Last year was a tough one for autonomous vehicles. Despite early optimism, 2023 ended poorly for the industry, after Cruise’s sudden and dramatic fall from grace. That won’t stop startups working on autonomous transport trucks from forging ahead in 2024, though.
Aurora Innovations, Kodiak Robotics, and Gatik AI all expect to start testing autonomous trucks without human safety operators onboard in the coming year. That means that they will start depending entirely on their sensor arrays and their software.
“At the end of the year, we anticipate getting to the point where we begin operating those trucks without drivers on board,” Chris Urmson, co-founder and CEO of Aurora Innovations, told Bloomberg. However, all three companies say they are prepared to deploy their technology this year, despite the high stakes involved in that.
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And that has some critics concerned. Opponents, like the Advocates for Highway and Auto Safety and the International Brotherhood of Teamsters, point to a lack of regulations, a lack of transparency, and to the enormous amounts of damage that semi trucks can wreak if something goes wrong, as reasons for caution.
However, these startups say that because trucks operate on fixed routes, and mostly on highways, developing autonomous software for them is actually easier than developing it for robotaxis, like Cruise’s vehicles, which have to deal with cross traffic, pedestrians, cyclists, and more.
These companies also point to the safety record of human operators. In 2021, 5,700 trucks were involved in fatal accidents, according to the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration. Driverless trucks have not yet been at-fault for any accidents. However, two-thirds of truck accidents occur when a person, animal, vehicle, or other object veers into the truck’s lane, so autonomous technology may not eliminate fatal accidents entirely, even if they manage to eliminate driver error.
For the companies that will eventually buy these autonomous vehicles, the appeal will likely be financial, not be the improved safety. In addition to not having to pay a human driver, autonomous trucks don’t have limits on how long they can drive, speeding up delivery times.
In order to get there, some of the startups plan to start small testing around their truck terminals before expanding their operating area from there. However, Gatik AI, which operates smaller box trucks, has already run some tests without a driver. It plans to deploy driverless trucks around Dallas “at scale” in 2024, suggesting that autonomous trucks could be coming to a road near you quite soon.
