Aurora distances itself from Tesla as Musk unveils robotaxi

By Evan Robinson-Johnson / Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

Aurora put out several statements distancing itself from Tesla as the electric carmaker prepared to announce a robotaxi at a large event Thursday.

The Strip District-based startup, which is chasing autonomy on the trucking side, said Tesla’s system is based on cameras and driving data, rather than the lasers and rules of the road that Aurora codes into its trucks to keep them safe on highways.

Tesla will unveil a robotaxi with butterfly doors and autonomy plans for its semi-trailer truck at a demonstration on a Warner Brothers lot in Burbank, California. But experts said they’ve yet to solve many of the safety problems needed to deploy such a model at scale.

“There’s nothing Tesla is going to talk about tonight that is going to compete with the reliability, scale and scope that the leaders in autonomous vehicle race are deploying,” a group that he said includes Aurora, said Bryan Reimer, a research scientist at the MIT Center for Transportation and Logistics, before the event.

Still, some investors said there’s a risk that Elon Musk will use his platform and influence to dominate the autonomy conversation while ignoring some of the safeguards Aurora and others have worked hard to establish. A majority of Americans continue to view self-driving cars as unsafe, and the crashes and conflicts associated with Mr. Musk and Tesla don’t help that perception.

“A lot of people will see Tesla's announcement as ... actually being detrimental to the cause of autonomous vehicles,” said Evangelos Simoudis, a California-based investor and adviser in the autonomous vehicle space. 

The Tesla event comes just days after Mr. Musk was in the Pittsburgh region campaigning for Donald Trump.

He also went to Sunday’s Steelers game and spoke with Gov. Josh Shapiro during a rain delay about potentially investing in the Pittsburgh region, according to two people familiar with the call. Several of Mr. Musk’s companies were part of the discussion, including Tesla, Starlink and SpaceX, according to one of those people.

Pittsburgh has seen firsthand how much investment and trust it takes to get a fully autonomous system on the road.

After the robotaxi firm Argo AI shut down here in 2022, its founders pivoted to trucking and many of their employees went to work on driver assistance tools at Ford’s Latitude AI. Motional, which still tests its robotaxis on Pittsburgh streets, cut half its staff here earlier this year.

“We've heard autonomy is a solved problem for almost 10 years now, so celebrating anniversaries of the promise is what we’re doing,” said Phil Koopman, a Carnegie Mellon University professor and one of the nation’s leading experts in autonomous vehicle safety. 

“Robotaxi prototypes are cool,” he said, “But the hardest part has always been… the software. That's the long pole in the tent. And Tesla does not yet have a story that's anything more than yet another promise.”

Included in the material Aurora released ahead of Tesla’s event was perspective from Sterling Anderson, Aurora’s chief product officer, who previously led Tesla’s autopilot program. He said on a recent investor call that models resembling an “unpredictable black box” will make it harder to determine what went wrong after a crash.

“The inability to introspect and find out exactly what just happened is a fundamental flaw that I expect ultimately will lead to a massive deficit of public trust,” he said, and create “a huge challenge with regulators who will look at this and say ‘you guys can’t even tell me why you just hit that pedestrian.’"

Tesla cars use cameras, not lasers, to measure depth and avoid obstacles. They’re also trained on driving data, rather than rules of the road, which Aurora’s team said leads to more uncertainty. Tesla did not respond to a request for comment.

Although thousands of Tesla cars support a feature called “full self-driving” or FSD, that mode still requires regular intervention from the human in the driver seat, said Jeff Schneider, a professor at Carnegie Mellon University who researches autonomous driving.

While sleek hardware builds interest, Mr. Schneider said that’s “not the unsolved problem.”

The problem is reliability. “They are still two to three orders of magnitude behind where they need to be to actually use this,” he said.

Mr. Koopman agreed. 

“The burning question,” he said, “is when exactly will FSD be ready to roll without a steering wheel. Because it's nowhere close, right now.”

Aurora is hoping to remove the backup drivers from 20 of its self-driving freight trucks in Texas later this year, though rides would still be monitored by humans remotely.

Tesla will showcase, for the first time, autonomy options for the electric Tesla Semi, which poses a more direct challenge to Aurora. 

“Aurora is in a much stronger position since they've been testing their technology with trucks whose characteristics are accepted by the industry users,” Mr. Simoudis, the California investor said. “Tesla's Semi has not yet found a wide audience because of the relatively limited load it can haul due to the battery weight. Tesla needs to improve its battery efficiency because the truck needs to have at least a 500-mile range.”

An Aurora spokesperson said the Tesla Semi would likely have a different customer base. Aurora plans to sell trucks to large carriers like FedEx while the Tesla model would likely be marketed directly to shippers.

PepsiCo has a fleet of about 100 Tesla Semi trucks, Forbes reported in January, noting that while enhanced autopilot was not yet available, the Semi had all the hardware necessary to support that feature.