Phoenix terminal launched as the company expands fleet and driverless miles
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Aurora announces nighttime driverless operations and Arizona expansion
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(Photo: Aurora Innovation)
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Aurora Innovation, an autonomous trucking technology maker, announced Wednesday an expansion of its commercial operations, which began in May. The expansion includes growing its driverless fleet to three trucks and surpassing 20,000 driverless miles at the end of June. The company also announced the opening of a terminal in Phoenix.
“Efficiency, uptime, and reliability are important for our customers, and Aurora is showing we can deliver,” said Chris Urmson, co-founder and CEO of Aurora, in a press release. “Just three months after launch, we’re running driverless operations day and night and we’ve expanded our terminal network to Phoenix. Our rapid progress is beginning to unlock the full value of self-driving trucks for our customers, which has the potential to transform the trillion-dollar trucking industry.”
To build on the momentum, the company expanded to nighttime driving on its existing driverless lane from Dallas to Houston. The expansion allows for continuous utilization, shortening delivery times and serving as part of its path to autonomous trucking profitability.
Aurora notes that the unlocking of nighttime autonomous operations can also improve road safety. It cited a 2021 Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration report on large truck and bus crashes that noted a disproportionate 37% of fatal crashes involving large trucks occurred at night. This comes despite trucks traveling fewer miles during those hours.
Read the full article here.
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Gatik unveils Arena, a next generation simulation platform for autonomous trucks
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(Photo: Jim Allen/FreightWaves)
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Gatik announced Wednesday its next-generation simulation platform called Gatik Arena. The platform is designed to help the autonomous truck technology maker accelerate the development and validation of its autonomous vehicle systems.
The platform is built in-house and produces photorealistic, structured synthetic data to address the limitations of traditional real-world testing methods.
“As the AV industry pushes toward scaled deployments, the bottleneck isn’t just better algorithms—it’s better, smarter data,” said Gautam Narang, Gatik’s CEO and co-founder, in a press release. “Arena allows us to simulate the edge cases, rare events, and high-risk scenarios that matter most, with photorealism and fidelity that match the complexities of the real world.”
The platform integrates with Nvidia Cosmos, a world foundation model that expands Arena’s capabilities by enabling data synthesis across diverse environments. This integration allows Gatik to transform limited real-world data into millions of testing miles with variations in weather, location, and agent behavior.
“One of the things that the industry has struggled with for a while is that there have been novel approaches that came about a few years ago that allowed re-creation or more photorealistic synthesis of data or synthesis of sensors,” said Apeksha Kumavat, co-founder and chief engineer at Gatik, in an interview with FreightWaves. “However, the grounding in physics or the physics-inspired way of doing these things was lacking, which caused skepticism in terms of using this for real safety validations.”
Read the full article here.
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Aeva teams with LG Innotek on 4D LiDAR manufacturing
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Aeva, a maker of next-generation 4D LiDAR systems, announced on Tuesday a strategic collaboration with LG Innotek, an affiliate of LG Group, which will serve as a manufacturing partner. The partnership will help to bring Aeva’s technology to the mass market for both commercial and passenger vehicles.
The partnership includes a $50 million strategic investment by LG Innotek and is part of a larger non-dilutive investment for new product development. FreightWaves spoke with Soroush Salehian, co-founder and CEO of Aeva, about the deal and how the technology works.
Aeva is a perception systems company and has developed an innovative 4D LiDAR technology that measures both distance and velocity simultaneously. The 4D refers to the addition of velocity as a fourth dimension of measurement compared to traditional LiDAR systems. “It’s just like cameras went from black and white to color. That additional dimension of information is what we call the fourth dimension,” Salehian told FreightWaves.
Unlike conventional time-of-flight LiDAR that only measures distance, Aeva’s frequency modulated continuous wave (FMCW) technology detects both position and speed for every pixel it captures. This capability provides crucial information for autonomous systems, particularly in trucking applications where LiDAR is used to identify objects at distances of 400-500 meters, about four to five football fields away.
Read the full article here.
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Benore Logistic Systems Inc. completed battery electric yard truck demonstrations with Michelin at its Pendleton, S.C., facility in the first half of 2025. Testing Orange EV and Autocar units in live operations, the pilots confirmed zero-emission trucks as viable alternatives to diesel in high-volume environments.
Range Energy completed vehicle dynamics and stability testing for its eTrailer System at the Transportation Research Center Inc. (TRC), validating safety and performance in over 400 maneuvers on dry and wet surfaces. The system reduced lateral forces by up to 25%, enhancing rollover prevention and integrating seamlessly with diesel and electric trucks.
Bendix Commercial Vehicle Systems and Aeva Technologies have partnered to integrate 4D LiDAR into Level 2+ advanced driver assistance systems for commercial trucks, enhancing detection in adverse conditions and collision mitigation. The collaboration targets North America’s 300,000 annual new truck sales.
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As always, thanks for watching and reading.
Thomas Wasson
twasson@firecrown.com
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