Here's your Forbes Daily Briefing for Saturday, January 25th.

Today on Forbes, one of the last robot truckers standing finally ready to hit the road.

The self-driving vehicle landscape is littered with the corpses of those who tried and failed.

Last year saw General Motors pull the plug on cruise. Rivals Ford and

Volkswagen scuttled their lavishly funded Argo AI venture in 2022, and Uber offloaded its self-driving

tech unit in 2020 after a fatal accident. Then there are the smaller companies who died before many

had even heard of them. Too Simple, Embark,

Ike, and Starsky Robotics. Alphabet's Waymo, the oldest and best-funded self-driving firm,

is the big exception here, with Robotaxy fleets in Phoenix, San Francisco, and Los Angeles,

and plans to expand into Austin, Atlanta,

and Miami. Forbes estimates its revenue topped $100 million last year and may rise substantially

in 2025. Then there's Aurora Innovation. Founded in 2017 by three autonomous driving experts

from Google, Tesla, and Uber, it's managed

to stay alive and is the only pure publicly traded U.S. autonomous vehicle stock left.

But more than three years after going public, it hasn't yet booked revenue.

And it's been forced to delay the launch of its driverless truck services, twice.

Co-founder and CEO Chris Ermson says that won't happen again, and come spring,

Aurora will get on a similar road to commercial success as its alphabet-backed rival, which he

led when it was incubating inside Google.

Ermson told Forbes, quote, We expected that this was a hard enough problem that there was only

going to be a handful of people to solve it.

And it's kind of played out that way.

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