DALLAS--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Jul 27, 2026--
Aurora Innovation, Inc. (NASDAQ: AUR), the leader in self-driving freight, today announced a new customer agreement to begin driverless hauls with the Aurora Driver. The deal coincides with the arrival of Aurora’s second-generation driverless trucks – a milestone that positions the company to meet the accelerating demand for the Aurora Driver. Value Truck plans to use the Aurora Driver to move freight more efficiently, especially in U.S. border cities like Laredo, Texas where nearshoring is driving unprecedented freight volume.
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"Freight volume on routes like Dallas-Laredo is growing faster than available capacity, and that gap is exactly what the Aurora Driver is built to close," said Zac Andreoni, Vice President of Business Development at Aurora. "Value Truck is exactly the kind of customer we built our second-generation trucks for — a carrier that is growing and needs flexible, round-the-clock coverage on high-growth corridors."
Value Truck Signs On
Value Truck, a full-service and cross-border carrier, specializes in transporting heavy, oversized industrial equipment, retail goods, and perishables. The company will initially deploy the Aurora Driver on two routes: Dallas-Laredo and Fort Worth-Phoenix – freeing up its own drivers to focus on local freight while adding the potential for 24/7 capacity on key long-haul and high-volume routes.
"We’re proud to work alongside Aurora to move autonomous trucking from possibility to everyday freight operations,” said Joe Skoog, Chief Executive Officer of Value Truck. “The Aurora Driver will add flexible capacity on key long-haul corridors while allowing our drivers to focus where their experience matters most. Phoenix to Fort-Worth and Laredo to Dallas are the starting point, not the finish line. Together, we intend to build one of the most advanced transportation networks across North America.”
Autonomous Trucks to Ease Congestion at U.S. Border Hubs
Laredo, Texas, is the busiest land port in the Western Hemisphere and handles approximately 40% of all freight moving between the U.S. and Mexico. As manufacturing facilities move closer to the U.S., “nearshoring” is driving a surge in freight that travels through Laredo, leading to longer pick-up times for traditional drivers at congested U.S. border hubs. The Aurora Driver gives carriers a way to move that freight around the clock on American highways, without the hours-of-service limits that constrain traditional drivers.
Cautionary Statement Regarding Forward-Looking Statements
This press release contains certain forward-looking statements within the meaning of the federal securities laws. All statements contained in this press release that do not relate to matters of historical fact should be considered forward-looking statements, including but not limited to, those statements regarding the prospects of the development, manufacturing, scaling (including, but not limited to, the route expansion strategy, the transition to our DaaS model, fleet size, fleet ownership, and our product’s availability and capabilities) and commercialization, and realization of the anticipated benefits of the Aurora Driver and Aurora’s autonomous driving technology (including expected improvements in efficiency, margins, capacity, and border freight operations), and Aurora’s relationships and anticipated benefits with customers, including risks that anticipated customer orders may not materialize, may be delayed, and/or customer contracts may be subject to cancellation, termination, or reduction in scope. These statements are based on management’s current assumptions and are neither promises nor guarantees, but involve known and unknown risks, uncertainties and other important factors that may cause our actual results, performance or achievements to be materially different from any future results, performance or achievements expressed or implied by the forward-looking statements. For factors that could cause actual results to differ materially from the forward-looking statements in this press release, please see the risks and uncertainties identified under the heading “Risk Factors” section of Aurora Innovation, Inc.’s (“Aurora”) Annual Report on Form 10-K for the year ended December 31, 2025, filed with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (the “SEC”) on February 11, 2026, and other documents filed by Aurora from time to time with the SEC, which are accessible on the SEC website at www.sec.gov. Additional information will also be set forth in Aurora’s Quarterly Report on Form 10-Q for the quarter ended June 30, 2026. All forward-looking statements reflect our beliefs and assumptions only as of the date of this press release. Aurora undertakes no obligation to update forward-looking statements to reflect future events or circumstances, except as required by law.
