- Three recent deals have given Aurora access to ride-hailing and car-building expertise.
- The latest, a partnership with Toyota, puts Aurora in a better position to compete with Waymo.
- But Aurora still has to prove it can put robotaxis on the road.
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Aurora Innovation has announced three major deals in the past three months that have given the autonomous-vehicle company access to ride-hailing and vehicle-manufacturing expertise.
In December, Aurora partnered with Uber and acquired its automated-driving division. Since then, the Amazon-backed startup has announced it’s teaming up with truck maker Paccar and Toyota to develop self-driving trucks and ride-hailing vehicles, respectively.
“A global manufacturing partner enables us to build an affordable product and a network partner allows us to deploy at scale — we now uniquely have both,” Aurora said in a press release on Tuesday.
With few exceptions, companies working on automated-driving systems have looked to automakers with deep experience in automotive design and manufacturing to build the vehicles their technology will run on, allowing them to focus on creating software and hardware that can drive without human assistance. Even buying vehicles and installing automated-driving technology in them would be too difficult and expensive for an autonomous-vehicle company to do alone on a large scale, Michael Ramsey, an analyst at Gartner who covers the auto industry, told Insider.
Aurora had previously partnered with Volkswagen, Hyundai, and Fiat Chrysler (before its recent merger with PSA), but each of those relationships has ended.
Teaming up with Toyota, the world’s largest automaker, gives Aurora the resources it needs to seriously compete with highly regarded rivals like Waymo — which is working with Stellantis, Jaguar Land Rover, and the Renault-Nissan alliance — as well as Cruise, which is funded by General Motors and Honda, Ramsey said.
“It’s something they had to get,” he said.
But, Ramsey said, Aurora still has work to do to catch up with Waymo, which operates the only ride-hailing service in the US that uses driverless vehicles. Though Aurora now has the pieces it needs to take on its biggest rivals, it needs to prove it can put them together.
“It’s like signing a free agent that might help your baseball team,” Ramsey said. “You don’t know yet what’s going to happen.”
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