Autonomous truck developer Aurora, Continental, and NVIDIA announced a long-term strategic partnership to deploy driverless trucks at scale, powered by the next-generation NVIDIA Drive Thor system-on-a-chip (SoC).
NVIDIA’s Drive Thor and DriveOS will be integrated into the Aurora Driver, an SAE L4 autonomous driving system that Continental plans to mass-manufacture in 2027, according to a news release.
“Delivering one driverless truck will be monumental. Deploying thousands will change the way we live,” said Chris Urmson, CEO and co-founder at Aurora. “NVIDIA is the market leader in accelerated computing, and they’ll strengthen our ecosystem of partners and our ability to deliver safe and reliable driverless trucks to our customers at scale.”
“Developing, industrializing, and manufacturing powerful self-driving hardware at commercial scale requires unique and unparalleled expertise,” said Aruna Anand, president and CEO, automotive, continental North America. “Our industry-first collaboration with Aurora and NVIDIA to deliver driverless trucks positions Continental at the forefront of this cutting-edge technology and will drive value to our business.”
“The combination of NVIDIA’s automotive-grade Drive Thor platform with Aurora’s advanced self-driving trucking technology and Continental’s manufacturing and integration expertise is set to help drive the future of autonomous trucking, helping make roads safer while driving up operational efficiency,” said Rishi Dhall, vice-president of automotive at NVIDIA.
Driverless trucking service launch in April
Aurora is in the final stages of validating the Aurora Driver for driverless operations on public roads and plans to launch its driverless trucking service in Texas in April.
NVIDIA will power the primary computer of the Aurora Driver with a dual NVIDIA Drive Thor SoC configuration that runs DriveOS. As Continental and Aurora prepare to manufacture self-driving hardware at scale in 2027, production samples of Drive Thor are coming in the first half of 2025.
Continental is developing a reliable, serviceable, cost-efficient generation of the Aurora Driver hardware, specifically for high-volume manufacturing. The company is also developing a specialized independent secondary system that can take over operation if a failure occurs in the primary Aurora Driver computer.
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