Driverless Semi-Trucks Are Here & Coming to a Highway Near You

19:49Kara Swisher:Right, because it matters a great deal more with trucks. So, Jonathan, you're bullish on autonomous vehicles and the ability to use traffic deaths, speaking of knowing when to stop. Talk about traffic deaths and injuries, because that, to me, is the greatest, one of the greatest inputs. And what are some of the potential externalities, for example, an increased capacity to haul freight could lead to more emissions, which would lead to negative health? You know, the more we can do it, the more they will, essentially. Thanks. This is a terrific question. You know, motor vehicle crashes are a public health crisis.

20:19I mean, we in this country alone last year.

20:21Kara Swisher:Which we've accepted, like gun shootings. Exactly. Exactly. And I think we've accepted it for really terrible reasons, for the cost of doing business, for the cost of getting places. We've accepted last year, NHTSA, the USDOT's safety agency, estimates 39 ,345 lives were lost in 2024. That's about 100 lives a day are lost from crashes. The potential for the autonomous vehicles and autonomy in general is that they can learn from their mistakes, which regular drivers, human drivers, us generally don't. Say, for example, I didn't sleep well last night, or I was taking some medication that meant that I was very, very drowsy, or I was impaired or whatever it may be.

21:04Today, we allow anyone to drive, basically, and many people who may not be fit to drive. So I think the role of autonomy in getting to safety is critical. The challenges or the externalities that you point out is that autonomy will solve some safety issues, but then it will introduce new ones potentially. So right now, when I'm driving a vehicle, there's no privacy or cybersecurity threat. But autonomous vehicles as a system are vulnerable.

21:36Kara Swisher:Well, there are some because they can program cars that people are driving in. And there's so much stuff on the cars now. There is today, right? There is. Yes. And the mix of the vehicle fleet such now is that that is penetrating the vehicle. And there is kind of cyber and privacy concerns today. But if you look at the traditional fleet, I think it's a mix of kind of old school vehicles, kind of more instrumented or tech heavy vehicles and then fully autonomous vehicles. And so I think as those technologies penetrate the fleet, we introduce a new set of challenges. They're not insurmountable. We just have to be very clear right about what they are and how to navigate them.

22:13And then in terms of once they can use them, they'll use them a lot more, which means emissions will presumably go, unless they're electric, right, or that kind of thing.

22:22Kara Swisher:If it's going hand-in-hand, EVs, and although we're seeing a decline in that today, Ford just took a massive right down. You're raising a terrific question about the mobility system in general. Like how will it play out in terms of convenience and access, public transit, what's going to happen to buses and trains, investment and so on. Those are questions that we still need to figure out. I think the economic model of the autonomous vehicles themselves is also something that we're only at the very beginning of figuring out. And so understanding how this is going to scale to operate at society level is going to take some time.

22:55Kara Swisher:We'll be back in a minute.

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25:00going to be fun. We rarely agree. But we almost never disagree. And we're always learning. That's true. You can subscribe to the Curiosity Shop on YouTube or follow in your favorite podcast app to automatically receive new episodes every Thursday.

25:15Kara Swisher:Chris, a lot of human drivers are nervous around semi-trucks for good reason, right? But I'm nervous around every semi-truck in existence, actually. If the car gets hit by an 18-mile highway, passengers don't do well, as you noted. And even though autonomous trucks are much safer than human drivers. There's no perfect system. And often it's a human's fault, typically, right? I know that. I've seen the statistics. But they have, as we just talked, cyber attacks. So what are the failures that you're looking for now? And maybe explain what conditions are you particularly looking at right now as you move to hundreds of thousands of driving hours?

25:54So part of how we've approached this is to build something we call a safety case. because there's no silver bullet. I can't say do A and you're done. Our safety case is really this, you know, kind of a holistic view at both the company and the technology to make sure that the thing that we put on the road is safe. So in our case, it's got five pillars. The first is that it needs to be performant. So when it's driving, that it behaves the way it's supposed to, it responds appropriately. And we put the thing through something like four and a half million tests to have conviction that, yep, This is going to behave as it should on the road.

