Thousands of new driverless trucks per year? For one autonomous company, driverless is now truly a literal term. With the announcement of its second-generation driverless truck, Aurora Innovation will no longer have anyone in the driver’s seat or anywhere in the cab in many cases. Members of the company’s roadside assistance team may ride in the rear seat at times to gather feedback and provide support, but this individual is not in the truck to drive or supervise driving, according to Aurora. The Pittsburgh-based autonomous developer said its latest driverless truck is built for a “million-mile service life.” Aurora plans to run its updated driverless truck on routes in the Southwest and Sun Belt on its commercial network and produce 1,000 new trucks annually through its manufacturing partnership with Roush. The deployment of this new AV comes amid lawmakers’ warnings of serious security threats. “Currently, autonomous systems put Americans, their vehicles and their personal privacy at risk given so many critical unanswered questions related to cybersecurity, operational safety and data transparency,” OOIDA President Todd Spencer said. “The safest operator of an 80,000-pound commercial vehicle on America’s roadways is a well-trained, professional, human truck driver.” The announcement also comes a little more than a year after Aurora decided to put a person back in the driver’s seat, following concerns from Paccar. “(Paccar) requested we have a person in the driver’s seat because of certain prototype parts in their base vehicle platform,” Aurora CEO Chris Urmson wrote in a blog post published in May 2025 “We are confident this is not required to operate the truck safely based on the exhaustive testing and analysis that populates our safety case. Paccar is a longtime partner and, after much consideration, we respected their request and are moving the observer, who had been riding in