Take a drive in Texas on Interstate 45 between Houston and Dallas or I-20 between Fort Worth and El Paso, and you will see dozens and dozens of tractor trailers. They are two of the busiest highways in the country for trucks — and two routes where Aurora Innovation is operating completely autonomous semis.

“It’s using lasers, radar, and cameras to look all around it and see the other cars, see the other trucks on the road, and figure out how to drive safely,” said Chris Urmson, Aurora founder and CEO. He talked with CNBC’s Phil LeBeau for more than three hours as they rode in the cab of an autonomous Aurora truck.

With 20 driverless trucks currently on the road and plans to grow the autonomous fleet to 200 trucks by the end of this year, Aurora is targeting major growth over the next several years. The company’s selling point is that it says an autonomous truck can operate more efficiently and at a lower cost than a semi with a driver behind the wheel.

“We can help them [truck operators] save on fuel economy,” Urmson said. “We can move goods more quickly and then we can fill the need when they can’t hire amazing drivers for their teams.” 

Ravi Shanker, transportation analyst with Morgan Stanley, estimates that “an autonomous fleet should be nearly 7.5X as profitable as a human-driven fleet today.” 

Bank of America, meanwhile, estimates “Aurora services will cost ~$0.85 per mile versus approximately $1.30 per mile for human driver wages and benefits, before considering indirect labour costs.”

With its next generation of driverless trucks to hit the road, Aurora believes its “driver as a service” business model, where customers pay by the mile driven, will be attractive to shipping and freight customers looking to lower costs. 

A shortage of truck drivers in the U.S. has freight firms looking for reliable service at a lower cost. Autonomous trucks have the potential to roll for up to 20 hours a day, while a truck driver’s hours are limited by federal laws that require drivers to take breaks.

Sean Wu, CEO of the freight firm uShip, said he understands the appeal of a driverless truck when it comes to lowering costs, but he questions how many shipping firms will want to ditch their drivers. 

“The drivers do more than just move the rig. There is judgement. There is customer service. There is protection,” Wu told CNBC. “There is just a lot more to think about than ‘Hey they are moving a truck from point A to point B.’”

The Department of Transportation estimates there are approximately 3.5 million Class 8 semitrucks on the road in the U.S. Only a fraction are autonomous, but the market is growing, and Wall Street sees huge potential. Kodiak AI, Gatik and Tesla are also developing autonomous vehicles. 

Aurora CEO Urmson said he knows there are plenty of skeptics, including those who will continue to question the safety of a driverless truck rolling down the highway at 65 or 70 mph.

“We’ve got millions of miles of experience,” he said. “We put this through 15 million tests before we put it out on the road.”

As we completed our freight run in Palmer, Texas, what stood out was the fact the ride was uneventful with no disruptions. The truck pulled off the highway once for less than a minute to reset the hazard lights which had come on for some unknown reason. Otherwise, over the course of three hours on I-45, we saw more than a few double takes from truck drivers passing by who looked twice when they saw nobody behind the wheel.

For Urmson, it is another 200 miles where Aurora’s autonomous driving technology has delivered a shipment. Since it began testing its AV technology on public roads in 2022, Aurora has logged more than 440,000 miles. Most of those included a human safety operator behind the wheel in case the technology failed.  

After losing more than $800 million in 2025, Aurora is targeting positive free cash flow by 2028, driven by a substantial increase in the number autonomous trucks on the road.

“We’ve been able to put out timelines and we’ve basically hit those timelines,” he said.

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HOBE SOUND, Fla. — Jennifer Eckhart, a former Fox Business associate producer who later hosted a podcast on recovery and sued a onetime Fox News anchor, was found dead at her home here on Sept. 19. She was 36.

The Martin County Sheriff’s Office said her mother found her and called authorities. She was pronounced dead at 11:57 a.m. Spokesperson Christine Christofek said Monday, “This death has been ruled a suicide.”

Sheriff John Budensiek said at a Sept. 21 briefing that Eckhart had been held six times in 18 months under Florida’s Baker Act, which allows a 72-hour psychiatric evaluation. “She spent a seven-week period in a mental health facility trying to get help for all her suicidal ideology,” he said, “and had been out of that facility for one week.” He said investigators found she had stopped her medication and written in a personal ledger that she needed to kill herself.

The incident report obtained by USA Today described the scene. The office’s criminal investigations unit and crime-scene staff responded. The medical examiner’s office confirmed the death to Entertainment Weekly.

Eckhart joined Fox Business in 2013 after work as an ESPN Radio correspondent and as an entertainment anchor at a Gainesville PBS station. She also worked at Fox News and Fox Nation. She left in 2020.

That year she sued Ed Henry, then an “America’s Newsroom” co-anchor, and Fox News. She alleged rape and other sexual misconduct. Henry denied the claims and said any relationship was consensual. Fox fired him in July 2020 after an outside inquiry into a sexual-misconduct complaint. A federal judge dismissed Fox from Eckhart’s suit in March 2025. Henry settled in June 2025, days before trial. He later joined Newsmax.

After the settlement she said: “This has been an exhaustive, re-traumatizing, five-year legal battle with incredible challenges that at times I almost felt was unable to bear.”

She launched “Reinvented with Jen Eckhart,” a podcast of interviews with people who had rebuilt after setbacks. The latest episode posted in March featured former Palm Beach County State Attorney Dave Aronberg. She also spoke about nonprofit work for trauma survivors.

In July 2025 she was arrested in Palm Beach County on a battery charge after an alleged fight with a boyfriend; prosecutors dropped the case for insufficient evidence. In February a Florida couple and their lash salon filed a $1 million defamation suit accusing her of linking them to sex trafficking. That case’s status after her death was unclear.

If you or someone you know is in crisis, help is available in the United States by calling or texting 988.

