Continental and Aurora have achieved a milestone in their exclusive partnership, finalizing the design and architecture of the Aurora Driver’s future hardware and fallback system. This collaboration aims to commercialize autonomous trucks at scale, with Continental planning to commence production of the Aurora Driver, an SAE Level 4 autonomous driving system, in 2027. The hardware design completion follows less than a year after the companies entered a groundbreaking partnership focused on the high-volume manufacturing of autonomous trucking systems.
Founded in 1871, Continental, a technology company, is focused on developing innovative solutions for sustainable and connected mobility. With a rich history, the company offers safe, efficient, intelligent, and affordable technologies for vehicles, machines, traffic, and transportation. In the year 2022, Continental achieved sales of €39.4 billion and currently employs approximately 200,000 individuals across 57 countries and markets.
Aurora is also focused on delivering the advantages of self-driving technology with a commitment to safety, speed, and widespread accessibility. Their flagship product, the Aurora Driver, is a versatile self-driving system designed to operate various vehicle types, ranging from freight-hauling trucks to ride-hailing passenger vehicles. Anchoring Aurora’s offerings are Aurora Horizon and Aurora Connect, innovative driver-as-a-service products catering to trucking and ride-hailing. Collaborating with key players in the transportation ecosystem, including Continental, FedEx, PACCAR, Ryder, Schneider, Toyota, Uber, Uber Freight, Volvo Trucks, and Werner, Aurora is shaping the future of reliable, efficient, and safe transportation.
The finalized hardware design represents a crucial step in introducing new, complex, and time-intensive hardware to the market. Aurora and Continental, recognizing the challenges, have collaborated to develop reliable, serviceable, and cost-efficient autonomous hardware kits for mass production. This partnership provides Aurora with a pathway to deploy autonomous trucks at scale following its initial driverless launch, scheduled for the end of 2024. Leveraging Continental’s automotive development and manufacturing expertise, the future Aurora Driver is set to deliver customer value over one million miles.
Philipp von Hirschheydt, Executive Board member for the Automotive Group Sector at Continental, emphasized the transformative potential of autonomous mobility technologies, stating, “Technologies for autonomous mobility present the biggest opportunity to transform driving behavior since the creation of the automobile. “Achieving this milestone puts us on a credible path to deploy easy-to-service autonomous trucking systems that customers demand.”
Aurora is collaborating with Continental’s engineering team to provide an industrialized fallback system expected to enter production in 2027. Autonomous vehicles, operating without human drivers, require built-in redundancies to provide backups in case of component or sensor failures. The innovative dual engineering approach aims to minimize exposure to single points of failure in both the main and fallback systems. Chris Urmson, Co-Founder and CEO at Aurora, highlighted the importance of building a strong ecosystem, “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. 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 have outlined a comprehensive four-year partnership roadmap, detailing the steps leading to the planned Start of Production (SOP) in 2027 for the Aurora Driver. The roadmap of the production process would begin in 2023 with Aurora and Continental focusing on the Blueprint and Design of the SOP. Aurora and Continental collaborated to define the detailed system architecture, key requirements, and comprehensive technical specifications for the Aurora Driver hardware and the advanced high-performance fallback system. This initial blueprint and design phase have been successfully completed.
In between 2024 to 2025, both the companies will concentrated on building and testing the SOP. With the established system architecture, Continental is set to embark on the development phase. Initial versions of the hardware will be manufactured for testing purposes. This testing will take place at Continental’s new facility in New Braunfels, Texas, USA, and will extend across the company’s global manufacturing footprint. The finalization, start of production and integration will be conducted in between 2026 and 2027.
Continental will proceed to industrialize and validate the future Aurora Driver hardware and fallback system leading up to the Start of Production at its facilities. Leveraging a comprehensive range of products from Continental’s extensive automotive portfolio, including 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. This phase will also involve the development of a service playbook and the establishment of a maintenance network for Aurora’s customers. The final phase would commence from 2027 and beyond where deployment would be at Scale. In this final phase, thousands of trucks integrated with the Aurora Driver will be prepared to autonomously transport freight across the United States.
Commenting on the strategic decision to enter an exclusive partnership with Aurora, Philipp von Hirschheydt had emphasized its significance. He noted that being the industry’s sole tier-one supplier committed to industrializing autonomous hardware kits at scale positions them at the forefront to capitalize on this groundbreaking technology. Philipp von Hirschheydt had also affirmed that entering an exclusive partnership with Aurora was a strategic decision, allowing Continental to be at the forefront of industrializing autonomous hardware kits at scale and capitalizing on groundbreaking technology. Continental will showcase its latest technologies, including its work with Aurora, at CES 2024 in Las Vegas, offering insights into their advancements in autonomous trucking systems.
