The race to deploy autonomous trucks at scale picked up speed as Aurora Innovation, Continental and Nvidia recently announced a long-term partnership to deploy driverless trucks at scale. The announcement came at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas and followed a keynote address by Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang during which he rolled out the latest Blackwell AI chips.
The industry-first partnership came on the heels of Aurora and Continental reaching a key development milestone last year, when they completed the blueprint and design of the future Aurora Driver hardware and fallback system in January 2024.
At the heart of this partnership is the integration of Nvidia’s cutting-edge Drive Thor system-on-a-chip (SoC) into Aurora’s autonomous driving system, the Aurora Driver. Nvidia will power the primary computer of the Aurora Driver with a dual Nvidia Drive Thor SoC configuration running DriveOS.
Built on Nvidia’s advanced Blackwell architecture, Drive Thor is specifically designed to handle the complex inference tasks critical for autonomous vehicles to perceive and navigate their environment safely through 1,000 teraflops of accelerated compute performance.
“Delivering one driverless truck will be monumental. Deploying thousands will change the way we live,” said Chris Urmson, CEO and co-founder at Aurora. “NVIDIA is the market leader in accelerated computing, and they’ll strengthen our ecosystem of partners and our ability to deliver safe and reliable driverless trucks to our customers at scale.”
The partnership combines Aurora’s SAE L4 autonomous driving system with Continental’s manufacturing expertise. Nvidia’s chipmaking expertise is the final ingredient. Aurora is in the final stages of validating the Aurora Driver for driverless operations on public roads. The system is equipped with a powerful computer and an array of sensors, including lidar, radar and cameras, enabling it to operate safely at highway speeds.
Continental, one of the world’s largest automotive suppliers, plays a crucial role in bringing this technology to market. The company says it is developing a reliable, serviceable and cost-efficient generation of the Aurora Driver hardware specifically for high-volume manufacturing.
“Developing, industrializing and manufacturing powerful self-driving hardware at commercial scale requires unique and unparalleled expertise,” said Aruna Anand, president and CEO, automotive, Continental North America. “Our industry-first collaboration with Aurora and NVIDIA to deliver driverless trucks positions Continental at the forefront of this cutting-edge technology and will drive value to our business.”
The timeline for this ambitious project is already in motion. As Continental and Aurora prepare to manufacture self-driving hardware at scale in 2027, production samples of Drive Thor are expected to arrive in the first half of 2025. Continental will begin testing prototypes of the future hardware kit in the coming months. Subsequently, the company will integrate Drive Thor with DriveOS into the primary Aurora Driver computer at its manufacturing facilities and ship the full hardware kit to Aurora’s truck OEM partners for integration into customers’ trucks.
The partners say this collaboration is not just about technological advancement; it’s about reshaping the entire transportation industry. They envision a future in which thousands of trucks integrated with the Aurora Driver autonomously haul freight across the United States. Aurora plans to launch its driverless trucking service in Texas in April, a milestone in the journey toward widespread autonomous truck commercialization.
The partnership also addresses critical aspects of autonomous vehicle deployment, such as safety and regulatory compliance. In the case of Drive Thor, Nvidia has invested more than 15,000 engineering years into safety across its full stack, adopting a unified safety approach from data center to fleet.
The Drive Thor SoC and AGX board are developed to comply with ISO 26262 standards. The software stack is designed for both ISO 26262 and ASPICE compliance. The Thor SoC and software are also designed and produced in alignment with ISO 21434, which provides the pathway for compliance with regulatory security such as UNECE Regulation 155.
As the transportation industry shifts toward software-defined vehicles with centralized electronic architectures, Aurora, Continental and Nvidia, with this partnership, are staking their claim to being leaders in the autonomous space. With the partnership with Nvidia and its Drive Thor capabilities, the need for the added compute power to handle the demands of the robust autonomous systems becomes easier to meet.
“The shift to software-defined vehicles with centralized electronic architectures is accelerating, driving a need for more powerful and more energy-efficient compute platforms,” said Sam Abuelsamid, principal research analyst at Guidehouse Insights. “The virtualization, high-speed data transfer and massive processing performance of NVIDIA Drive Thor can enable safer vehicles, better user experiences and potential new revenue streams.”
The partnership is Nvidia’s long-term play in autonomous trucks and marks a new chapter in the autonomous vehicle industry, where collaboration among technology providers, automotive suppliers and autonomous driving specialists becomes more common.