So much of our coverage on Bloomberg Tech in the Theater of Autonomy has been about autonomous ride hailing or robotaxi. But in the real world, when it comes to deployment and use case, the movement of goods, haulage, long distance and short distance. There's much more to talk about there, too, and that's where Aurora comes in. And thankfully we have Aurora CEO Chris Urmson with us. You and I have been speaking over a number of years and I reflect back to when I visited you in Texas May of this year was actually a big moment of progress. You yourself sat in the back of the Class eight and you took the route between Dallas and Houston. What was that experience like and what did it signal to you?
Yeah. Well, great to see you again, by the way. It was awesome. Right. This is something where we've been working at this for eight and a half years. We put safety first along the way and really to see the culmination of that effort and effort to play out kind of as we expected.
Yeah, it's just amazing. Can we talk a little bit about the basics? In the back of the vehicle, the vehicle was operating itself autonomously. What was the distance of the room and what was the point of it?
Yeah. So we were hauling pastries from Dallas to Houston. It's about a 200 mile trip. Took about three and a half, 4 hours. And yeah, I sat in the back. I got to watch it for a while, and then I watched YouTube for part of it.
Now, after you launched this initiative, which will get into the limits of what I'd call a pilot at the moment, but your partner, PACCAR, asked for a human to be put back into the front for supervisory purposes. Just explain that and why you agreed to do it.
Yeah, well, the reason why we agreed to is we believe in partnership, and PACCAR's an important partner for us. And so they asked us to and we did that. We don't need them to be there for any safety reason. The truck is able to detect if something breaks and react to that appropriately. So it's an easy ask. Importantly, it doesn't impact our road map in one bit at all. The road map is actually a technology one, and when I say that, like to start with that route between Dallas and Houston is in the daytime. Yeah. With a limited number of trucks to start. But the way of expanding it is to go nighttime and increase the number of trucks.
So over the course of this year, we expect to go from daytime to day, night to big day, night and rain. Today we operate down to Houston. By the end of the year, we expect to operate Fort Worth to El Paso, El Paso to Phoenix and Fort Worth to Phoenix. And what's really exciting about that is it demonstrates what we've believed, which is that this technology, we've kind of cracked the back of it and that we can really rapidly launch and iterate and get the value out to our customers. From a regulatory point of view, we've believed in engaging with regulators since day one, but there's not any blockage there. That's a hold up for us.
Chris, What's the business model long term? Is it that you sell the trucks with their sensor suites? Is it you sell a service and literally offering to move goods from A to B? How do you monetize?
Yeah. So for the long term, our plan is to provide drivers. So we work with great tractor manufacturers, great truck companies like PACCAR and Volvo. They make the trucks and then our customers who are companies like FedEx and Werner Enterprises and Schneider, they go and buy a truck and they buy it with the Aurora Driver installed on it, and then they pay us to drive that truck for them. Sorry, I said, I'm going to let this fly go away. It's the joy of nature.
Your name comes up a lot in the context of NVIDIA. That's where I have been hearing it most, at least like in media earlier in the year, even CBS at the beginning of the year. What is the technology arrangement? What is it on the hardware? And also increasingly in Nvidia's context, I think Omniverse and software. How do you work together?
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Urmson, C. (2025, July 10). Aurora Innovation CEO on Self-Driving Trucks, Working With Nvidia [Interview transcript]. Bloomberg Television. CEOInterviews.AI. https://ceointerviews.ai/interview/1171021/
MLA
Chris Urmson. "Aurora Innovation CEO on Self-Driving Trucks, Working With Nvidia." Bloomberg Television, 10 Jul. 2025. Transcript, CEOInterviews.AI, https://ceointerviews.ai/interview/1171021/.
BibTeX
@misc{urmson2025_1171021,
author = {Chris Urmson},
title = {Aurora Innovation CEO on Self-Driving Trucks, Working With Nvidia},
howpublished = {Interview transcript, Bloomberg Television. CEOInterviews.AI},
year = {2025},
month = {jul},
url = {https://ceointerviews.ai/interview/1171021/},
note = {Speaker-attributed transcript with timestamps}
}