About Aurora
Aurora (NASDAQ: AUR) is delivering the benefits of self-driving technology safely, quickly, and broadly to make transportation safer, increasingly accessible, and more reliable and efficient than ever before. The Aurora Driver is a self-driving system designed to operate multiple vehicle types, from freight-hauling trucks to ride-hailing passenger vehicles, and underpins Aurora’s driver as a service product for trucking. Aurora is working with industry leaders across the transportation ecosystem, including AUMOVIO, FedEx, Hirschbach, McLane, NVIDIA, PACCAR, Ryder, Schneider, Toyota, Uber, Uber Freight, Volvo Trucks, Volvo Autonomous Solutions, and Werner. To learn more, visit aurora.tech.
About Value Truck
Value Truck is a North American logistics platform giving enterprise shippers a single source of dynamic capacity, uniting a company-owned asset fleet and cross-border terminal network with a rapidly scaling asset-light operation. Headquartered in Phoenix, Arizona, and operating terminals across the U.S. and Mexico, the company moves freight for shippers in manufacturing, building products, chemicals, and defense, and is partnering with Aurora to operate on the frontier of autonomous freight. Value Truck pairs its own proprietary AI and automation software with best-in-class technology to operate an integrated freight network engineered for what's next, delivering enterprise-grade reliability at scale. Value Truck isn't preparing for the autonomous era of freight; it's building it alongside the best partners in the world. To learn more, visit valuetruck.com.
Value Truck to Deploy Aurora’s Second-Generation Driverless Trucks
LONDON (AP) — Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy will meet Monday at a naval base in England with Prime Minister Andy Burnham, a visit the British leader said is intended to signal the country's “unwavering” support for Kyiv.
Zelenskyy's trip is the first by a foreign leader since Burnham took office a week ago. His predecessor, Keir Starmer, was in Kyiv less than two weeks ago in his last overseas trip before leaving office.
Burnham will be the fifth British prime minister to deal with Zelenskyy since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022.
“Russia should be in no doubt of our resolve, and we will not back down until we achieve long lasting and just peace for Ukraine,” said Burnham, who has spent the past nine years as mayor of Greater Manchester and has little foreign policy experience.
The U.K. trip comes a day before Zelenskyy is expected to meet with U.S. President Donald Trump in Washington.
During the visit to Portsmouth on England's south coast, Zelenskyy and Burnham will meet more than 200 Ukrainian military personnel who have spent the past three weeks in Britain. They have been taking part in an exercise aimed at strengthening their fighting capabilities and measures to counter mines in the Black Sea, the U.K. government said.
The U.K. will give Ukraine the intellectual property behind its new “Stone Cloak” electronic warfare system, which is capable of jamming Russian air defenses to stop drones from being detected, Burnham’s office said.
Ukraine has expanded its campaign of frequent drone attacks deep inside Russia that have targeted oil facilities, military factories and, most recently, logistical centers, bringing the war home to millions of Russians and raising pressure on President Vladimir Putin.
The raids have shattered Putin’s narrative of the conflict as something that doesn’t affect the lives of ordinary people in his country. But he has remained undeterred and Russia has ramped up its aerial campaign, regularly bombarding Ukraine with missiles and drones.
Russia again attacked Ukraine overnight with 147 long-range drones, according to the Ukrainian air force, which said it intercepted or jammed 123 of them.
In Zaporizhzhia, one person was killed and two injured in attacks on the city that damaged a high-rise residential building and several private residences overnight, according to regional administration head Ivan Fedorov.
A Russian strike on the town of Balakliia in the Kharkiv region killed one person and wounded eight, according to Vitalii Karabanov, head of the city military administration.
In the Nikopol district of the Dnipropetrovsk region, Russian strikes damaged a kindergarten, residential buildings and infrastructure, injuring a woman and a 6-year-old boy, according to administration head Oleksandr Hanzha.
