(TNS) — Sometime this month, Texas drivers could see a driverless tractor-trailer cruising across the Lone Star State.
Aurora Innovation Inc. is rolling out its first fully self-driving tractor-trailer on Texas highways.
The Pittsburgh-based company says it isn’t that big a change. Its autonomous tractor-trailers have been hauling freight in Texas since 2021 but a “vehicle operator” has ridden in the cab and could take over if needed.
This month, one of Aurora’s tractor-trailers will be losing its operator for the first time while hauling freight.
“The person in the front seat typically has a limited role anyway,” said Jake Martin, Aurora’s head of strategic communications. “But we’ve been putting together just like a ton of work to make sure that we are confident in the safety of our technology.”
That doesn’t mean there will suddenly be massive fleets of self-driving semis rolling across Texas.
“We start with a single one, go to tens by the end of the year and then, over the course of the next five years, go to like, hundreds and then, eventually, thousands,” he said.
Here’s what else to know about these self-driving tractor-trailers in Texas.
Some Already Here
Chris Urmson, Sterling Anderson and Drew Bagnell — who individually worked in the autonomous vehicle industry at Waymo, Tesla and Uber, respectively — founded Aurora in 2017 with the idea to reset what they knew about autonomous vehicles and how self-driving vehicles can be improved for the future.
Since then, they have developed Aurora’s self-driving tractor-trailers, which are equipped with 25 laser, radar, camera and lidar sensors.
The sensors “help give this near 360-degree view of the entire world around it,” Martin said. “I know I would be a better driver if I had eyes on the back of my head, could not only see everything around me, but could track every single object. If I’m driving, I’ve got like the car in front of me, maybe one to the right, maybe one to the left. That’s kind of my field of view. These vehicles are tracking everything around them all the time.”
Aurora currently operates on two routes: from Dallas to Houston, which is about 240 miles, and from Fort Worth to El Paso, which is about 600 miles. The tractor-trailers cruise on highways at 65 mph but will speed up to 75 mph when necessary, according to the company’s 2025 safety report.
Aurora’s trucks, which are diesel tractor-trailers created by a few companies including PACCAR and Volvo, carry loads for companies like FedEx, Uber Freight, Werner, Schneider National, Hirschbach and others, Martin said.
“For a lot of people already in Texas,” Martin said, “if you have received a package via FedEx, whether you’re a consumer or business, there’s a good chance it was delivered by an autonomous truck.”
Volvo rolled out its autonomous trucking partnership using Aurora’s technology in December, launching in Texas with DHL Supply Chain. That launch fleet, which has about 25 trucks, runs between Dallas and Houston, and they currently have an operator aboard.
Nils Jaeger, president of Volvo Autonomous Solutions, said Texas is essential to launching the self-driving trucking industry.
“This new freight system, autonomous trucking, will start in Texas,” Jaeger said. “Texas really will be the state where this transport system will kick off from. It will go from there, east and west.”
Safety, Workforce and Ethics
For many drivers, sharing the road with a tractor-trailer is already nerve-racking, but knowing the truck is operating without a driver inside might prove even more daunting.
“It’s understandable to come from that perspective,” Martin said. “I think we as people don’t really often think about how scary driving is as just a concept. You’re in a multi-thousand-pound vehicle flying down the road at 60-plus miles an hour. It’s a pretty scary thing, and especially when that’s a big semi-truck.”
Martin said Aurora’s technology is based on safety and is not trying to lean into only one type of sensor. Similar to Waymo, the car uses lidar, which stands for “light detection and ranging” and is a sensing technology using lasers to measure and track distances from far away, as well as other radar, light, camera and laser sensors.
Amy Witherite, a Dallas-based personal injury and vehicle wreck attorney who has been outspoken about the need for regulations for autonomous vehicles, said autonomous trucking companies need to be more transparent with their testing and data.
“You still have a human being sitting in the driver’s seat, even if the vehicle is programmed to self-driving. And so what we don’t have is any information on how many times the human has to intercede and prevent some wreck from happening,” Witherite said. “We have no idea on the frequency of what may occur if the human is not in there. … So, there’s no way to really figure out how dangerous it’s going to be, because we don’t have the statistics or metrics.”
Martin said Aurora looks at the number of times the operator has to jump into the driver’s seat or grab the wheel on each trip, saying such incidents have become quite rare. According to him, the data most often point to the operators being overly cautious and jumping in unnecessarily.
“When I started at Aurora in 2021, they were relatively involved a few times per 200-mile trip, like three or four times per trip, they might jump in and grab the wheel. Now it’s pretty rare that they jump in at all,” Martin said. “And even when they do what we’ll do is, afterwards, we’ll look at it and see if, did they need to? We encourage them to be more careful than not. And oftentimes we find even the times they do jump in, they didn’t need to.”
Autonomous car companies are not required to release this type of data to the state or the public. However, they must report crash data to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration. In 2017, the Legislature passed Senate Bill 2205, which established uniform policies for autonomous vehicles across Texas and placed oversight in the hands of the state government, preventing municipalities from enacting any laws or regulations related to autonomous and self-driving vehicles.
Witherite said the biggest issue for her is the lack of safety regulations for autonomous vehicles. She emphasized the need for more inspections and improvements in technology before these vehicles are launched on the roads.
“There are no regulations; there are none,” Witherite said. “It’s all up to the state of Texas to decide. They would have to decide they want to pass a bill for any type of accountability. … Until the technology is perfected. And I do think once it is perfected and it’s working great, it’s going to make everybody safer on our roadways.”
Some self-driving vehicle companies have been criticized for using camera-based systems, Elon Musk’s Tesla being one of them.
Martin said Aurora’s sensors are not for show and are built with backups. He argued Aurora’s autonomous tractor-trailers are safer than the everyday driver.
“The biggest causes of collisions in the United States are distraction, inebriation, exhaustion and speeding. Well, quite literally, our trucks cannot get distracted. They’re paying attention 100% of time,” Martin said. “They can’t get inebriated, as funny a thought as that is. They can’t get exhausted, and they don’t speed by design.”
Jaeger said Volvo’s autonomous trucking team has been focused on creating redundant systems. He said, “It is very crucial that if one system fails, that the autonomous truck has the ability to execute another one.”
Martin said Aurora sees its self-driving tractor-trailers as a solution to the ongoing truck driver shortage in the U.S.
The U.S. has a shortage of an estimated 24,000 professional truck drivers, causing the freight industry to miss out on $95.5 million every week, according to a study by factoring service altLine. The industry’s potential, according to the study, is $50 billion higher than its current revenue. The American Trucking Association has estimated that the shortage of truck drivers could grow to over 160,000 by 2030.
“There is room for both autonomous trucks and human truck drivers in this industry,” Martin said. “In fact, I would even say that the industry needs both of them to succeed. … There is potential, with the introduction of autonomous trucks into the long-haul space that it does create more jobs for human drivers in the short-haul space.”
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