January 05, 2024 - Continental and Aurora Innovation announce achieving a key partnership milestone in commercializing autonomous trucks at scale by finalizing the design and architecture of the fallback system and hardware of the Aurora Driver Level 4 autonomous driving system. The companies release a roadmap to the planned Start of Production (SOP) in 2027 based on detailed development plans and key milestones, where Continental will work closely and directly ship the Aurora Driver hardware to Aurora’s truck manufacturing partners.
Blueprint and design of the future Aurora Driver hardware and fallback system completed
Once deployed, Aurora Driver will become the world’s first serviceable automotive-grade autonomous system at scale. Continental is jointly developing a reliable, serviceable, cost-efficient autonomous hardware for mass production with Aurora. The partnership gives Aurora a path to deploy autonomous trucks at scale after its initial driverless launch, planned at the end of 2024. With Continental’s automotive development and manufacturing expertise, the future Aurora Driver will be designed to deliver customer value for one million miles.
Aurora is also working with our world-class engineering team to provide an industrialized fallback system. To operate safely without a human driver, autonomous vehicles require built-in redundancies that provide backups in the rare case a component or sensor fails. One of these redundancies is the fallback system – a specialized secondary computer that can take over operation if a failure occurs in the primary system. This innovative dual engineering approach is intended to reduce the exposure of the main and fallback system to single points of failure.
