aging driver population with high turnover rates, skyrocketing operating costs, and underutilized assets. The company believes that the value proposition of autonomy—a solution that it says will offer safe, reliable capacity without an impact to jobs, citing a 2021 U.S. DOT report—is highly attractive to the trucking industry.

 

Launch partners

Aurora’s launch customers are Uber Freight and Hirschbach Motor Lines, which have had long-standing supervised commercial pilots with Aurora.

Since April, Aurora’s self-driving trucks have been completing round-trip hauls between Dallas and Houston, delivering commercial freight without anyone behind the wheel for Uber Freight, the first logistics platform to offer shippers access to fully driverless Class 8 trucks operating on public roads.

“When Uber Freight and Aurora came together more than four years ago, we set out to transform the future of logistics—and today, that future is here,” said Lior Ron, Founder and CEO of Uber Freight. “Moving autonomous commercial freight without anyone behind the wheel is a historic step forward in our mission to build a smarter and more efficient supply chain, and one we’re proud to lead alongside Aurora.”

Hirschbach, which has collaborated with Aurora for years on autonomous technology, says its initiative reinforces its commitment to the professional driver, enhancing the role, improving the driving experience, and creating new opportunities as the industry continues to evolve.

“Aurora’s transparent, safety-focused approach to delivering autonomous technology has always given me confidence they’re doing this the right way,” said Richard Stocking, CEO of Hirschbach Motor Lines. “Transforming an old school industry like trucking is never easy, but we can’t ignore the safety and efficiency benefits this technology can deliver. Autonomous trucks aren’t just going to help grow our business—they’re also going to give our drivers better lives by handling the lengthier and less desirable routes.”

During its development, Aurora says it has prioritized transparency and collaboration with elected officials, government agencies, and safety organizations. Prior to driverless operations, it closed its safety case, which is how the company assembled evidence to show its product is acceptably safe for public roads. The company also released a Driverless Safety Report, which includes details about the Aurora Driver’s operating domain for initial operations along with Aurora’s approach to cybersecurity, remote assistance, and more safety-critical topics.

Most U.S. states, including Texas, allow for driverless vehicles, according to Aurora.

“Texas ranks No. 1 for technology and innovation, and that continues as we welcome America’s first self-driving trucks,” said Greg Abbott, Texas Governor, on Aurora’s commercial launch. “These new, autonomous semis on the I-45 corridor will efficiently move products, create jobs, and help make our roadways safer.”

 

Aurora Driver

In over four years of supervised pilot hauls, the Aurora Driver, which can see beyond 400 yd (365 m), has delivered over 10,000 customer loads across 3 million autonomous miles. It has demonstrated extraordinary capabilities, including predicting red light runners, avoiding collisions, and detecting pedestrians in the dark hundreds of meters away.

The company’s Verifiable AI approach to autonomy blends powerful learning models with guardrails to help ensure the rules of the road are followed, like yielding for emergency vehicles. The approach also played a critical role in enabling the company to close its driverless safety case, as it enables the examination and validation of the Aurora Driver’s decision-making.

Aurora’s launch trucks are equipped with the Aurora Driver hardware kit and redundant systems, including braking, steering, power, sensing, controls, computing, cooling, and communication. The company is working with manufacturing partners to deploy self-driving trucks at scale, and it continues to make progress with its partners on purpose-built driverless platforms designed for high-volume production.

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 that Continental plans to mass-manufacture in 2027.

 

Urmson on milestone

Twenty-two years ago this week, Urmson was a Carnegie Mellon University PhD student competing in the U.S. DoD’s DARPA Grand Challenge, watching his team’s robot drive around the desert. Sandstorm was the autonomous vehicle created by CMU for the 2004 and 2005 DARPA Grand Challenge competition. That competition helped spawn an industry and innovators not only at his Aurora and what became Waymo but also Nuro, Stack, Argo, Kodiak, Waabi, and Pony.ai.

“Even with the incredible adventures I’ve had to date, today, April 27th, is special,” wrote Urmson, of the beginning of Aurora Driver commercial operations. “Many years of hard work is paying off. Today, I feel the joy and energy that comes with attempting something hard and accomplishing it with a team. It’s a special feeling that anyone who has experienced it will know.”

Urmson was a passenger during a launch that included hauling a trailer south to Houston and then hauling pastries back to Dallas.

“We’ve never been here to do a demo, we’re here to deliver the benefits of self-driving technology safely, quickly, and broadly,” he wrote. “And now we know what we believed: we have the team, the technology, the plan, and the partners to achieve something transformational. We need this technology. Our roads must be safer. Our logistics must be more sustainable. And our economy relies on a strong backbone of trucking.”

He promises that Aurora will continuously improve and expand its driverless operations, working to make the Aurora Driver more useful for customers to realize the important safety and sustainability benefits.

The company will share more details about its launch and ongoing commercial operations at its 2025 Q1 business review on its Investor Relations website on May 8th.