What’s Behind Trucking’s Rush to Automation?
As driverless trucks hit the roads in Texas, the interests of truckers—and the public—seem to be taking the back seat.
In the world of trucking, a quiet industrial revolution is under way. This revolution, though hyped on the margins over the years, is still in its infancy. It is mostly taking its first steps in the southwest of the country, especially in Texas.
Earlier this month, Aurora Innovation, a leader in the development of autonomous truck systems, which is to say “driverless” big rigs, announced “plans to allow its self-driving trucks to operate without a driver in inclement weather after launching commercial trips this year in Texas.”
If that sounds somewhat alarming, that’s because it is—Aurora and the small handful of other companies racing to replace America’s truck drivers have been required to have a human “safety driver” on board those rigs during testing on public roads. Aurora has had their systems deployed for quite some time now, especially on two corridors in Texas: along Interstate 45 between Houston and Dallas, and between Fort Worth and El Paso along Interstates 20 and 10. In the same neighborhood of West Texas, Kodiak Robotics has already unleashed their driverless system on the much less traveled oilfield access roads in the deserts above the Permian Basin, where their suite of technology has been paired with Peterbilt tractor units hauling frac sand to drilling sites.
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It’s no surprise that testing of these trucks has taken place in the Sunbelt, where weather is less of a consideration for the Lidar systems meant to replace the eyeballs of humans behind the wheel. The inclement weather testing is obviously meant for the eventual deployment of these trucks in other areas of the country where sunny weather is displaced by snow or rain for half of the year. Texas also has a friendly regulatory regime, while hurdles in other states remain ambiguous.
What is driving this race to take human drivers out of trucks? Depends on whom the executives at companies like Aurora are talking to—they have a track record of saying different things to different groups, which roughly break down to government officials and policymakers, the general public, including the drivers they seek to replace, and, finally, their investors.
The difference in rhetoric and messaging is possible because it is illegal to lie only to one of those groups, the investors. Any funny business in messaging to investors will result in swift action from the Securities and Exchange Commission. (If only the government protected the rest of us with such speed and unyielding force of law.)
Investors in autonomous truck technology systems are told that the sum total of truckers wages in America is in the ballpark of $200 billion a year, which is quite the bag to grab. The competition to get first-mover advantage in this market is easily explained by the profits which could be harvested from replacing truckers with cold, hard code. In that competition, however, we may see why Aurora made this announcement about inclement weather testing when they haven’t even pulled safety drivers out yet during testing on the mostly sunny interstates of Texas.
In April of 2023, Aurora was making bold claims about removing safety drivers and going full autonomous by the end of 2024. Later in 2023, they announced the launch of testing on Interstate 45, not long after also announcing that they expected to raise over $800 million in additional investment capital. Despite all the announcements and testing, Aurora had yet to meet their projected 2024 deadline for going “driver out,” the phrase used in the industry for full autonomous operation.
Others are also in the market, nipping at the heels of both Kodiak and Aurora. Plus AI, which has partnerships with companies around the world and is likewise testing its systems everywhere, inked a contract with Amazon in 2021 for 1000 Plus AI–equipped trucks. In a recent interview given to the ominously named Bloomberg Surveillance podcast, Plus AI CEO David Liu told the hosts about Amazon’s position on autonomous truck technology: “Amazon is one of our customers and partners we have been working with… they are visionary in utilizing technology to help make the roads safer… In the future we hope to provide them with more capacity with automated trucks.”
Given Amazon’s current model of relying on bottom-feeder carriers who employ semi- or barely literate and untrained migrants from other countries (who have proven to be a menace on the roads in a number of incidents where innocent motorists have been killed), we ought be somewhat skeptical of the company’s stated concerns about safety. Are these systems being sold as a solution to a problem created by the very trucking industry they will be selling these trucks to? Megacarriers have long been the recipients of corporate welfare in order to avoid solving their driver retention problem, which results in a constant stream of newer, less experienced drivers on the roads, who are, no surprise, involved in more collisions and other incidents. Are these robotic systems simply another method by which the trucking industry can get away with not paying market rates for more experienced, safer, human drivers?
In the race between these automated systems companies to get their trucks to market, we must also ask: Is Aurora rushing the deployment of their trucks to keep investors happy? Are these trucks really as safe as they say they are? Or is the desire to be the iPhone of automated trucks going to exact a toll in lives and jobs? There has been a dearth of discussion about what happens when automated trucks begin to replace human truckers at scale; strangely enough, the only big names to broach the subject have been on opposite ends of America’s political spectrum.
Andrew Yang expressed concern for truckers on Joe Rogan’s podcast during his bid for the Democratic Party Presidential nomination in 2019, as part of a larger discussion about what he called the “Fourth Industrial Revolution.” And in an interview with Ben Shapiro, Tucker Carlson touched on the broader political and social ramifications of rendering America’s truckers unemployed: “If I were president… we’re not letting driverless trucks on the road, period…. Driving for a living is the single most common job for high school–educated men…. I don’t want to put ten million men out of work because you’re going to kill ten million families…. The social cost of eliminating those jobs in a five year or 10 year span is not sustainable.”
The trucking industry is already in a crisis mode. The driver market, flooded by a Biden-era program, is running into the turbulence from Prudent Donald Trump’s tariffs. Perhaps we ought to ask whether America’s truck drivers are being kicked while they are down, and whether the reasons given to seek their elimination are legitimate.
