Aurora is finally ready to show the world what it’s been up to
0Reported today on The Verge
For the full article visit: https://www.theverge.com/2020/1/24/21080298/aurora-self-driving-car-announcement-2020-plan-waymo-ford-general-motors
Reported today in The Verge.
Aurora is finally ready to show the world what it's been up to
Aurora, the self-driving car company founded by former Waymo engineer Chris Urmson, doesn't do dog and pony shows. It doesn't trot out its vehicles just to prove they exist or take journalists for test drives to demonstrate that the technology actually works. In fact, in the three years since Aurora launched, the public has heard very little about how Aurora plans to compete against Waymo, Ford, and General Motors.
After months of announcements - the company acquired a LIDAR sensor maker, hired a VP of hardware, and took an investment from Amazon - that finally appears to be changing. Just before the New Year, Urmson's co-founders Sterling Anderson and Drew Bagnell hosted a rare media event to talk about their technology and take journalists for test drives. It was, in other words, a dog and pony show.
"These vehicles look like garbage because they're test vehicles," Anderson said, before ushering us outside to try them out. The vehicles, a fleet of Lincoln MKZs, did not look like garbage; they looked functional and exceedingly clean. Inside, screens mounted on the backs of the front seats displayed a dynamic map with moving blocks and blinking lights. It was the world around us, interpreted through the "eyes" of the car.
"It's the main line of our software," Urmson tells me in a phone call the following week. (He missed the event because of a cold.) "It wasn't some kind of weird, pulled off to the side, polished for demo. It was our core developer branch."
It was this software that powered me along at about 20 miles per hour, accompanied by two of Aurora's safety drivers and a journalist from NPR. As we pulled away from the venue, an oncoming vehicle nudged into our lane,