Trucking news and briefs for Wednesday, Sept. 15, 2021:
The first look at the autonomous Volvo VNL, powered by the Aurora driver.
Self-driving truck startup Aurora this week shared a glimpse of its prototype Aurora-powered Volvo VNL.
Integrated with the Aurora Driver’s sensor suite, the truck is the first Volvo designed to operate with the Aurora Driver, representing a significant step as Aurora and Volvo begin building commercial Level 4 autonomous Class 8 trucks at scale.
Aurora is leveraging the power of its Aurora Driver Development Program to structure the engagement with Volvo and maximize the combined team’s strengths in world-class vehicle engineering, manufacturing and support, and autonomous vehicle technology development. The Aurora Driver Development Program leverages the “common core” design of the Aurora Driver to simultaneously deliver self-driving long-haul trucks and passenger vehicles. The Aurora Driver “common core” refers to how its hardware, software, infrastructure, and development tools are designed to work across all vehicle types. This commonality ensures that every learning, development, hardware improvement, and cost reduction made to the Aurora Driver benefits every vehicle it powers, which also allows for concurrent vehicle development.
Safely developing vehicles powered by the Aurora Driver for wide deployment, the company said, "is an extremely rigorous multi-phase process." This complex process is why Aurora is collaborating with Volvo to design the VNL architecture for its Driver and why these trucks will be manufactured on Volvo’s own production line.
Over the next several months, Aurora will integrate its feature-complete hardware kit and test and validate Aurora-powered Volvo VNL trucks through its robust Virtual Testing Suite.