Eckhart was 36. She is survived by her mother, Cynthia Eckhart. A public funeral notice had not been issued in Monday’s reports. The sheriff’s ruling closed the death investigation on paper. It did not close the record of a producer who left a network, sued an anchor, settled, and tried to build a second act on a podcast about starting over.

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EXCLUSIVE: Whether heading into Chicago or leaving it behind on the Stevenson Expressway, commuters are driving past a new billboard campaign from Florida’s top business lobby.

Expanding its multimillion-dollar recruitment campaign into the Midwest, the Florida Chamber of Commerce is launching its next “Free Enterprise” billboard campaign targeting Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker as the Chamber says data shows billions of dollars in income moving from Illinois to Florida.

“The billboards will look very much like the billboard we did in New York, but we’ll have two of them in Chicago, and we’ll be naming Governor Pritzker the runner-up ‘Florida Economic Developer of the Year,’” Florida Chamber President and CEO Mark Wilson exclusively told Fox News Digital.

“This isn’t personal, right? This is about policy. And the person responsible for all of Illinois’s policies is the governor there, just like our governor in Florida has top responsibility for what we do here,” he added. “When we look at how unsafe Chicago is, when we look at the extraordinarily high taxes that we have in Chicago — I’m from there, by the way, and so I have firsthand knowledge on what’s happening in Illinois and what’s happening in Chicago… And all of Illinois is losing people, more businesses are leaving Illinois than are moving to Illinois, and Illinois is losing billions of taxable income. And so the whole state is in a death spiral.”

FLORIDA CHAMBER CEO: COMPANIES EYE SUNSHINE STATE ‘FROM ALL OVER THE COUNTRY’ AFTER VIRAL MAMDANI BILLBOARD

An image of Pritzker shrugging can be seen on billboards facing traffic in both directions along I-55, with the ads naming him runner-up and thanking him for jobs moving to Florida. Their launch comes just over one month after the Chamber named New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani Florida’s “Economic Developer of the Year” as part of a Times Square campaign. The Chamber says the campaigns are intended to argue that progressive tax and economic policies encourage wealth, businesses and families to move to Florida.

Chicago is the next stop for the Florida Chamber’s “Free Enterprise” campaign, where they’re calling out Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker. (Getty Images)

“Everything we do is scorecard driven, and we follow the data,” Wilson said when asked why Chicago was the next stop on the campaign. “New York earned the number one spot, and if you look at the data, Illinois earns the number two spot… Florida’s grown by about 1.9 million residents and Illinois’s lost [75,000] or 100,000 residents over the same period of time… When we look at taxable income that’s moved from Illinois to Florida, it’s over $2 billion that has left Illinois and relocated to Florida.”

Wilson also pointed to high-profile corporate exits from Chicago — most notably billionaire Ken Griffin moving hedge fund giant Citadel to Miami — as evidence for his argument that crime and tax burdens can drive employers out of the state.

“When bullet holes emerged in the Citadel building in Chicago, that was sort of one of the straws, right? You can’t decriminalize things and then tell everybody you have a safer community… people don’t buy that, and it’s not true,” the CEO noted.

“They’re raising taxes on the very people that are investing in manufacturing, they’re investing in the community. And in fact, people like Ken Griffin are investing hundreds of millions of dollars and philanthropy into public education into making our communities safer,” he continued. “This is about: bad policy in Illinois is moving Illinois in the wrong direction. It’s made Illinois less safe, it’s made it less competitive, and it’s made it a more expensive place to be.”

The campaign isn’t just targeting hedge funds and billionaires — Wilson said the Chamber is directly courting Illinois’ advanced manufacturing, aviation and tech startup sectors.

“Advanced manufacturing, for example, is one of our top priorities in Florida. We’re one of the only states with a chief manufacturing officer,” Wilson explained. “Florida is currently the No. 1 state in the country for new business startups. So as people are coming up with good ideas in Illinois only to have their government policies quash them, we want them to know that they’re more than welcome here in the Sunshine State.”

According to Wilson, the initial Times Square campaign pushed the Chamber’s overall earned-media valuation to more than $100 million. While he declined to disclose how much the Chamber is spending on the billboards, he said, “it takes millions of dollars a year to do what the Florida Chamber of Commerce does.”

“In Illinois, what we’re hoping is that the governor’s office reflects on the data,” Wilson said. “Illinois has half as many people as Florida, but their budget and their debt is significantly larger than Florida… And what we hope to hear is that Illinois wants to take us up on our offer to join forces and introduce free enterprise into every aspect of Illinois. The people of Illinois deserve that. The businesses of Illinois deserve that.”

Gov. Pritzker did not immediately respond to Fox News Digital’s request for comment.

Looking ahead, Wilson acknowledged that Florida’s rapid economic boom brings a heavy responsibility for state and business leaders to avoid the very pitfalls currently plaguing northern hubs.

“The biggest risk to the Florida model is that we allow to happen in Florida, what leaders in Illinois, New York and California allowed to happen there,” Wilson warned. “If you go back a few decades, California was a national leader. Everybody wanted to be like California… and they let it go.”

Wilson said Florida’s growth brings a responsibility for state and business leaders to avoid problems he sees in states including Illinois, New York and California.

“I often hear a refrain of, ‘Hey, at least we’re not Illinois or California or New York.’ And the challenge is we need to compare ourselves to Florida’s potential, right? Florida versus Florida.”

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Though the Chicago billboards will remain active along I-55 for just one week, Wilson said the Free Enterprise Florida campaign will continue, with additional states potentially targeted.

“Our goal in all of this is to give a wake-up call to the residents of these states,” Wilson said. “We want America to win. And if you want to look at the future of what America can look like, you look no further than what Florida has done.”

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