26:29The second is that it has to be fail safe, that it's not okay for us to say, oh, that broke. That's why this accident happened. We need to be able to identify what might break. We do all these kind of systems engineering things like FMEAs and DFMEAs and hazard analyses that allow us to get convinced that, okay, we've thought about the way this could break systematically. And we've used that to design the system so that should that computer fail or this tire blow out or that sensor fall off the truck, that the vehicle is going to find a way to respond safely to that and not create undue risk on the roadway.

27:05The next is we need to be continuously improving, right? As you point out, we're human and fallible. And so we need to be able to have processes at our company where we learn from what we see in the field, where we learn from our new experiences. And we feed that back in to refine the requirements, refine the system, and make it incrementally safer over time. We need to be resilient, which means that we need to foresee how people are going to misuse the technology. And importantly, we need to be robust to cyber security attack or cyber attacks, right?

27:35Kara Swisher:Which are open. That's one of your biggest challenges. Well, it is. I actually agree with you that today's vehicles have enough footprint that you can do real damage with a cyber attack if you could do it in a broad-based way. It's a lot easier to do damage to a vehicle by going up and physically touching it. And so I'm not particularly worried about any individual vehicle because it's just cheaper, easier to go and cut a brake line or stab the tires or do whatever. And so we do have, you know, like a 50-person cybersecurity team. But you're in the southwest, very straight roads, highways, which are standardized around the country, which is good for you.

28:17Kara Swisher:So you have something that's pretty – you know what a highway looks like. Wherever you drive, a highway is a highway or something. I think that's one part of it. And they're flat and warm, correct? They're not always warm. It's pretty cold in Texas right now. Okay, but it's not heavy snow. It's not heavy snow. But that's not really – so the shape of the road is not really the thing you worry about. That's like – we solved that in computer science and robotics decades ago. It's really the interaction with other actors in the road. And this is one of the places where I think people have had this misconception about, you know, city driving hard, freeway driving easy.

28:51And the truth of the matter is you're right. Most of the time driving down the freeway because it's kind of straight and it's limited, you know, it's pretty easy. The problem is we don't care about the most of the time. That's not the limiter. If most of the time we could have launched self-driving cars 20 years ago, what we really care about is those events. And what happens is all the crazy stuff you see in the city, you see on the freeway, but you're moving at 70 miles an hour with a hell of a lot more kinetic energy. And so the outcomes are worse. And so we have to be really careful. We have to push the perception horizon out.

29:22You know, we see – we literally see people running across the freeway, five lanes of freeway in Dallas or in Houston, you know, 60-mile-an-hour traffic, person playing Frogger going across the road. We saw, you know, a police chase going the wrong way down the road, right? And so, we need to think about those. We need to design the system to be robust to them even in those situations.

29:44Kara Swisher:People are crazy. Yes, I'm aware. Disappointingly so. It is. So, Jonathan, but people have to decide when safe is enough, right? And I'm going to agree with Elon Musk here for a second. But one of the things he said, when one bad thing happens to one of his cars, it gets tons of attention. He was whining again about it. But he's right. Like, people get in accidents all day long or, you know, there's all this damage by gas guzzling vehicles. But we've sort of gotten used to that. What has to change? Is it younger people? What are the main factors? Is it just older people have to just die? and then younger people are comfortable in them?

30:22So I think there's, well, hopefully none of those bad things is going to happen. But I think there's a paradox that you've just pointed out, that we hold these vehicles to a higher standard than we do to ourselves. And I think the truth is that it feels scary to put your trust in something that you don't understand or don't know how to relate to. I think there's also a challenge that we all face, which is something we haven't resolved about the transportation system in general, which is that, you know, we've never answered this question before. Like, no one ever sat back and asked how safe is safe enough for any of the vehicles that we have, for any of the systems that we have.

