Automotive supply giant Continental claims it has successfully designed and built the world’s first hardware system to provide Level 4 autonomous driving technology to commercial trucking fleets.
In league with automated driving specialist Aurora, the company says the system using the Aurora Driver suite will begin commercial production in 2027.
The partnership allows Aurora 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 truck owners a system guaranteed robust for at least 1 million miles (1.61 million km) of transportation.
The companies say to operate safely without a human driver, autonomous vehicles require built-in redundancies that provide backups in the event of a component or sensor failure. One of these redundancies is the fallback system, which is a secondary computer that can take over operation if a failure occurs in the primary system. This dual engineering approach is intended to reduce the exposure of the main and fallback system to single points of failure.
Test mule systems will be built this year and put through extensive testing at Continental’s facility in New Braunfels, TX, and across its global manufacturing centers through 2025. The final stage of planning and instigating the large-scale production of the systems is planned for late 2027.
Philipp von Hirschheydt, executive board member for the automotive group sector at Continental, says: “Technologies for autonomous mobility present the biggest opportunity to transform driving behavior since the creation of the automobile. Achieving this milestone puts us on a credible path to deploy easy-to-service autonomous trucking systems that customers demand.”
