Is Aurora On The Cusp Of Commercializing Driverless Trucks?

Forbes

Aurora’s stock had a wild ride this month and CEO Chris Urmson, who led Google’s self-driving car program in its pre-Waymo days, thinks it’s on the cusp of commercializing driverless trucks. But profitability is years away.  Read the full story on Forbes: https://www.forbes.com/sites/alanohnsman/2025/01/21/one-of-the-last-robot-truckers-finally-ready-to--hit-the-road/  Subscribe to FORBES: https://www.youtube.com/user/Forbes?sub_confirmation=1  Fuel your success with Forbes. Gain unlimited access to premium journalism, including breaking news, groundbreaking in-depth reported stories, daily digests and more. Plus, members get a front-row seat at members-only events with leading thinkers and doers, access to premium video that can help you get ahead, an ad-light experience, early access to select products including NFT drops and more:  https://account.forbes.com/membership/?utm_source=youtube&utm_medium=display&utm_campaign=growth_non-sub_paid_subscribe_ytdescript  Stay Connected Forbes newsletters: https://newsletters.editorial.forbes.com Forbes on Facebook: http://fb.com/forbes Forbes Video on Twitter: http://www.twitter.com/forbes Forbes Video on Instagram: http://instagram.com/forbes More From Forbes:  http://forbes.com  Forbes covers the intersection of entrepreneurship, wealth, technology, business and lifestyle with a focus on people and success.

Transcript

00:00Today on Forbes, one of the last robot truckers standing finally ready to hit the road.

00:08The self-driving vehicle landscape is littered with the corpses of those who tried and failed.

00:13Last year saw General Motors pull the plug on Cruze, rivals Ford and Volkswagen scuttled

00:19their lavishly funded Argo AI venture in 2022, and Uber offloaded its self-driving tech unit

00:25in 2020 after a fatal accident.

00:29Then there are the smaller companies who died before many had even heard of them.

00:33Too Simple, Embark, Ike, and Starsky Robotics.

00:38Alphabet's Waymo, the oldest and best-funded self-driving firm, is the big exception here,

00:44with robo-taxi fleets in Phoenix, San Francisco, and Los Angeles, and plans to expand into

00:49Austin, Atlanta, and Miami.

00:52Forbes estimates its revenue topped $100 million last year and may rise substantially in 2025.

00:59Then there's Aurora Innovation.

01:01Founded in 2017 by three autonomous driving experts from Google, Tesla, and Uber, it's

01:07managed to stay alive and is the only pure publicly traded U.S. autonomous vehicle stock

01:12left.

01:13But more than three years after going public, it hasn't yet booked revenue.

01:18And it's been forced to delay the launch of its driverless truck services, twice.

01:23Co-founder and CEO Chris Urmson says that won't happen again, and come spring, Aurora

01:29will get on a similar road to commercial success as its Alphabet-backed rival, which he led

01:34when it was incubating inside Google.

01:36Urmson told Forbes, quote,

01:39We expected that this was a hard enough problem that there was only going to be a handful

01:43of people to solve it.

01:44And it's kind of played out that way.

01:46Waymo seems to have cracked it, and we're on the cusp of launching in April.

01:51That launch, which was first supposed to happen in 2023, will begin with a single semi-truck

01:56hauling loads between Dallas and Houston.

01:59Others will follow, and Aurora hopes to have, quote,

02:02tens of trucks on the road by the end of the year, some of them traveling a second route

02:06between El Paso and Fort Worth.

02:09It's a purposely slow start.

02:11And even if all goes well, investors will need to be patient, likely for years, before

02:16Aurora generates revenue and profits to justify its $11.7 billion market cap.

02:22Aurora has more than $1 billion and isn't facing any immediate danger from the funding,

02:27safety or management problems that killed some competitors.

02:31But the timeline for when and if it enters the black remains fuzzy, assuming all goes

02:36well in April.

02:38Meanwhile, the challenges, technical and business, are daunting.

02:43Aurora is building computing systems better at instantaneously processing visual data,

02:48finding cheaper and more powerful sensors for detailed images of road conditions and

02:52hazards, and in the case of trucking, building and wrangling a mess of relationships with

02:57freight companies and truck makers.

03:00Allison Malick runs Middle Third, a mobility tech consultancy, co-founded the autonomous

03:05shuttle startup May Mobility, and was part of the GM Ventures team that acquired Cruise

03:11in 2016.

03:12She said, quote,

03:14Transportation is a huge global industry, worth trillions of dollars, which is exciting,

03:19but it's also generally low margin.

03:22And you have to have a full suite of relationships, which is a lot of work to set up in trucking

03:26because it's a highly fragmented industry.

03:30Investors are eyeing Aurora with cautious optimism.

03:33Early this month, the company's languishing shares, which traded below $5 for much of

03:382024, spiked 29% to close at $8.39 on news of tech partnerships with AI chip behemoth

03:46NVIDIA and truck parts maker Continental.

03:50Since then, however, much of that gain has been lost.

03:54Aurora and remaining competitors like Kodiak and Wabi are developing AI-enabled big rigs

03:59for a simple reason.

04:01The trucking industry generates about $1 trillion of annual revenue and faces a shortage of

04:05human drivers.

04:07If they can successfully commercialize the tech, the autonomous truck business could

04:11be worth $600 billion annually by the mid-2030s, according to a McKinsey study.

04:19For full coverage, check out Alan Onsman's piece on Forbes.com.

04:25This is Kieran Meadows from Forbes.

04:27Thanks for tuning in.

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