Has the Autonomous Trucking Revolution Arrived?

The trucking industry is currently in a bind. On the one hand, it has a miserable safety record, with over five thousand trucking-related fatalities annually. As 60 Minutes highlighted to the world, many small carriers are shady, fly-by-night operations that regularly break even the most basic rules of the road. And now that the Supreme Court has decided that freight brokers can be held liable for accidents caused by carriers they book—the biggest of those brokers, C.H. Robinson, recently lost a whopping $604 million suit—it seems inevitable that the trucking industry is going to have to clean up its act. On the other hand, due to a crackdown on “non-domiciled” commercial drivers licenses, i.e., those issued to foreign nationals, and a new emphasis on English language proficiency for drivers, trucking also has a new labor shortage. This is reflected in recent wage increases for drivers but also in high spot rates and tender rejection rates, driven primarily by a loss of carrier capacity rather than heightening demand. With safety concerns becoming more pressing and increasing labor market tightness, the appeal of autonomous driving in the trucking industry is growing. As Waymos enter more cities, it no longer seems like a far off dream: if autonomous vehicles can navigate around San Francisco, how hard can it be to drive them straight along a freeway? The startups leading the new technology, such as the venture capital–backed Aurora, Kodiak, and Waabi, are all confident that their products are ready for commercial deployment and scaling, as well as that the economics of autonomous trucking will soon be in their favor. They are also adamant that autonomous technology will solve the safety issues in the trucking industry. Just how far along is autonomous trucking? While autonomous drivers are indeed moving to commercial deployment, there are still many unanswered questions around their adoption, the answers to which may considerably slow their progress. In any event, autonomous deployment is not happening so quickly that it would spoil what I have previously argued in these pages is a massive organizing opportunity for truck drivers. But the bigger question concerns safety: the autonomous vehicle (AV) companies would like us to believe that safety is a technical problem, and that their systems’ technical capabilities simply outmatch those of their human equivalents. But in narrowing their focus to technical questions, the AV proponents risk missing what truly creates safe outcomes on the road: a regulatory environment supported by social investments. The state of autonomous trucking With Waymo operating in ten US metropolitan areas, why have we seen much slower progress in autonomous trucking than in light-duty vehicles? The first barrier has been regulatory: Waymo piloted its robotaxis and then eventually launched its commercial taxi service in Phoenix because the city and state of Arizona offered a lax regulatory environment, among other reasons. Trucks, by contrast, necessarily move between cities and states, and with competing regulatory authorities between different locales and no national framework for autonomous deployment, getting permission has been a hassle. That is all quickly changing, however: in April, a major roadblock was lifted when the state of California allowed for the testing of autonomous trucks in preparation for eventual commercial deployment. Many states, including Arizona and Texas, have already created friendly environments for autonomous trucking startups, but California is a key domino to fall, as companies can now imagine automated journeys from the Inland Empire to Fort Worth, a key trucking corridor. The Department of Transportation also recently allowed autonomous trucking companies to use cab-mounted warning beacons when their trucks are stopped on a freeway shoulder, in place of the typical warning triangles placed by a driver at a distance behind a trailer. The autonomous tech company IMAMS Technology described the rule about warning triangles as the “one thing standing in [autonomous trucks’] way from being truly driverless.” And California congressman Vince Fong has introduced legislation to override state laws and create a national framework for autonomous truck deployment, which has been incorporated into the Build America 250 Act, the surface transportation bill currently making its way through Congress. A second key barrier has been some trepidation around the consequences of failure: if something goes wrong with a truck on the freeway, the results can be disastrous, given the weight and velocity of the vehicle. This barrier, too, has largely been overcome, thanks most importantly to the development of sensor stacks—for most companies, a “sensor fusion” of radar, LiDar (Light Detection