Dive Brief:
- AV firm Torc has signed a lease to house an autonomous truck hub in Dallas-Fort Worth, the Daimler Truck subsidiary announced Tuesday in a news release.
- The site features an 18-acre facility and 22,000 square feet of office space and will serve the company’s autonomous development through testing, pilots and customer operations.
- “As we work toward commercialization, the new hub will give us access to talent, resources and routes that we didn’t previously have,” Torc CEO Peter Vaughan Schmidt said in the announcement.
Dive Insight:
Torc is preparing to launch a commercial AV lane from Dallas-Fort Worth to Laredo, Texas, as early as 2026 and recalibrating where its workforce is based.
The company shared in November that it was planning to wind down and transfer operations from its original testing site in Albuquerque, New Mexico, and its tech hub in Stuttgart, Germany, during the first half of 2025.
The Blacksburg, Virginia-headquartered company already has locations in Austin and Montréal, and it’s also transitioning to Michigan this year to attract Detroit automotive and tech talent.
“Torc will be shifting many of its Albuquerque resources to Dallas and starting a hiring push there and in Ann Arbor, hiring over 100 positions in each location over the coming months,” the company said last year.
The Dallas-Fort Worth facility will be built out in the first half of this year, the release said.
Among Torc’s AV rivals, Aurora also has sites in Texas and is planning to launch fully driverless operations in April 2025 in the Lone Star State. The competitor announced last month that it opened a 78,000-square-foot office for lidar research along with a testing facility in Bozeman, Montana.
Other AV firms such as Kodiak and Waabi have gravitated toward Texas for facilities, fostered by state policy that gave approval to AVs in 2017.
