That company — Aurora Innovation — is reversing course a bit. The company said it’ll be putting a human back in the driver’s seat.
You might wonder why. According to company co-founder and CEO Chris Urmson, the change came at the request of one of Aurora’s partners.
A message posted to the company’s website from Urmson reads, in part, “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.”
Aurora said the human will only observe, but not actually drive the truck. It’ll still be automated. The company said this change will have no impact on near and long term development plans.