Trucks Move Past Cars on the Road to Autonomyhttps://www.wired.com/story/trucks-move-past-cars-road-autonomy/ampIn 2016, three veterans of the still young autonomous vehicle industry formed Aurora, a startup focused on developing self-driving cars. Partnerships followed with major automakers, including Hyundai and Volkswagen. CEO Chris Urmson said at the time that the link-ups would help the company bring “mobility as a service” to urban areas—Uber-like rides without a human behind the wheel.
But by late 2019, Aurora’s emphasis had shifted. It said self-driving trucks, not cars, would be quicker to hit public roads en masse. Its executives, who had steadfastly refused to provide a timeline for their self-driving-car software, now say trucks equipped with its “Aurora Driver” will hit the roads in 2023 or 2024, with ride-hail vehicles following a year or two later. This month, the company announced it would go public via a reverse merger, raising $2 billion in the process. “We have a team that really understands how hard this problem is,” says Urmson.
The move points to a growing consensus in the industry: If self-driving vehicles are going to happen, trucks will likely arrive before cars.
For evidence, follow the money. Investors have poured $11 billion into autonomous truck startups in the past two and a half years, more than $5 billion of that in the first five months of this year alone, according to the data and research company PitchBook. Aurora last week announced plans to go public, joining a convoy of other autonomous truck startups: Embark Trucks in June and the companies Plus andTuSimple in the spring. Competitors Waymo—a Google sister company—and Locomotion are reportedly eyeing similar moves.
Traditional truck makers and carriers are signing deals with tech companies, signaling optimism in the self-driving future. And the pandemic showed just how vital trucking and logistics are to the economy. ... “This is a snowball effect, and building steadily,” says Don Burnette, cofounder and CEO of Kodiak Robotics, another self-driving truck startup, which recently announced investments from BMW i Ventures and tire maker Bridgestone.
Another reason autonomous trucks may arrive before cars: For now, they’re only tackling the easy parts of self-driving, and they're skipping some of the hardest. The makers of self-driving trucks are focusing on highways, which are generally wide and smooth, with steady traffic flow. They anticipate staging drivers at exits, to handle the more challenging local streets. But that’s precisely where robotaxis will be most in demand. They’ll have to contend with less predictable characters, like people on foot, bike, and scooter. Building software to predict the movements of that group is a harder job.
The American Trucking Association says shippers paid $791 billion to move goods by truck in 2019; by contrast, Aurora estimates the annual market for ride-hail vehicles at $35 billion. Tech developers reason that if they lower the cost of shipping, they can keep a cut of the savings. “There's clearly a need for robotaxis in dense cities, but outside dense cities, where everyone has their own car, you need to create demand,” says Asad Hussain, who analyzes mobility companies at PitchBook.
The makers of self-driving trucks say their technology will save shippers money. Embark says its self-driving technology, which it hopes to sell to fleet operators as a subscription, will save 80 cents per mile, cutting costs compared to human-driven trucks in half. Robots, after all, don’t need to be paid and don’t need rest breaks. They won’t quit, sparing carriers labor shortages. And robots don’t have a union. Human drivers might continue to handle short-haul trucking jobs, the companies say, a more localized job that will allow them to spend more time at home rather than on the road.
And yet, there’s still not a true driverless truck—and may never be. Self-driving trucks present a tantalizing safety opportunity—truck driving is one of the most deadly jobs in the US, according to the Labor Department—but an 80,000-pound missile moving at 70 mph can cause a lot of damage. Because self-driving trucks are so heavy and go faster than cars on city streets, they need to be able to see farther down the road—no small technical feat. So far, companies have run limited demonstrations and pilots of their technology, but all have had safety drivers in the cab.
