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Dive Brief:
- Driverless technology company Aurora Innovation more than doubled its pilot revenue in 2023 to $640,000 a year, CFO David Maday said on a fourth-quarter earnings call last week.
- Pilot customers include FedEx, Werner Enterprises, Schneider National, Hirschbach and Uber Freight, among others, co-founder and CEO Chris Urmson noted to investors.
- The Pittsburgh-based company also continued a “strategic partnership with Ryder System, piloted on-site maintenance of the fleet to support current autonomous piloted cargo operations and prepare for commercial operation at scale,” according to the annual report.
Dive Insight:
Aurora, seeking to start commercial operations this year, recently laid off 3% of its workforce, listed as about 1,800 workers in its annual report.
“We must continuously adopt to meet the evolving needs of our business,” Maday told investors. “We have recently reviewed the entire organization to ensure we are working as efficiently as possible and at the speed required to achieve our ambitious goals.”
The corporate autonomy readiness measure, a weighted review of safety caseincreased from 84% at the end of the third quarter to 93% in January 2024, just short of a target of around 95%.
Another measure, called the autonomy performance index, tracks how trucks equipped with autonomous technology perform without human assistance. In the fourth quarter, most of its vehicles continued to operate at 100% of this metric. And the API score of 99% increased from 84% of trucks in the third quarter to 88% in the fourth quarter, according to investor presentation.
The company plans to release more details about scaling its technology at its Analyst and Investor Day on March 14.