Self-driving car company Aurora has announced a global and strategic collaboration with Toyota and Denso to build and globally deploy self-driving cars at scale. It engineering teams will develop and test driverless-capable vehicles equipped with the Aurora Driver. And it is to lay the groundwork for the mass-production, launch, and support of these vehicles with Toyota on ride-hailing networks, including Uber’s, over the next few years.
San Francisco-based Aurora competes with Alphabet’s Waymo, General Motors’s Cruise and Argo AI, with investors Ford and Volkswagen. The Sienna minivans by Toyoya will be equipped with the Aurora self-driving system, with a test fleet to be deployed by the end of 2021. These vehicles will eventually be deployed in the Uber ride-hailing fleet, and with other companies. In December, Aurora bought Uber’s self-driving unit, the Advanced Technologies Group (Uber ATG), in a deal valued at $4 billion.