31:05So I think autonomous vehicles are forcing us to kind of ask questions that have always been there. These are deep questions. And I think part of this is also bumps up against human values. I think what we're really feeling the friction on is like, I don't want to be killed by a machine. Well, guess what? You don't really want to be killed by anyone, but today it can happen. And so I think what we need to center is what do we want out of our transportation system? We want a safe system for everyone, for all road users. And autonomous vehicles are kind of adding a lot of momentum to that conversation because they're forcing us to kind of come to grips with things that we really haven't resolved for 100 years.

31:44Kara Swisher:For a long time, besides getting seatbelts and airbags. There hasn't been a lot of that. So let's move to jobs. As we said, we talked a little bit, but you basically had trucking jobs aren't good, and Aurora will create better jobs, right? But you haven't been able to persuade the Teamsters Union, which represents truck drivers or the Owner-Operator Independent Drivers Association. They fought you in court and in state houses and promises new jobs. You've got to give them the jobs, right, presumably. So talk about why they're pushing, continue to push back on you. You have to ask them why they continue to push back on us, right?

32:18That's their perspective. I'm asking you. You know, from our perspective, right, and everyone can have their own perspective. It's not a surprise that they're doing this. No, it's not, right? They have an entrenched interest that they're defending, right?

32:34Kara Swisher:Have they been a real detriment to you? Obviously, unions are losing power across the country, but. What I would say is that, you know, we are a democracy. We have elected policymakers, and they're forcing a conversation, right? And I may not agree with their viewpoint. I have a viewpoint, and we're having the conversation. And to date, consistently, the conversation is netted out on the side of progress, right? That they have challenged in many states and pushed for requiring a driver in a driverless truck, and they've lost every time to date, right? And I think that is because there's a compelling argument around road safety.

33:15There's a compelling argument around economic growth. There's a compelling argument around sustainability. And importantly, as you kind of alluded to, this is probably the biggest change in transportation infrastructure in a century. The internal combustion engine, right, that built the 20th century American success. Right. That allowed us to have interstate commerce and grew that. That basically built America. ultimately enabled us to win World War II, right? It was kind of the platform that lifted the American economy. This will be the next platform for transportation. And we cannot afford to cede that to our adversaries.

33:57And, you know, this is the other winning argument, right? China is pursuing automated vehicle technology aggressively. Indeed.

34:02Kara Swisher:Although China is always like, China, like whatever they want to make an argument. But there's a reality to it. There is some reality, yes. In that, you know, I think it was a legitimate concern we would have about having the American internet run through Chinese hardware. And if we were concerned about the bits, we should be equally concerned about the atoms, right, that will move on these trucks. And then so we've got regulation of the U.S., but this competition is going to play out globally. And I believe – I assume you have aspirations of global. We would love to, right? We would ultimately like to be driving equipment around the world.

34:38And I think that having a U.S. underpinned transportation economy globally is much better for the world and better for the U.S. than having a Chinese underpinned economy.

34:48Kara Swisher:There's certainly a lesson in BYD, which is taking over the whole world. Well, we're not. And why? Because we collectively did not get behind electric vehicles in the same way that the Chinese government did. The Chinese did. Yeah. We'll be back in a minute.

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36:40Kara Swisher:So, Jonathan, we have seen this pattern before in transportation, these changes, the automation improves safety, but also eliminated job categories. In aviation, there used to be a pilot, a co-pilot, a commercial, in commercial cockpits. There used to be a radio operator, a navigator, a flight engineer. But planes are safer than ever, right? for the most part, except in disasters. But from a public health and policy perspective, what happened with that transition? Because it's still a vibrant industry for some of it. It's just not as many people. They don't need as many people. And someday, you know, they're working on autonomous planes right now, obviously.

37:14Yeah, I mean, I think a lot of planes could presumably just kind of fly themselves. You know, you have the pilots there and the co-pilots for almost, for, you know, keeping an eye on things. As a transportation researcher, I think we can definitely look to the past to learn lessons about the future. These transitions are going to take some time. I mean, I think I'm fundamentally optimistic and bullish on autonomy and autonomous vehicles and trucking. But I think one thing to keep in mind, and perhaps it's not the kind of popular view, is that these transitions are going to take time. Right now, the vehicle fleet in this country takes about 30 years to turn over.

