Night vision activated.
That’s the latest development from autonomous trucking company Aurora, which announced July 30 that it’s adding nighttime driving to its driverless route between Dallas and Houston, among other expansions of its service.
“Efficiency, uptime, and reliability are important for our customers, and Aurora is showing we can deliver,” Chris Urmson, Aurora’s co-founder and CEO, said in a statement. “Just three months after launch, we’re running driverless operations day and night and we’ve expanded our terminal network to Phoenix. Our rapid progress is beginning to unlock the full value of self-driving trucks for our customers, which has the potential to transform the trillion-dollar trucking industry.”
In a news release, the company said that adding nighttime driving “more than doubles truck utilization potential, significantly shortening delivery times on long-haul routes and creating a path to profitability for autonomous trucking.”
Aurora’s proprietary light detection and ranging tech, FirstLight Lidar, “can detect objects in the dark more than 450 meters away” and identify “pedestrians, vehicles, and debris up to 11 seconds sooner than a traditional driver,” according to the company.
Next, TechCrunch reported, Aurora leaders hope to validate the ability of their trucks to drive in the rain. Since debuting commercial driverless operations earlier this year, Aurora says it’s logged more than 20,000 driverless miles.
Meanwhile: In other AV expansion news, Alphabet-owned robotaxi service Waymo announced July 28 that it’s launching in Dallas next year.
The announcement included “a new strategic, multi-year partnership” between Waymo and mobility solutions provider Avis Budget Group, which will manage Waymo’s fleet in Dallas and potentially in other cities in the future, according to a blog post.
Waymo currently offers paid robotaxi rides in five cities: Phoenix, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Austin, and Atlanta. It’s slated to debut its service in Miami and Washington, DC, next year.
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Hop on: On July 25, Lyft announced that autonomous shuttles will debut on its ride-hailing platform late next year. Lyft is partnering with mobility-as-a-service provider Benteler Mobility on the initiative, which will start in the US with the launch of Holon GmbH autonomous shuttles equipped with Mobileye’s AV tech. The deployments initially would start “in partnership with airports and cities,” with plans to expand, per a news release.
“With May Mobility bringing AVs to Atlanta this summer, plans for Mobileye to enable ‘Lyft-ready’ vehicles across our network, and now Benteler Mobility’s plans to expand our ecosystem with purpose-built shuttles and international capabilities,” Lyft said in a news release, “we’ll be creating even more pathways to serve our customers and build a more connected world, with transportation for everyone.”
Pairing up: Uber announced on July 17 that it would add at least 20,000 Lucid Gravity EVs equipped with AV startup Nuro’s Level 4 autonomy system over six years in “dozens of markets around the world.” The first launch is slated to take place “in a major US city next year,” according to a news release.
The agreement involves Uber making “multi-hundred-million-dollar investments in both Nuro and Lucid.”
“Autonomous vehicles have enormous potential to transform our cities for the better,” Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi said in a statement. “We’re thrilled to partner with Nuro and Lucid on this new robotaxi program, purpose-built just for the Uber platform, to safely bring the magic of autonomous driving to more people across the world.”