For one autonomous company, driverless is now truly a literal term.
With the announcement of its second-generation driverless truck, Aurora Innovation will no longer have anyone in the driver’s seat or anywhere in the cab in many cases.
Members of the company’s roadside assistance team may ride in the rear seat at times to gather feedback and provide support, but this individual is not in the truck to drive or supervise driving, according to Aurora.
The Pittsburgh-based autonomous developer said its latest driverless truck is built for a “million-mile service life.”
Aurora plans to run its updated driverless truck on routes in the Southwest and Sun Belt on its commercial network and produce 1,000 new trucks annually through its manufacturing partnership with Roush.
The deployment of this new AV comes amid lawmakers’ warnings of serious security threats.
“Currently, autonomous systems put Americans, their vehicles and their personal privacy at risk given so many critical unanswered questions related to cybersecurity, operational safety and data transparency,” OOIDA President Todd Spencer said. “The safest operator of an 80,000-pound commercial vehicle on America’s roadways is a well-trained, professional, human truck driver.”
The announcement also comes a little more than a year after Aurora decided to put a person back in the driver’s seat, following concerns from Paccar.
“(Paccar) requested we have a person in the driver’s seat because of certain prototype parts in their base vehicle platform,” Aurora CEO Chris Urmson wrote in a blog post published in May 2025 “We are confident this is not required to operate the truck safely based on the exhaustive testing and analysis that populates our safety case. Paccar is a longtime partner and, after much consideration, we respected their request and are moving the observer, who had been riding in the back of some of our trips, from the back seat to the front seat.”
Paccar declined at the time to say why it requested for a person to be in the driver’s seat.
Just days after revealing its new driverless truck, Aurora announced an agreement with Value Truck, which will move freight in border cities using Aurora’s driverless trucks.
The cross-border carrier plans to operate driverless trucks on routes between Dallas and Laredo, Texas and Fort Worth and Phoenix.
Approximately 40% of all freight moved between the U.S. and Mexico passes through Laredo.
Value Truck executives believe this agreement will add flexible capacity on key long-haul corridors while allowing drivers to focus on local freight.
Aurora said its new autonomous trucks give carriers a way to move freight around the clock without hours-of-service limits that restrict traditional drivers.
Other developers expanding
During a recent earnings call, Tesla said it plans to have its self-driving system operational on the Tesla Semi by the end of this year or early next year.
The company’s Nevada factory is reportedly built to produce 50,000 trucks per year. LL
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