A new autonomous truck – manufactured by Volvo and equipped with autonomous vehicle technology developed by Aurora Innovation – could be on public roads as early as this summer.
The Volvo VNL Autonomous truck, unveiled Monday evening at the ACT Expo in Las Vegas, is the product of a partnership between Aurora and Volvo Autonomous Solutions. Aurora plans to begin transporting cargo using these Volvo autonomous trucks in the coming months. The trucks will be in autonomous mode and will always have a human safety operator behind the wheel to take control if necessary.
Later this year, the company plans to announce pilot programs with customers who will use the Volvo VNL autonomous truck, according to an Aurora spokesperson. Volvo has already started manufacturing an initial test fleet of these autonomous trucks at its New River Valley assembly plant in Virginia.
The reveal of the Volvo VNL autonomous truck comes as Aurora continues to make progress toward its stated goal of commercializing autonomous 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 say whether trucks made by Volvo, or its other partner Paccar, would be part of this first driverless fleet.
Getting to commercialization is existential for Aurora, one of the last autonomous trucking companies. Waymo Via slowed down its autonomous trucking program last year, and TuSimple recently left the U.S. market to expand in Asia. Aurora has also not been immune to the high capital costs of developing and then launching autonomous commercial trucks. In January, the company laid off 3% of its workforce to reduce costs ahead of its commercial launch.
Consolidation in the audiovisual industry has led to a decrease in the number of competitors for Aurora. Einride, Torc and Kodiak Robotics, which have unveiled their own purpose-built large autonomous device, are among the few remaining.
The Volvo partnership, which the companies first signed in March 2021, is part of Aurora’s go-to-market 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 to mass produce autonomous vehicle hardware for self-driving commercial trucks. The two companies finalized the design and system architecture of an AV hardware kit, as well as a plan for a secondary computer capable of supporting operations in the event of an outage. The Continental hardware kit won’t be in Aurora trucks until 2027, but the Volvo VNL will still come with safety features, the company says.
The Volvo truck has redundant steering, braking, communications, computing, energy 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 two computers, self-driving software, internal lidar capable of detecting objects more than 1,300 feet away, high-resolution cameras and an imaging radar.
“Our platform engineering approach prioritizes safety by integrating high-assurance redundancy systems designed to mitigate potential emergency situations,” said Shahrukh Kazmi, product director at Volvo Autonomous Solutions, in a statement. “We built the Volvo VNL Autonomous from the ground up, integrating these redundancy systems to ensure that every safety-critical component is intentionally duplicated, significantly improving safety and reliability.
Once Aurora and Volvo validate this platform, the plan is to begin fully driverless operations with a “modest-sized fleet of trucks,” according to the Aurora spokesperson, who declined to provide a specific timeline . The spokesperson said that over the next few years, Aurora and Volvo plan to begin high-volume production of the Volvo VNL integrated with the Aurora Driver.
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