Charger Logistics to Buy Up to 500 Aurora-Powered Autonomous Trucks

Charger Logistics intends to purchase up to 500 autonomous trucks running on Aurora's self-driving technology, with deliveries spread across 2027 and 2028, the two companies announced today.

The non-binding memorandum of understanding builds on an existing contract the Ontario-based carrier signed with Aurora in July. Charger has already deployed second-generation driverless trucks under that deal. The new agreement signals the carrier's conviction that the Aurora Driver platform will be critical to expanding its network and strengthening its business.

Charger operates across the U.S. and Mexico, hauling for the food and beverage, pharmaceutical, automotive, and retail sectors. Under the MOU, the carrier would take ownership of 500 Aurora Driver-powered trucks and deploy them on current and new high-volume routes near the border and throughout the country.

How will the trucks be owned and operated?

Upon a final agreement, Charger intends to subscribe to Aurora's Driver as a Service (DaaS) model. That structure lets Charger keep ownership of the physical asset, which the companies say maximizes Total Cost of Ownership savings.

Aurora, in parallel, benefits from what it expects to be a high-margin, capital-efficient, asset-light business. The company doesn't carry the trucks on its balance sheet; it sells the driving capability instead.

DaaS agreements are a critical component of Aurora's scaling roadmap. The self-driving platform provider aims to have 200 driverless trucks on the road by the end of 2026 and 30,000 by 2030, targets it laid out at its analyst and investor day.

What has Charger seen so far?

The carrier has been running autonomous freight along the Laredo corridor, and the early results have shaped its appetite for scale.

"Since launching autonomous operations along the Laredo corridor, we've realized immediate operational benefits that point to a clear path to scaling," said Andy Khera, President of Charger Logistics. "Aurora's plans to open long-haul, high-volume routes position us to scale geographically while we integrate autonomy from our TMS to the road, building a resilient and autonomous ecosystem for our customers."

Khera's reference to TMS integration points to the operational pitch behind the deal: autonomy wired from the transportation management system down to the pavement, not just robots replacing drivers on isolated lanes.

What does this mean for shippers and carriers?

For Charger's shippers in food and beverage, pharma, automotive, and retail, the bet is on capacity expansion without a proportional expansion in driver recruitment — a persistent constraint in cross-border trucking. Border-adjacent, high-volume lanes are exactly where labor scarcity and dwell costs bite hardest.

For the broader trucking market, a 500-unit commitment from a mid-size carrier is one of the larger concrete orders in the autonomous freight space to date. Most deployments so far have run in the dozens of trucks on hub-to-hub corridors like Dallas-Houston and the Laredo route Charger is using.

For forwarders and brokers, the delivery timeline matters more than the headline number. Nothing arrives before 2027. The near-term effect on capacity and pricing is negligible; the 2027-28 window is when owned autonomous fleets could start showing up in contracted cross-border capacity in meaningful volumes.

The deal is still non-binding, so the 500-truck figure is an intent, not an order book entry. Aurora's path to converting MOUs into delivered trucks — and to hitting 200 driverless units by end-2026 — will be the metric to watch as the company pushes toward its 30,000-truck vision for 2030.