Aurora Innovation leverages partnerships to smooth supply chain

“One of the things you have to do, even working with strong partners, is you have to demonstrate a degree of patience, and at the same time you have to optimize your ability to source parts and adapt. Not everything is going to go great when you start, but having really deep collaboration with your OEM partners is the way to mitigate most of the risks and challenges.”

“When we think about our partnership strategy, we don’t require exclusivity and our partners don’t require it either. Deploying self-driving technology means that we can’t be exclusive in trying to box people out. It sets the wrong incentive strategy because all of a sudden if our volume isn’t large enough and they can’t monetize somewhere else, their prioritization of this technology gets worse.”

“There’s a lot of growing pains that the industry is going to need to go through in terms of how to deploy this. In the long term, we can see a Paccar program on another developer’s [system], but we’re not worried about that.”