37:50And so if every single vehicle sold today was fully autonomous and every truck it's going to take us really until like you know 30 or so years until we see this mixed turnover so I think we've got time for this transition to take place and to manage these transitions I think what we need to be clear-eyed about is what is our vision for the system and what's our pathway to get there and part of our pathway is we don't want big social externalities like loss of jobs okay hey, that's part of our pathway. Let's prioritize that. Let's put that in the center. Right now, it doesn't feel like we've got a clear vision or a coherent pathway to get there.

38:29And so I think that's part of the challenge that we're trying to resolve.

38:32Kara Swisher:Yeah, clear vision and coherent pathway is not really America these days. But the Department of Transportation recently approved Aurora warning device to replace the reflective triangles truckers use when they stop on the side of the road and took a lawsuit to get there, though. The DOT says it's developing regulations specific to automated trucks right now, but basically there aren't any. What's it going to take to get updated federal regulations here? I think getting to the point where there's something to regulate. I've actually been pretty positive about the way the federal government has approached this, that they've put guidelines in place.

39:09The idea that there's no regulation is not accurate.

39:14Kara Swisher:Well, you're under trucking regulation. Well, we're under trucking regulations and car regulations, and there's always a backstop, right, that both at the state and federal level, if the state authorities or the federal authorities believe you're creating unreasonable risk on the roadway, you can kick those vehicles off the roadway. We've seen that actually in use with Uber back in the day where they were kicked out of both Arizona and California. And so there is a stick that's available. But to answer your question directly, I think there is value in federal regulation because this is fundamentally an interstate commerce issue.

39:49And that avoiding 50 different regulations would be helpful. Now, we don't need it. That we will adapt and work and, you know, handle the friction.

40:02Kara Swisher:But there will be certain states that are more willing than others. And today, the majority, the vast majority of U.S. states are either open to or enthusiastic about this technology. And when it comes to the warning triangle thing, like, again, it's great that we got this waiver. We would have found a way to drop triangles if that was it. But it's also common sense, right? The truck drivers walking down the side of the freeway to drop cones is immensely dangerous. And other ways, like other vehicles that are stopped on the freeway, what they do, they turn on blinking lights. because that's better than walking down the freeway and putting cones.

40:34And, you know, the technology breakthrough we had for this was turn on blinking lights on the truck.

40:39Kara Swisher:Brilliant. Yeah, that's what we do at Aurora. And that took a lawsuit to you. Well, and we've got to – we've got to waiver from them. The lawsuit has moved on and we're now engaged constructively. So were you against the cone people? Yeah, big cone. Big cone was keeping us down. Wow. No. So there's a rule on the books from like – I even believe you should win on that one. Yeah, on big content. Yeah, we did too. And ultimately, we're kind of continuing through the process. And what we see with the current administration is that Secretary Duffy's innovation agenda is pretty well aligned with this.

41:16We've seen positive comments from the secretary and from the vice president about the importance of automated trucking. We've seen legislation introduced at the federal level by Representative Fong from California, who's a Republican, called America Drives. And so we're seeing some momentum here. And I think that's great. Was that different with Democrats? It depends on which Democrats. Under the Obama administration, that was when I first started talking with Secretary of Transportation and DOT about this. Very enthusiastic and positive. Under the first Trump administration, enthusiastic and positive.

41:51The Biden administration was not focused on this at all. And then with this administration, we're seeing, again, support.

41:59Kara Swisher:Right. So now universities are one of the few institutions that are structurally designed to think beyond political and market considerations. So Jonathan, as an academic researcher, talks to lawmakers, policymakers, industry stakeholders. Do universities have any role in the web of interest between private industry and government agencies? Definitely. I think I can speak from my own experience with respect to transportation safety in this area is that universities offer kind of a neutral and independent place for data, for ideas, and for kind of arbiters of new technologies and emerging things in the innovation ecosystem.

