Pittsburgh-based autonomous vehicle company Aurora will partner with NVIDIA and Continental, the mobility technology manufacturing company, to deploy driverless trucks at scale, the companies said Tuesday.
The companies said they will integrate NVIDIA DRIVE Thor system into the Aurora Driver that Continental plans to mass-manufacture in 2027. The partnership will be the first partnership in the industry to scale driverless trucks, the companies said.
“Delivering one driverless truck will be monumental. Deploying thousands will change the way we live,” Chris Urmson, CEO and co-founder at Aurora, said. “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.”
As part of the partnership, Aurora plans to launch its driverless trucking service in Texas in April 2025. It is in the final stages of validating the Aurora Driver for driverless operations on public roads. NVIDIA powers the primary computer in the Aurora Driver with DRIVE Thor, which is designed to accelerate inference tasks critical for autonomous vehicles to understand and navigate the world around them. As Continental and Aurora prepare to manufacture self-driving hardware at scale in 2027, NVIDIA will provide the software. Production samples of DRIVE Thor will be available in 2025, NVIDIA officials said.
“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,” Rishi Dhall, vice president of automotive at NVIDIA, said.