A new self-driving truck — made by Volvo and loaded with self-driving technology developed by Aurora Innovation — could hit public highways as early as this summer.
The Volvo VNL autonomous truck, unveiled Monday night at the ACT Expo in Las Vegas, is a collaboration between Aurora and Volvo Autonomous Solutions. Aurora plans to start transporting goods using these autonomous Volvo trucks in the coming months. The trucks will be autonomous and still have a human safety operator behind the wheel to take control if needed.
Later this year, the company plans to announce pilot programs with customers using the Volvo VNL Autonomous Truck, according to an Aurora spokesperson. Volvo has already begun building an initial test fleet of these self-driving trucks at its New River Valley assembly facility in Virginia.
The unveiling of the Volvo VNL self-driving truck comes as Aurora continues to push toward its stated goal of commercializing self-driving trucks by the end of 2024. The company initially plans to transport freight between Dallas and Houston using up to 20 driverless Class 8 trucks — this time without a human behind the wheel. Aurora declined to share whether trucks made by Volvo or its other partner Paccar would be in this initial driverless fleet.
Commercialization is existential for Aurora — one of the last stand-alone trucking companies. Last year, Waymo Via put the brakes on its self-driving truck program, and TuSimple recently left the US market to expand into Asia. Nor was Aurora immune to the high capital costs of developing and then commercializing autonomous trucks. In January, the company laid off 3% of its workforce to cut costs ahead of its commercial launch.
Consolidation in the AV industry means fewer rivals for Aurora. Einride, Torc and Kodiak Robotics, which unveiled its own custom-built self-driving big rig, are among the few left.
The Volvo partnership, which the companies first signed in March 2021, is a part of Aurora’s commercialization strategy. Aurora has launched pilot programs with logistics companies FedEx, Ryder, Schneider and Uber Freight. In January, Aurora and automotive supplier Continental closed the first phase of a more than $300 million project mass production of autonomous vehicle hardware for commercial autonomous trucks. The two companies completed the system design and architecture for an AV hardware kit, as well as the design for a secondary computer that can take over operations in the event of a failure. The Continental hardware kit won’t be available on Aurora trucks until 2027, but the Volvo VNL will still be packed with safety features, the company says.
The Volvo truck has redundant steering, braking, communication, computing, power management, energy storage and vehicle motion management systems, according to Aurora. The truck is also integrated with the so-called Aurora Driver, an autonomous driving system that includes dual computers, self-driving software, an internal lidar that can detect objects more than 1,300 feet away, high-resolution cameras and radar imaging.
“Our engineering platform approach prioritizes safety by incorporating highly reliable redundancy systems designed to mitigate potential emergency situations,” said Shahrukh Kazmi, chief product officer of Volvo Autonomous Solutions, in a statement. “We built the Volvo VNL Autonomous from the ground up, incorporating these redundancy systems to ensure that every safety-critical component is intentionally duplicated, thereby significantly improving both safety and reliability.”
Once Aurora and Volvo validate this platform, the plan is to launch fully driverless operations with a “moderately sized fleet of trucks,” according to an Aurora spokesperson, who declined to provide a specific timeline. The spokesperson said that in the coming years, Aurora and Volvo expect to begin high-volume production of the Volvo VNL built into the Aurora Driver.