and Ranging, a remote sensing device that measures features in the environment using laser pulses), and camera systems—which have grown by leaps and bounds in sophistication. Now they can also benefit from the development of vision language models (VLMs), which help both with further sensory precision but also with dealing with the persistent problem of “edge cases,” i.e., situations well outside the driving norm. Inference appears currently to be too slow to really be useful in real time, but it’s only a matter of time before these models are brought to bear in the AV space. The goal with all of these developments is Level 4 autonomy (as defined by the Society of Automotive Engineers), in which no human driver is present in situ and the autonomous system is fully responsible for driving tasks most of the time (but will call for remote assistance when needed) and in limited service zones. No one really thinks Level 5 autonomy (full autonomy in all situations with no remote assistance) will happen any time soon, but the industry would really like to avoid settling on Level 3, “conditional” autonomy, where a human driver is there to handle any situations that the autonomous system cannot. Level 3 is less of a technological and safety problem for the companies—indeed, there’s a good argument to be made that in situ assistance rather than remote assistance is safer—than an economic one. AV trucking adoption pencils out if labor is displaced; commercially it’s a nonstarter if human beings remain in the cab (indeed, if there even is a cab). The current leaders in AV long-haul trucking are Aurora and Kodiak, both of which’s CEOs once worked on Google’s self-driving car project. Aurora, which was started by Chris Urmson in 2017, recently began its commercial scaling phase, promising roughly two hundred trucks by the end of the year and signing an agreement with the auto engineering company Roush to “upfit” (i.e., add autonomous systems to already built tractors) about one thousand trucks per year after that. Their trucks have been doing regular runs between Dallas and Houston on I-45 but are now expanding to New Mexico and Arizona, having logged 500,000 driverless miles so far. The “Aurora driver” (their autonomous driving system) is built directly into Volvo’s autonomous trucks during the latter’s own manufacturing process, in an unusual industrial partnership between the two companies. Volvo is projecting $3 billion of annual revenue in just five years from its autonomous segment. Aurora also has a commitment from Hirschbach Motor Lines to add five hundred tractors equipped with the Aurora driver through 2027 and 2028. Urmson confidently stated on Aurora’s most recent quarterly earnings call: “If you’re not using our stuff in the next five years, you’re not going to be competitive in long-haul.” Kodiak is a tad behind Aurora by the numbers: they have deployed thirty-five customer-owned vehicles and logged forty thousand hours of paid driverless operations (more on the particularities of these claims in a moment). To my knowledge, the only customer with deployed vehicles thus far is their “launch partner,” Atlas Energy Solutions, which uses Kodiak-driven trucks to move fracking sand in the Permian Basin. Kodiak also has many connections in the defense industry—for example, they are working with General Dynamics Land Systems “to create autonomous ground vehicles (AGVs) for defense applications.” Kodiak’s CEO, Don Burnette, touts the more rugged industrial and defense applications of their technology as hard testing their vehicles for broader commercial deployment: the company plans for driverless long-haul to launch by the end of the year. I interpret Kodiak’s emphasis on “customer-owned” vehicles to be a slight dig at Aurora. While Aurora claims it will scale with a “Driver-as-a-Service” (DaaS) model, in which trucking companies own and insure the trucks and the Aurora driver is provided as a service through a subscription fee, it thus far has only deployed under a “Transportation-as-a-Service” (TaaS) model, in which Aurora owns the trucks involved itself. While TaaS brings in more revenue, it has a lower margin than DaaS given the costs of running an actual trucking company, which of course lies outside the core competencies of any autonomous vehicle player. Aurora’s CFO David Maday revealed that TaaS revenue is in the “$2 plus” per mile range, while its DaaS target is “$0.85 plus” per mile. The industry average to operate a truck in 2025 was $2.34 per mile, and driver compensation accounted for $1.03 of that cost. The DaaS proposition to trucking companies is thus essentially: instead of paying a human driver $1.03 per mile, pay us $0.85 per mile (17 percent less) for a safer driver with better fuel efficiency and no hours of service limitations—and who will never go on strike.