Aurora Will Test Self-Driving Vehicles in Dallas-Fort Worth

On Monday, Aurora announced it’s setting a “small” fleet of autonomous test vehicles loose in the Dallas-Fort Worth Metroplex. I’m currently holed up in DFW and will drive around until I find one. I will find one.

Refresher: Aurora is developing a vehicle-agnostic virtual “driver” and its own lidar systems. Chris Urmson, who Reid Hoffman called the “Henry Ford of autonomous vehicles,” cofounded the Sequoia-, Hyundai-, and Amazon-backed startup.

Go-to-market takeaways

Bigger is better: Aurora is bringing Pacifica vans and Class 8 trucks to DFW. I’m especially interested in the latter, since the startup has confirmed its first commercial product will be in trucking, “where the market is largest today [and] the unit economics are best”.

• TuSimple, which recently announced an autonomous freight network, has a head start in Texas.

The stars are bright: Texas has large cities, relatively lax regulation, AV-friendly weather, and huge freight corridors. Along with California and Arizona, Texas will be an early autonomy adopter, with Ford/Argo in Austin, Nuro in Houston, Aurora in DFW, and TuSimple and Waymo trucks around the state. I will find them all.