Dive Brief:
- Driverless tech firm Aurora Innovation more than doubled its pilot revenue in 2023 to $640,000 year over year, CFO David Maday said on an Q4 earnings call last week.
- Pilot customers include FedEx, Werner Enterprises, Schneider National, Hirschbach and Uber Freight, among others, co-founder and CEO Chris Urmson noted to investors.
- The Pittsburgh-headquartered company also continued a “strategic collaboration with Ryder System, piloting on-site fleet maintenance to support current autonomous freight pilot operations and prepare for commercial operation at scale,” per its annual report.
Dive Insight:
Aurora, seeking to launch its commercial operations this year, recently eliminated 3% of its workforce, listed as approximately 1,800 employees in its annual report.
“We need to continuously adopt to meet our evolving needs of our business,” Maday told investors. “We recently reviewed the entire organization to ensure we are working as effectively as possible and with the velocity required to achieve our ambitious goals.”
The company’s Autonomy Readiness Measure, a weighted review of its safety case, increased from 84% at the end of Q3 to 93% in January 2024, just shy of an approximate 95% goal.
Another measure, dubbed the Autonomy Performance Indicator, tracks how trucks equipped with the autonomous tech are doing without human assistance. In Q4, most of its vehicles continued to operate at 100% of this metric. And an API rating of 99% rose from 84% of trucks in Q3 to 88% in Q4, according to an investor presentation.
The company plans to release more details on the scaling of its technology at its Analyst & Investor Day on March 14.
