Aurora Innovation
Assembly Line
How Aurora is finding its own lane on the road to autonomous trucking
Aurora has zeroed in on long-haul trucking for a number of reasons: It’s a far larger market than other autonomous-vehicle possibilities, there’s more money to be made, and a general scarcity of drivers. The American Trucking Association estimates that the industry is short of 78,000 drivers and will need to hire another 1.2 million over the next decade. Plus, trucking has an efficiency limit that can’t be fixed by better driver pay or training: how long any one driver can legally stay on the road.
Aurora has spent the past few years developing its hardware and software stack. A key technological component of Aurora’s plan sits above the cab of each of its trucks: its proprietary FirstLight lidar sensor, which uses a continuous stream of laser light that varies in frequency instead of the usual fixed-frequency light pulses to detect road objects farther out.
Aurora is banking on production efficiencies getting it there. It’s moving to condense FirstLight into a system-on-a-chip design and has signed up the German mobility manufacturer Continental to mass-produce its hardware stack, with a 2027 due date for both projects.
Aurora Announces Closing of $483 Million Upsized Public Offering of Class A Common Stock and Full Exercise of Underwriters’ Option to Purchase Additional Shares
Aurora Innovation, Inc. (Nasdaq: AUR) announced the closing of its previously announced underwritten upsized public offering for total gross proceeds of approximately $483 million, before deducting underwriting discounts and commissions and other offering expenses.
In the public offering, Aurora sold 134,166,667 shares of its Class A common stock at $3.60 per share, which includes the full exercise by the underwriters of their option to purchase up to 17,500,000 additional shares.
| Goldman Sachs & Co. LLC, Allen & Company LLC and Morgan Stanley acted as joint book-running managers and Evercore ISI, Canaccord Genuity, TD Cowen and Wolfe | Nomura Alliance acted as book-runners for the offering. |
Aurora Partnering with Continental to deliver a commercially scalable autonomous trucking system
Continental and Aurora Innovation, Inc. (NASDAQ: AUR) announced an industry-first partnership to deliver the commercially scalable, future generation of Aurora’s flagship integrated hardware and software system—the Aurora Driver. Leaning on more than 150 years of expertise and its global manufacturing footprint, Continental plans to industrialize the Aurora Driver hardware and help broaden adoption of Aurora’s autonomous trucking service. Combined with Aurora’s existing vehicle manufacturer partnerships, this first-of-its-kind, innovative partnership will help Aurora achieve the commercial scale and cost structure necessary to execute on its mission to deliver the benefits of self-driving technology safely, quickly, and broadly.
Within the exclusive partnership, Continental will develop a new fallback system for the Aurora Driver with improved system reliability and cost. In the unlikely event of a failure in the primary autonomy system, a fallback system is designed to ensure a driverless truck can continue the driving task until it reaches a safe position. Continental will also manage the complete lifecycle of the autonomous hardware kits and provide maintenance procedures as well as services for Aurora Driver-powered trucks in the field.