Shortly after launching commercial self-driving trucking services in Texas, Aurora Innovation, Inc. announced it will be putting a human back in the driver’s seat at the request of a partner company.

On May 1, 2025, Aurora announced the launch of regular driverless customer deliveries between Dallas and Houston.

However, on May 16, Aurora CEO Chris Urmson published a blog post announcing that the company would reverse course on fully driverless operations.

Urmson says that trucker maker and partner company PACCAR requested that Aurora keep a human in the driver’s seat, and that Aurora has opted to honor that request.

From Urmson’s blog post:

“When we launched our driverless trucking service last month, it was a moment guided by safety and underpinned by rigorous testing, painstaking validation, and a deep commitment to our mission. A core part of our strategy has always been building a strong ecosystem of partners across the industry — from OEMs to logistics providers to regulators. These partnerships are essential to delivering a safe, scalable, commercial product.

One of those partners, PACCAR, requested we have a person in the driver’s seat, because of certain prototype parts in their base vehicle platform. We are confident this is not required to operate the truck safely based on the exhaustive testing (covering nearly 10,000 requirements and 2.7 million tests) and analysis that populates our safety case. PACCAR is a long-time partner and, after much consideration, we respected their request and are moving the observer, who had been riding in the back of some of our trips, from the back seat to the front seat. This observer will not operate the vehicle — the Aurora Driver will continue to be fully responsible for all driving tasks, including pulling over to a safe location if required. And we’ve shown we can do that safely, with the Aurora Driver operating for more than 6,000 driverless miles along our commercial launch lane between Dallas and Houston. This change has no impact on our near, mid and long-term development plans.“

Aurora also recently announced plans to expand its driverless service to El Paso, Texas and Phoenix, Arizona by the end of 2025.