Tech
Aurora's Observer Was Still in the Seat When Bot Auto Ran
Aurora launched driverless trucking in Texas in May 2025 with an observer in the cab. A company running Freightliner hardware cleared the same corridor just under twelve months later with no one aboard, at $1.89 per mile.
At 1:16 a.m. on April 29, a Bot Auto truck left northeast Houston for Dallas with no driver and no one watching.
Ryan Transportation, ranked 19th on the 2025 Transport Topics freight brokerage list, brokered the load. The truck, a Freightliner retrofitted with Bot Auto's autonomous sensor stack, arrived in Hutchins, south of Dallas, at 4:57 a.m., covering 230 miles in three hours and 41 minutes.
Bot Auto was founded in 2023 by Xiaodi Hou, whose previous company TuSimple closed its U.S. operations that year. The company has raised $40 million, employs 80 people, and runs 12 Freightliner tractors serving 25-plus contracted customers.
Aurora Innovation launched commercial driverless trucking in Texas on May 1, 2025, with Hirschbach as a customer on the same Dallas-Houston corridor. Aurora runs on PACCAR hardware, specifically the Kenworth T680. Its trucks have carried an in-cab observer since launch, after PACCAR requested the arrangement over prototype concerns with the first-generation system.
Bot Auto's haul carried no such observer. The company states its cost on the lane at $1.89 per mile, against a revenue equivalent of $2.70 per mile, though the component breakdown is not publicly disclosed. For reference, the American Transportation Research Institute's 2024 survey puts the national average for human-driven long-haul trucking at $2.26 per mile.
Running on Freightliner hardware, Bot Auto carried no counterpart to Aurora's PACCAR arrangement. The divide points to Aurora's observer as an OEM-contractual condition specific to PACCAR's first-generation prototype concerns, not a floor imposed on all autonomous carriers operating on Texas roads.
Aurora's second-generation hardware, planned for International LT trucks, targets Q2 2026 commercial service and was designed to remove the observer requirement. Whether observer-free runs on that hardware appear on public lanes before July 1 is the near-term test. Hirschbach's 500-truck order, with deliveries starting in 2027, assumes they will.