MENU

Continental, Aurora plan self-driving truck launch

Continental, Aurora plan self-driving truck launch

Business news |
By Nick Flaherty

Cette publication existe aussi en Français


Continental and Aurora Innovation have finalized the design and architecture of an autonomous truck for launch at the end of the year.

The Aurora Driver is a Level 4 autonomous driving system that Continental plans to start production of in 2027 for a self-driving truck. The finalized hardware design comes less than a year after the companies entered an industry-first partnership aimed at high-volume manufacturing of autonomous trucking systems.

Introducing new hardware to the market is complex and time-intensive, often taking years from initial design to the start of production. Aurora teamed up with Continental to jointly develop reliable, serviceable, cost-efficient autonomous hardware kits for mass production.

The partnership gives Aurora a path to deploy autonomous self-driving trucks at scale after its initial driverless launch planned for the end of 2024. The future Aurora Driver will be designed to work for one million miles using Continental’s automotive development and manufacturing expertise.

“Technologies for autonomous mobility present the biggest opportunity to transform driving behavior since the creation of the automobile,” said Philipp von Hirschheydt, Executive Board member for the Automotive Group sector at Continental. “Achieving this milestone puts us on a credible path to deploy easy-to-service autonomous trucking systems that customers demand.”

Aurora is also working with Continental’s engineering team on an industrialized fallback system that is expected to go into production in 2027. To operate safely without a human driver, an autonomous self-driving truck requires built-in redundancies that provide backups in the rare case a component or sensor fails.

One of these redundancies is the fallback system – a specialized secondary computer that can take over operation if a failure occurs in the primary system. This innovative dual engineering approach is intended to reduce the exposure of the main and fallback system to single points of failure.

“From day one, we knew we’d need to build a strong ecosystem of partners to bring this technology to market safely and at a commercial scale,” said Chris Urmson, Co-Founder and CEO at Aurora. “Finalizing the design of our future hardware is a meaningful step toward making the unit economics of the Aurora Driver compelling and building a business for the long-term.”

Continental and Aurora are also sharing their four-year partnership roadmap to commercialize thousands of autonomous trucks:

With the system architecture in hand, Continental will build initial versions of the hardware for testing at its new facility in New Braunfels, Texas, USA, and across its global manufacturing footprint.

Continental will industrialize and validate the future Aurora Driver hardware and fallback system before the Start of Production at its facilities in 2026 and 2027. The hardware will use a wide spectrum of Continental’s extensive automotive product portfolio from sensors, automated driving control units (ADCU), high-performance computers (HPC), telematics units, and more.

The hardware and fallback system will be shipped to Aurora’s trucking manufacturing partners for integration into autonomous-ready vehicles. During this phase, the companies will also develop a service playbook and maintenance network for Aurora’s customers.

Aurora plans to ship thousands of trucks integrated with the Aurora Driver from 2027 to autonomously haul freight across the US.

“Entering an exclusive partnership with Aurora was a very good decision as it is an ideal match,” von Hirschheydt added. “Being the industry’s only tier-one supplier with a commitment to industrialize autonomous hardware kits at scale allows us to be at the forefront of and capitalize on this groundbreaking technology.”

Continental will show its latest technologies, including its self-driving truck work with Aurora, at CES 2024 in the US next week,

www.continental.com; www.aurora.tech

If you enjoyed this article, you will like the following ones: don't miss them by subscribing to :    eeNews on Google News

Share:

Linked Articles
10s