In the eastern Kharkiv region, a regional council member said Russian forces destroyed every gas station along the highway between Kharkiv and Poltava, a distance of about 150 kilometers (93 miles). Oleksandr Skoryk said the situation is becoming more critical daily, but the region is not facing a fuel or food crisis.
The highway is a key supply route linking Kharkiv, the country’s second-largest city and a regional hub close to the Russian border, with central Ukraine. Russia has intensified strikes on gas stations, power facilities and other infrastructure this year as part of a broader campaign to strain Ukraine’s logistics and energy networks.
Romania’s Ministry of National Defense said a drone briefly entered its airspace before crossing the river border into Ukraine, where explosions were subsequently reported. It said two F-16 fighter jets were deployed to monitor airspace.
The drone’s incursion into Romanian airspace marked the fourth such incident in as many days. The three previous drones were all shot down by the NATO member.
In Moscow, Russia’s Defense Ministry said air defenses downed 276 Ukrainian drones overnight.
Rostov regional Gov. Yuri Slyusar said five people, including a child, were killed when a Ukrainian drone hit an apartment building in Rostov-on-Don. Ukraine’s military General Staff said Ukrainian forces struck an export terminal in Rostov-on-Don, setting it ablaze.
The Ukrainian military said other strikes in the Moscow-held part of the Kherson region targeted a ground relay station used to control drones and a bridge over the Henichesk Strait that Russia uses for military logistics. Russian fuel and supply depots were also hit.
In the city of Belgorod in southwestern Russia near the border with Ukraine, a Ukrainian drone attack injured 12, including two children, according to regional emergency officials.
Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi said Ukraine struck an Iranian vessel in the Caspian Sea, killing a sailor.
In a statement on X on Sunday, Araghchi denounced the attack as a “blatant U.N. Charter violation done at Israel’s behest to drag Europe into its war.” He said he made it clear in calls with the European Union foreign policy chief Kaja Kallas and Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov that the attack “can't go unanswered.”
Zelenskyy said Ukrainian long-range strikes in the Caspian Sea over the weekend achieved “very good results,” adding that the targets included “vessels involved in transporting military cargo linked to Iran, as well as a warship.”
Ukrainian Foreign Minister Andrii Sybiha rejected Iran’s threats of retaliation as unjustified and groundless, saying Tehran's weapons supplies to Russia have made it a direct accomplice to Moscow's aggression. “Iran has no standing to pretend to be a victim," he posted on X, and called its references to the U.N. Charter “absurd.”
Sybiha said Iran’s statements were an attempt to divert attention from Russia’s attacks on civilian shipping in the Black Sea, which would be a focus of an emergency U.N. Security Council meeting Monday.
Hanna Arhirova and Illia Novikov in Kyiv, Ukraine, and Stephen McGrath in Bucharest, Romania, contributed.
In this photo taken Saturday, July 25, 2026 Ukrainian soldiers of Khartia brigade prepare a ground drone for a mission in Kharkiv region, Ukraine. (AP Photo/Andrii Marienko)
In this photo provided by the Ukrainian Emergency Service, firefighters put out a fire in a supermarket following a Russian drone attack in Chernihiv, Ukraine, Sunday, July 26, 2026. (Ukrainian Emergency Service via AP)
This photo provided by the Ukrainian Emergency Service shows a damaged supermarket after Russian drone strikes in Chernihiv, Ukraine, Sunday, July 26, 2026. (Ukrainian Emergency Service via AP)
FILE - Britain's Prime Minister Andy Burnham speaks to staff and media at 10 Downing Street in London, Monday, July 20, 2026. (AP Photo/Kirsty Wigglesworth, File)
FILE - Ukraine's President Volodymyr Zelenskyy looks od during his meeting with U.S. President Donald Trump on the sidelines of the NATO summit in Ankara, Turkey, on July 8, 2026. (AP Photo/Alex Brandon, File)
