A growing number of self-driving technology developers are seeing a path to profitability in commercial vehicles. By Stewart Burnett
Amazon Web Services (AWS) has announced a partnership at CES, tying up with Continental spin-off Aumovio to accelerate the commercial deployment of autonomous vehicles. The deal, which aims to establish AWS as Aumovio’s cloud provider of choice for self-driving development, will begin with Aurora’s fleet of driverless freight trucks set to scale production in 2027.
Once known as tyremaker Continental’s automotive technology division, Aumovio spun off as part of restructuring efforts in September 2025. The newly-established company will supply the primary hardware platform for Aurora’s autonomous system, as well as a specialised backup computer designed to bring trucks safely to halt if the main driving system experiences a major error.
The collaboration integrates generative and agentic AI capabilities directly into development workflows, addressing bottlenecks that would historically require weeks of manual data searching. Among the touted benefits of this integration is allowing engineers to query millions of recorded driving scenarios using natural language commands.
Aurora marked a US-first when it launched limited driverless freight operations in Texas back in April 2025. Operations currently run in the presence of safety drivers, and at the time of writing some five vehicles are currently in commercial operation. Later in 2025, the company expects to eliminate the need for safety drivers—which were requested by Paccar—by way of its second-generation commercial hardware.
To date the Aurora Driver has completed validation against more than 10,000 requirements in over 4.5 million tests. In a statement to Reuters, the company’s System and Software Head Jeremy McClain noting: “When you validate a Level 4 system, you’re trying to prove it behaves correctly in extremely rare situations that are very hard to find in the real world […] Without AI, finding those edge cases in massive data sets would be very difficult.”
Aumovio frames the AWS partnership as a logical one for the task at hand. The platform’s cloud infrastructure processes vast amounts of sensor information to ensure that the autonomous system can navigate complex scenarios. Targets include reaching over one million miles of durability for forthcoming self-driving hardware.
