Aurora, Volvo Team Up for Self-Driving Partnership

Aurora’s collection of influential friends in the autonomous vehicle industry has been growing faster than Taylor Swift’s posse did in 2015.

In the past four months, Aurora bought Uber’s self-driving unit, teamed up with Paccar on self-driving trucks, and partnered with Toyota and Denso on self-driving minivans. And yesterday, it announced a partnership with Volvo for autonomous, long-haul trucks.

What’s so special about Aurora?

Most startups use spinning lidar, a pricey legacy system that requires lots of maintenance and recalibration—not ideal for bumpy car rides, Asad Hussain, PitchBook’s lead mobility analyst, told us.

Aurora is instead banking on Frequency Modulated Continuous Wave (FMCW) lidar, which is thought to outperform traditional lidar on 1) determining which direction an object is moving in and 2) telling different objects apart. But it’s earlier-stage and difficult to produce at scale.

• Aurora bought two FMCW-focused startups, Blackmore and OURS Technology, to help it scale more quickly.

Zoom out: Hussain thinks we’ll see large-scale adoption of autonomous trucking in the next few years. Compared to robotaxis and passenger vehicles, he says, the sector is “ripe for autonomy,” for familiar reasons: hauling goods is less complex and lower-stakes than shuttling people around a city.