Aurora’s Driverless Trucks Can Now Run Longer Than Humans Drivers Are Legally Allowed

• Pittsburgh-based Aurora is on track to triple its network of driverless delivery trucks.
• The company’s latest software update will also enable trucks to drive a 1,000-mile route between Fort Worth and Phoenix without stopping for mandatory breaks.
• The trip takes roughly 15 hours to complete, but human drivers need to rest after 11 hours.

Aurora, the Pittsburgh-based autonomous trucking company, wants to supercharge its fleet of driverless big rigs. The company said the latest software update to its driverless hardware suite will enable its trucks to drive nonstop from Phoenix to Fort Worth.

That trip is roughly 1,000 miles long and takes 15 hours to complete, but here’s where trucks without drivers behind the steering wheel have the upper hand, because they’re not subject to the same mandatory rest breaks as human drivers. By contrast, a human driver would have to take a rest after 11 hours of driving. A second driver could take the wheel, though.

Peterbilt 579 powered by the Aurora Driver

Photo by: Aurora

“Expanding across the Sun Belt and introducing customer endpoints enables us to provide our customers with the capacity they need to move goods at a scale that wasn’t possible before,” said Chris Urmson, co-founder and CEO of Aurora. “Being a carrier is a game of margins, and if autonomy can work around the clock, it will be key to growing our customers.”

This is Aurora’s fourth software release since deploying driverless trucks on America’s roads back in April 2025. The first version validated initial driverless operations between Dallas and Houston, the second enabled night driving, and the fourth opened up routes to and from El Paso.

The company currently has five autonomous trucks carrying cargo without safety monitors between Dallas, Houston, Fort Worth and El Paso. Additional trucks are on the road with safety monitors for several of the startup’s clients, including Hirschbach Motor Lines and Detmar Logistics, but Aurora’s CEO previously said in an interview with The Verge that the monitors are in the cabs because of optics, and their presence doesn’t have an impact on the company’s progress.

By the end of this year, the startup expects to have over 200 driverless trucks in operation. The expansion will be boosted by the firm’s new automated mapping feature, which can deploy direct-to-customer lanes faster, with the help of Verifiable AI. “After a single manual drive, cloud-based algorithms are able to generate semantic components, which helps to build new maps with little to no human assistance,” the company said.

As part of the expansion, a new semi-truck will be added to the startup’s fleet in the second quarter of 2026. Based on the International LT, the driverless big rig will feature Aurora’s latest hardware suite, which costs half compared to the current stack. The new International LT will join the Peterbilt 579 and Volvo VNL.

Since launching commercial operations last year, Aurora’s trucks have amassed over 250,000 driverless miles and over 4.5 million commercial miles.