CES 2024: Conti and Aurora develop the first autonomous truck system for series production

The automotive supplier Continental and the specialist for autonomous driving systems Aurora Innovation have announced an important step in the comprehensive commercialization of autonomous trucks. The companies have defined the design and architecture of the future fallback system and the hardware of the Aurora Driver – an autonomous driving system of SAE (Society of Automotive Engineers) Level 4 – which the Hanover-based company plans to produce by 2027. The final hardware concept was thus ready in less than a year after the companies entered into this first-of-its-kind industry partnership, they announced. The goal of the collaboration is to manufacture autonomous truck systems in high volumes.

Goal: The world’s first operational autonomous system in automotive quality

According to the providers, the market launch of new hardware is complex and time-consuming, often taking years from initial design to production start. Therefore, they joined forces early on to jointly develop reliable, maintainable, and cost-efficient autonomous hardware solutions for mass production. The partnership provides Aurora with the opportunity to deploy their driverless mobility service on a large scale, following the planned market launch at the end of 2024. Continental’s expertise in automotive development and manufacturing ensures that the future Aurora Driver will offer customers a service life of one million miles, they promise.  

“Technologies for autonomous mobility offer the greatest opportunity to change the driving experience since the invention of the automobile,” says Phillipp von Hirschheydt, member of the Executive Board for the Automotive division at Continental.

Aurora is also working with Conti engineers on an industrial-grade fallback system, expected to go into series production in 2027. For safe operation without a human driver, autonomous vehicles require built-in redundancies. These act as backups in the rare event of a component or sensor failure, the providers explain. In the system, a secondary computer takes over operation in the event of a primary system failure. This dual approach aims to reduce the susceptibility of the main system and the fallback system to individual failure sources.

“We knew we had to build a strong ecosystem of partners to bring this technology to market safely and at a commercial scale,” says Chris Urmson, co-founder and CEO of Aurora.

Hirschheydt emphasized that they are the only Tier-One supplier in the industry dedicated to the industrialization of autonomous hardware solutions on a large scale. The partners will present their latest technologies at CES 2024, including those developed in collaboration, in a private exhibition at Central Plaza opposite the Las Vegas Convention Center.