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 the point where it’s scalable, and set ourselves up in ’26 so we can scale across the Sun Belt,” he says. “Some things move a little faster, some things move a little slower, but it’s lining up in a way where ’26 is going to be this year where we go from a handful of trucks today to hundreds of trucks by the end of next year.”

Slow and steady

Driverless trucks were once expected to precede robotaxis and personally owned autonomous vehicles in mass adoption, considering that highways are vastly less complex than city and residential streets. But self-driving truck operators have run into hurdles involving the technology and regulation that have delayed their public debut. Some companies, like Embark Trucks, TuSimple, and Locomation, have gone out of business, while others have cut plans to deploy driverless trucks as timelines have stretched into the future and funding has dried up.

Moreover, public opinion toward autonomous vehicles has trended downward, thanks in part to missteps of companies like Tesla and Cruise. But like Waymo, Aurora has placed its hopes on a measured, conservative approach to commercialization, as well as an emphasis on safety.

Urmson, who once led the Google self-driving car project that would eventually become Waymo, said the assumption that trucks would be easier to automate than passenger cars was always a fallacy. While highways appear simpler, they involve higher speeds and less frequent but more dangerous anomalies, and they require much more powerful sensors, like lidar that can see objects 400 meters away compared to around 150 meters for a city environment. Waymo, for example, has yet to open up highway driving to its customers in all the cities in which it operates.

“If something on the truck breaks on the freeway at 70 miles an hour, you can’t just stop in the lane, or you’ll get crashed into,” Urmson says.

Aurora has two fleets: its driverless fleet with fully validated hardware and software, functioning autonomously without human intervention; and its development fleet with trucks still undergoing testing and validation that operate with a safety driver onboard. The company currently has five fully autonomous trucks in operation, driving routes between Dallas and Houston, and more recently Fort Worth and El Paso.

The latter route, which is over 600 miles, represents the true potential for driverless trucks, Urmson says. A human driver would take upwards of nine to 10 hours to drive the whole distance. Legally, human truck drivers are restricted to 11 hours of driving a day, within a 14-hour duty limit, before they are required to take a break. An autonomous truck is not subject to these same restrictions.

Aurora recently struck a deal to haul fracking sand on public highways for an energy company. The trucks will be running up to 20 hours a day, far beyond what a human driver can do.

Robots vs. jobs

That said, Aurora is facing stiff opposition from truck driver unions like the Teamsters, which has fought to ban driverless trucks in California and elsewhere. They argue that autonomous vehicles represent an existential threat to working class truck drivers, of which there are millions in the US, and they want state lawmakers to block their advancement.

But Urmson asks: What kind of jobs are we fighting to preserve? “It’s awesome that people are willing to do this, but they’re 10 times as likely to die on the job as the average American,” he says. “That’s bad, right? They often have health issues, substance abuse problems. It’s a job I’m thankful people are willing to do. It’s not a job we should necessarily want to do.”

That said, Urmson says he believes truck driving as an occupation is in no immediate danger of becoming obsolete. “If you continue to want to drive a truck, there will be a job for you to do there,” he says. “You’ll be able to retire a truck driver.”

On top of that, autonomous trucks will lead to safety improvements for everyone on the road, including other truck drivers, Urmson argues. He recalled a recent incident in which a police officer stepped out of his vehicle into a live lane of traffic after incorrectly positioning his cruiser on the side of the road. A driverless Aurora truck was traveling in that lane and swerved to avoid the officer just in time, Urmson said.

“The consequence if that had not been us would probably have been that officer’s life,” he says.

“The consequence if that had not been us would probably have been that officer’s life.”

Aurora recently hit 100,000 driverless miles, and reports a “perfect on-time performance” for its customers, which include Uber Freight, the ridehailing company’s trucking brokerage, and Hirschbach Motor Lines, a carrier that delivers time- and temperature-sensitive freight. In 2026, Aurora plans on rolling out its next-generation hardware, which includes sensors with double the range of the current generation. Additional refinements aim to reduce costs and improve production times. And Urmson says he’s confident in Aurora’s cash position, with roughly $1.6 billion in the bank, enough to last until the second half of 2027.

But more money will need to be raised, and the regulatory picture ahead is uncertain. Still, Urmson says he expects “thousands” of trucks on the road within the next two years.

“It’ll be a little less visceral, because it’s not a consumer-facing product,” he says. “But in terms of the expansion, I think we’ll start to see that happen pretty quickly.”

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• Andrew J. Hawkins