Why Autonomous Trucks Are Harder Than Everyone Expected

You might think that driverless 18-wheeler trucks would be "easier" to implement than self-driving passenger cars. After all, if you're going to have an autonomous vehicle, long stretches of highway would be a safer and more accessible use case than crowded city streets—right? 

If so, you aren't alone in that thought. But like others who have made this mistake, you'd unfortunately be wrong. It turns out it's a lot harder than many expected. 

One company leading the charge these days is Aurora Innovation Inc., which has driverless test trucks on the road right now. It recently raised nearly half a billion dollars as it prepares a commercial launch of its technology by the end of the year. Yet getting to that point has hardly been easy for Aurora, despite being founded and staffed by veterans of Google's Waymo, Uber, Tesla and others. 

While Tesla is racking up headlines this week as CEO Elon Musk aims to elaborate on why he's betting the farm on autonomy, it's hardly the only player trying to "solve" self-driving vehicles. And on an appearance of today's Pivot podcast with journalist Kara Swisher and professor and venture capitalist Scott Galloway, Aurora co-founder Chris Urmson elaborated on the challenges facing this space in particular. 

It's worth adding that Urmson and Aurora would know. He co-founded Aurora along with Sterling Anderson, the former director of Tesla Autopilot, and Uber's former autonomy chief Drew Bagnell. And Urmson himself was the Chief Technology Officer of Waymo; he's also got a Ph.D in robotics from Carnegie Mellon University and led the school's DARPA Grand Challenge Teams two decades ago.

So, yes, he's an expert here. And on Pivot, he gets very candid about the challenges facing the autonomous space in general, to say nothing of trucking. If you want to listen to the embed below, Urmson comes in about 40 minutes into it.

"The imagination is caught more viscerally by the robotaxi space, right? It's where I worked for a long time and people can connect with that in a way that they don't really connect with long-haul trucking," he said.

When asked about the roadblocks that exist in the space, he added, "at some point, we realized that making the self-driving cars was hard. And so there were a bunch of companies actually that jumped into the space and like, 'Oh, we'll just go do trucking. That's so much easier because, you know, freeways are straight and there's not much happens there.' And it turns out they were ill-informed."

Urmson admits that when a driverless car is operating in a city—where General Motors' Cruise and even the occasional Waymo robotaxi have seen high-profile mishaps over the past few years—there is "more to interact with." Construction, pedestrians, cyclists, other cars and so on. 

"But when you're moving at 15 miles an hour, you can stop within, you know, 15 feet," Urmson said. "Whereas, if you're driving down the freeway, you can't just stop for one thing and you know, it takes you 150 meters, 200 meters to stop. And so, you know, the kinetic energy involved with a 70,000-pound truck, it's 70 miles an hour is just completely different. And so people underestimated how hard the technological problem would be."

Urmson added that many companies in the automated trucking space—he doesn't name them but they include Embark, TuSimple and Waymo—have either left that field or moved out of the U.S. Some competitors "didn't really understand the strategic investment you'd have to make," he said. For Aurora, that included its LIDAR system, which Urmson said "allows us to see much further than you can see or any of the, we think, the Robotaxi folks can see." 

Urmson brought up one challenge the entire autonomous sector is dealing with: regulations. Right now, the laws around driverless cars, robotaxis, test trucks and so on are a state-by-state patchwork. Technically, he said Aurora can operate in 44 U.S. states, but since this is an interstate commerce issue he'd like to see a proper federal standard for the tech—an ongoing problem for everyone in the space. 

This lack of regulation is also part of why robotaxi services like Waymo and Cruise only operate in certain places, or why Mercedes-Benz's hands-off, eyes-off Level 3 automated system can only be used in California and Nevada under certain conditions. As for Tesla's Full Self-Driving tech, it is the subject of a number of regulatory probes, lawsuits and even a federal criminal investigation. That system depends on cameras and AI, not LIDAR, but Urmson's co-founder Anderson recently discussed the difference he sees between the two approaches. 

"(Tesla) uses a 'train and pray' approach where you fix a problem by throwing more data at the system," Anderson said. "We find this to be problematic in a safety-critical industry where you need confidence and proof you’ve actually fixed it."

Right now, Urmson said, Aurora has trucks running on routes that include Dallas to Houston and Fort Worth to El Paso. (For anyone unfamiliar with the geography of the great state of Texas, we're talking hundreds of miles.) He said they have human minders, "but almost all of the time they're driving themselves."

That's a big deal because, as this podcast points out, everything you see in the room around you right now was probably hauled on a truck at some point. The U.S. trucking industry moved $987 billion worth of gross freight revenues just last year. And while Aurora's approach to automation may sound like bad news for those employed in the trucking space—a demanding but decent-paying path-to-the-middle-class job that doesn't require a college degree—the industry has been facing a driver shortage for years. Automating that sector could be a pathway not just for self-driving car tech, but also for keeping America's insatiable appetite for stuff running. 

"My expectation is that if you are driving a truck today and you want to retire driving a truck, you're gonna be able to do that," Urmson said. "But in the interim, what we're going to see is more automation come in to support the logistic industry and that over time there'll be less and less people that actually do this job."