Self-driving has been "almost here" for over a decade. But somewhere between DARPA challenges and a handful of driverless trucks hauling freight between Dallas and Houston, Aurora co-founder and CEO Chris Urmson’s story changed. The self-driving truck company started commercial driverless operations last April and is now scaling from a handful of trucks to hundreds this year.
On this episode of TechCrunch's Equity podcast, we're bringing you a conversation Rebecca Bellan had with Urmson at the HumanX conference in San Francisco. The pair dug into the long road from lab to highway and how physical AI differs from the LLM boom everyone else is chasing.
Listen to the full episode to hear about:
Why long-haul trucking may crack the autonomy business case before robotaxis ever do
What "verifiable AI" means and why Urmson thinks end-to-end systems are a liability when lives are on the line
The surprisingly common-sense solution to the driverless truck safety triangle problem
What Aurora's roadmap looks like beyond trucking, and which companies in the autonomy space have Urmson genuinely excited
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How a secret project at Google led to driverless cars on American roads.
Freakonomics Radio shares a story from our friends at Search Engine. (Part one of a two-part series.)
SOURCES:
Alex Davies, author of Driven: The Race To Create the Autonomous Car.
Chris Urmson, co-founder and C.E.O. of Aurora.
Don Burnette, founder and C.E.O. of Kodiak AI.
PJ Vogt, reporter, writer, and host of the Search Engine podcast.
Sebastian Thrun, roboticist, C.E.O. of Sage AI Labs, adjunct faculty at Stanford University.
Timothy B. Lee, author of Understanding AI newsletter.
RESOURCES:
"Very few of Waymo’s most serious crashes were Waymo’s fault," by Kai Williams (Understand AI, 2025).
Driven: The Race to Create the Autonomous Car, by Alex Davies (2021).
"An Oral History of the Darpa Grand Challenge, the Grueling Robot Race That Launched the Self-Driving Car," by Alex Davies (WIRED, 2017).
Understanding AI, newsletter on Substack.
Waymo Safety Dashboard.
EXTRAS:
"The Fascinatingly Mundane Secrets of the World’s Most Exclusive Nightclub," by Freakonomics Radio (2024).
Search Engine, podcast by PJ Vogt.
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Kara sits down with Chris Urmson, CEO and co-founder of the autonomous trucking company Aurora, and Johnathon Ehsani, a professor of public health at Johns Hopkins University and leading road safety researcher, for a candid look at the future of AI-powered freight transport.
Recorded live at the Hopkins Bloomberg Center, the three discuss the rapid rise of driverless trucking, what it will take to convince a skeptical public that sharing the road with self-driving 18-wheelers will actually make driving safer, the potential for job losses, and how to regulate autonomous vehicles across state lines. It’s a deeply informed look at the promises and the trade-offs of autonomous trucking with two experts.
Questions? Comments? Email us at on@voxmedia.com or find us on YouTube, Instagram, TikTok, Threads, and Bluesky @onwithkaraswisher.
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Six leaders from across tech — from SaaS and semis to law and logistics — come together for our 250th episode milestone in this very special AI recap, where we unpack how new advances are transforming the way industries function, and how work gets done.
Featuring:
• Bret Taylor (Sierra Co-founder)
• Winston Weinberg (Harvey Co-founder and CEO)
• Matt Murphy (Marvell Technology Chairman and CEO)
• Yamini Rangan (HubSpot CEO)
• Chris Urmson (Aurora CEO)
• Varun Mohan (Windsurf Co-founder and CEO)
Connect with Joubin:
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/joubin-mirzadegan-66186854/
- X: https://x.com/Joubinmir
Email: grit@kleinerperkins.com
Learn more about Kleiner Perkins: https://www.kleinerperkins.com
Chris Urmson has spent the last 20 years pushing the limits of autonomous driving—first at Carnegie Mellon’s DARPA Grand Challenge team, then as co-founder of Google’s self-driving car project, now Waymo.
On this week’s episode, the Aurora CEO retraces that journey—from building robot cars in the desert to leading a public company pioneering driverless trucking.
He shares why autonomy was always a matter of when, not if, how he handled a high-profile departure from Waymo, and what it takes to build at the intersection of deep tech, safety, and infrastructure.
Now eight years into Aurora, Urmson says the future he’s been chasing is finally within reach.
Guest: Chris Urmson, Co-Founder & CEO of Aurora
Chapters:
00:00 Trailer
00:43 Introduction
01:59 FSD: are we there?
14:31 The competition, a million dollar check from LA to LV
22:50 Dream like an amateur, execute like a pro
32:30 Operate with integrity
42:49 The future is here, unevenly distributed
49:36 Underestimated decisions, minimizing regrets
1:03:55 Retaining value
1:16:45 Integrating self-driving
1:28:20 Lifer
1:29:25 Who Aurora is hiring
1:29:53 What “grit” means to Chris
1:30:15 Outro
Mentioned in this episode: Waymo, Google, Rivian, Dmitri Dolgov, Uber, Tesla, The DARPA Grand Challenge, Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, United States Department of Defense, Carnegie Mellon University, Stanford University, FedEx, Werner Enterprises, Hirschbach, Schneider Electric, Larry Page, Sergey Brin, Sebastian Thrun, Batman, Kentucky Fried Chicken, Anthony Levandowski, Donald Trump, Apple iPhone, Airbnb, Blackmore, Stripe, Titan, Ford, Volkswagen, RJ Scaringe, Peterbilt Motors Company, The Volvo Group, Continental AG, Dara Khosrowshahi
Links:
Connect with Chris Urmson
X
LinkedIn
Connect with Joubin
X
LinkedIn
Email: grit@kleinerperkins.com
Learn more about Kleiner Perkins
Kara and Scott discuss Kamala Harris's big media blitz, and the podcast (aside from Pivot) that she should really appear on. Then, Elon Musk leapt into the air at Donald Trump's weekend rally in Pennsylvania, and a lot of people had thoughts. Plus, Google is finally facing some real competition when it comes to the $300 billion search advertising business. Our Friend of Pivot is Chris Urmson, founder and CEO of Aurora, a start-up focusing on autonomous trucking. Chris explains how Aurora is getting driverless trucks on the road, and why the technology could be good for the economy.
