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Aurora Innovation co-founder and CEO; former Google self-driving CTO and Carnegie Mellon DARPA challenge team leader.
Aurora and other driverless truck operators won a five-year U.S. exemption to use cab-mounted beacons in place of driver-placed warning devices. The term is long enough to plan driverless freight around, though the beacons' safety on the road is still unproven.
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Mercedes-Benz will build Wayve's Level 2 driving software into at least one model due within two years, with the human still driving. The deal gives the startup more reach through carmakers, but its driverless product still has to prove itself in separate robotaxi work.
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Aurora runs 20 driverless trucks today and wants 200 by December, but covering last year's $800 million loss with revenue alone would take closer to 2,000 of them at full utilisation.
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Aurora and Kodiak can now run supervised autonomous trucks on California roads. Two consecutive 500,000-mile gates mean the safety operator stays in the cab for a long time.
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Mythos AI's towboat advisor and Aurora's driverless trucks are not rival technologies so much as rival evidentiary standards. Only one of them has a published number, and it is not a savings figure.
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