For this driverless car pioneer, vehicle autonomy has finally arrived. It's been a long road. (www.businessinsider.com)

After nearly two decades in the lab and field, Aurora — led by AV pioneer Chris Urmson — announced a string of milestones that signal practical autonomy is arriving for trucking. The company says its driverless trucks have logged 100,000 driverless miles with perfect on‑time and safety records, and it expanded commercial operations to a new 600‑mile Fort Worth–El Paso lane only six months after its initial commercial launch. Aurora plans to deploy hundreds of trucks without human observers next year once safety validation is complete on Volvo and Navistar platforms. The significance lies in both scale and the technical architecture behind it. Aurora’s next‑gen hardware includes a proprietary FirstLight lidar with ~1 km detection range, and its "verifiable AI" approach explicitly models cars, pedestrians, cyclists and lane geometry so decisions are grounded in interpretable, real‑world concepts rather than opaque heuristics. Operationally the company is shifting from transportation‑as‑a‑service (TaaS) toward a “driver‑as‑a‑service” (DaaS) licensing model, promising lower labor and fuel costs (65 mph cruise vs. 75 mph saves thousands of gallons annually) and faster lane rollouts because learned skills transfer to new routes. For the AI/ML community, Aurora’s progress highlights advances in perception range, safety validation, and interpretable decision models that make large‑scale, real‑world autonomy commercially viable.