Exclusive: Ride-Along Inside Aurora’s Self-Driving Semitruck

6:45 a.m. and the start of a freight shipment run for this truck owned by Aurora innovation. But unlike every other truck on I 45 between Houston and Dallas, this one does not have a human driving it. And it means that you can move goods more quickly. So instead of having to drive 11 hours and then take 11 hours off, we can just keep moving the moving the goods the whole time. For more than three hours, I rode shotgun in the passenger seat while Aurora founder and CEO Chris Urmson rode in the back seat and no one was behind the wheel. This is one of the first commercial freight runs for a completely autonomous Aurora truck. Shipments between Houston and Dallas is one of ten routes where Aurora's driverless trucks are operating. Urmson believes this is the future of trucking. No drivers and far lower costs. And we think it's going to make their business multiple times more profitable in terms of dollars they make. So fuel economy savings, savings and insurance savings in the cost of actually driving it and then dramatically increasing utilization as well. Wall Street sees huge potential for autonomous trucking, especially with approximately 3.5 million class A semi trucks registered in the US. And a shortage of truck drivers, forcing many freight and shipping companies to pay more to lock in crews. Stripping out the cost of a driver could be lucrative. Morgan Stanley analyst Ravi Shankar estimates an autonomous fleet should be nearly seven and a half times as profitable as a human driven fleet today. Still, Aurora and other autonomous trucking firms like Kodiak, AI and Gaedeke are still far from putting thousands of driverless trucks on highways. But as the technology advances, it raises the question of how many freight firms will opt to go driverless. Shawn Wu, CEO of Uship, says the reality is that most semis are operating not only on highways but on congested streets and parking lots, or at tricky loading docks, places where truck drivers are better prepared to maneuver a truck and handle a shipment. The drivers do more than just move the brake. There's judgment. There's customer service, there's protection, there's backstop. There's just a lot more to think about than just, hey, they're moving a truck from point A to point B. Chris Urmson has heard the concerns about autonomous trucking for years, including those about the safety of a semi without a driver rolling down the highway at 65 or 70mph. After three hours, we pulled into the distribution center with our payload. The trip uneventful exactly what Urmson is looking for. As Aurora innovation starts to expand its fleet of 20 autonomous trucks and potentially drive towards positive free cash flow in 2028. There's an opportunity here, right? In America, 4000 plus people die on our roads every year. 5000 people die in accidents involving heavy trucks. Like we could do something about this. Right. And I think that is one of the overarching benefits of what we're building.