Continental Partners With Aurora to Develop Self-Driving Truck Tech

Interest in autonomous personal cars may be dimming, but it’s still full-speed-ahead in the commercial truck industry.

Self-driving truck startup Aurora Innovation and mega-supplier Continental on Thursday announce an exclusive partnership to deliver the first commercially scalable generation of Aurora’s flagship integrated hardware and software system, the Aurora Driver.

The organizations will jointly design, develop, validate, deliver and service the scalable autonomous system for the trucking industry. The system is expected to be available to carriers and commercial fleet operators across the U.S. and to facilitate broader adoption by reducing costs.

Amazon and Toyota each hold significant stakes in Aurora, and analysts say this is evidence that interest in autonomous commercial trucking is not fading.

“Delivering autonomous vehicles at scale has the potential to dramatically transform modern transportation, bringing new accessibility, safety and efficiency to the movement of goods and people,” says Aurora CEO Chris Urmson.

“Continental demonstrates its leading technology expertise by industrializing the first commercially scalable autonomous trucking systems. Together with Aurora, we take a crucial step towards autonomous mobility,” adds Continental CEO Nikolai Setzer.

In this first-of-its-kind partnership, Continental will be responsible for the autonomous driving system kits which will leverage a wide spectrum of Continental’s extensive automotive product portfolio from sensors, automated driving control units, high-performance computers, telematics units and more, to the complete fallback system which covers the full chain of effects.

Continental says it will integrate these hardware components into pods which will be supplied to Aurora’s vehicle-manufacturing partners and this will advance the product offering for autonomous trucking customers.

The companies say this new partnership also will mark the industry’s first hardware-as-a-service business relationship, based on mileage driven, to deliver safe, reliable, uptime-optimized and commercially scalable autonomous driving systems to customers through the Aurora Horizon platform.

Frank Petznick, head of Continental’s Autonomous Mobility Business Area, says Continental and Aurora will bring the commercial freight market, limited by supply chain constraints in many markets of the world, to a new service level.

“The first commercially scalable autonomous trucking system provides exciting opportunities for passenger transportation in the coming years and paves the way for broad adoption of autonomous mobility,” says Petznick.