Follow Chris at @chris_urmson
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Chris Urmson is one of the founding fathers of the autonomous vehicle industry. He participated in three DARPA self-driving vehicle challenges before joining the team that launched Google’s self-driving car project, which later became Waymo. Eventually though, Chris saw an opportunity to scratch an entrepreneurial itch and bring his expertise to an industry that was ripe for it: trucking.
This week on How I Built This Lab, Chris talks about launching and scaling Aurora, a company that is developing autonomous systems to safely drive semitrucks on America’s freeways. Plus, Chris and Guy discuss the impact that this technology could have on the U.S. economy, as well as the millions of truck drivers working in the industry today.
This episode was produced by Chis Maccini and edited by John Isabella, with music by Ramtin Arablouei. Our audio engineer was Katherine Silva.
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Tesla’s self-driving ambitions (and the company’s recent recall) may dominate the conversation when it comes to autonomous driving, but they’re not the only players in the space. This week, Kara’s talking to CEOs whose driverless vehicles are being roadtested. First up: Chris Urmson, co-founder and CEO of Aurora, which will launch its driverless truck service next year in Texas. They discuss safety, job displacement and the time that Kara tried to hit Urmson with his own driverless car. (Spoiler alert: It didn’t work.)
BTW, do you have any burning questions on career, love or life you’d like Kara or Nayeema’s advice on? If so, call 1-888-KARA-PLZ and leave us a voice mail.
Questions? Comments? Email us at on@voxmedia.com or find us on Instagram. We’re @karaswisher and @nayeemaraza.
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To complete an audacious journey, you need to set short, achievable goals — or waypoints — to avoid getting wildly lost. But waypoints also need to be flexible because when you're knocked off track, you need to be able to realign your waypoints to get back on course. Aurora's Chris Urmson shares how he keeps returning to short, flexible waypoints on his daunting journey to make autonomous vehicles part of our everyday lives.
Read a transcript of this episode: https://mastersofscale.com
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Chris Urmson has had to take a different approach in building his company Aurora, which develops self-driving technology. As opposed to creating and iterating a product with a handful of people, and then building a company around that product, Urmson says he’s had to do the opposite. “Given the scale of the problem we're trying to solve and the complexity and breadth of it, we really had to build the company almost ahead of the product,” he says in this interview with Rapid Response host and editor-at-large Bob Safian. Urmson is determined to transform transportation as it is today – a goal that has and will continue to require a great amount of energy and investment upfront, he says. However, if he’s able to pull it off, “the benefit and impact that we'll have socially and economically will be profound.”
Read a transcript of this interview at: mastersofscale.com
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In episode 18 of The Robot Brains Podcast our host Pieter Abbeel meets Chris Urmson. Chris is one of the world-leading pioneers in self-driving. He led the Google self-driving project for several years - which later became Waymo. Then, in 2017, he co-founded his own self-driving company, Aurora where he is currently the CEO. In this episode, he discusses his involvement of the DARPA Grand Challenge, departure from Google, and his (and Aurora's) vision for the future of autonomous vehicles. | Visit therobotbrains.ai and follow us on Twitter @therobotbrains, Instagram @therobotbrains and YouTube TheRobotBrainsPodcast | Host: Pieter Abbeel | Executive Producers: Ricardo Reyes & Henry Tobias Jones | Audio Production: Kieron Matthew Banerji | Title Music: Alejandro Del Pozo Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
Chris Urmson the CEO of Aurora, a leading self-driving company, joins Jason to recount the history of autonomous vehicles (1:06), the roadmap for removing human drivers (16:47), what technology problems are left to solve (38:25) and more!
Chris Urmson was the CTO of the Google Self-Driving Car team, a key engineer and leader behind the Carnegie Mellon autonomous vehicle entries in the DARPA grand challenges and the winner of the DARPA urban challenge. Today he is the CEO of Aurora Innovation, an autonomous vehicle software company he started with Sterling Anderson, who was the former director of Tesla Autopilot, and Drew Bagnell, Uber’s former autonomy and perception lead. This conversation is part of the Artificial Intelligence podcast. If you would like to get more information about this podcast go to https://lexfridman.com/ai or connect with @lexfridman on Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, Medium, or YouTube where you can watch the video versions of these conversations. If you enjoy the podcast, please rate it 5 stars on iTunes or support it on Patreon.
Aurora CEO Chris Urmson stops by to discuss the future of self-driving cars with The Verge's Nilay Patel and Andrew Hawkins. They explore how the industry has evolved over the years, and how long it will take before self-driving cars are commonly used on the road.
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Chris Urmson, the CEO of Aurora and former CTO of self-driving cars at Google, talks with Recode's Kara Swisher about when autonomous vehicles will replace human-driven ones. Urmson, who started working on the technology at Carnegie Mellon University in the mid-2000s, predicts we'll see fleets of self-driving cars on some roads within five years, but that they won't completely take over for at least 30 years. He talks about the remaining challenges to making these vehicles completely safe — including the danger of their operators becoming complacent about the technology — and how their arrival will impact everything from government to public transportation to fast-food jobs.
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