42:32And so I think in that way, they become a kind of a one of the pillars that can advance the innovation in this country and the competition. We see this all the time, actually, and I think one of the, you know, We poke fun at academics for taking forever to write a paper or so on. But there's more and more industry leaders and companies coming to universities and wanting to work with us on issues related to safety and autonomy.

42:56Kara Swisher:And the broader AI advancements in public transportation, right? And I'd say beyond that, I think what's most striking about this is that it's often the leaders who are coming to us. It's almost like those who are ready to prove their technologies work and that they're safe come knocking. And I think in a way, it's a test. I think the other role that universities can play in this ecosystem is that they can begin to advance the kind of the broader societal agenda of the public good that can come of these. So one real opportunity that exists with autonomous vehicles and trucks is that once one catastrophic thing happens, it should never happen again because the entire vehicle fleet should learn from it.

43:37And so the opportunity for something like data pooling for safety critical incidents. Between all the companies. Between all the companies. It's not happening right now. Right. But universities could form consortia where these data are shared. There is precedent. It happens in the aviation industry already. And everyone can learn from those events.

43:54Kara Swisher:Right. They're not operating autonomously from a safety point of view. Airlines are. That's certainly a good comparison. Yeah. So I think that in that way, I think universities and research can play a critical role in advancing this and not slowing down the industry. I think that's the other kind of stereotype is that, you know, things are moving quickly. Academics and researchers can move rapidly with them. With them. So, Chris, right now you have no competition really that I can see it. But at some point, there's going to be other successful autonomous trucking companies, including from China, as you noted.

44:27Kara Swisher:You'll have to compete on price, speed. Pressures will be to cut costs to get from point A to point B faster. Presumably, there are at least one company that's willing to cut corners in order to gain market share. That's often a way to do it. Do you, how do you look at, I mean, there's more competition in the autonomous vehicle, the car space, than there is in the truck space. Why is that? And you moved from the car space to the truck space. We did. We focused, we were intending to operate cars and vehicles, and we decided to focus on trucks because we just think it's a better, more impactful market for us to go after, and one where we think we have some unique advantages.

45:03is how do we think about the kind of the impact of pressure for shipping versus safety? Like I mentioned, the company's mission is deliver the benefits of self-driving technology safely, quickly, and broadly. And that safely is first for a reason. And it's kind of a decision-making paradigm for us, right? Do it safely. Move as quickly as you can. Think about scale. For us, you know, when we talk to our customers, the trucking companies, safety is top of mind for them. And so by continuing to be transparent, right, if you want to see something really boring, youtube.com, at Aurora Driver, we live stream the Aurora Driver every day, right?

45:44That kind of transparency builds trust. And we think the customers who have an experience with us, work with us, we set the standard for what it means to be safe in the road. It's going to be hard to unseat that.

45:58Kara Swisher:Unless like there's a catastrophic accident, right, with you in the middle of it. And again, part of building trust is also to position yourself for forgiveness, right? That by demonstrating that we're doing these things the right way, that we've taken the steps, that we engage appropriately with the regulators and the policymakers, that we're transparent about this. You know, it's how you get through those moments. And I actually think it's warranted, right, that we are doing something new. There should be scrutiny. We should be held to a standard. And what happens, you know, you remember the days, right?

46:32The very first days of the first accident we had at Google with a self-driving car, national news. Yes. Right? And then the second one, slightly less visible, national news. At this point, just given the scale of operations, I am sure there is a Waymo crash every day, right? Not because they're bad, not because there's any kind of problem with the system, just because of scale and people on the road.

46:54Kara Swisher:Well, they had a good one in San Francisco the other day where three of them were facing off. That one made national news. Yeah, that was good, though. But that was novel, right? It was in my neighborhood, yeah. But what happens is people are like, okay, we've scrutinized this. We get it. We understand it. Okay. Yeah. Right? Chris and I were joking. That just happened to me the other day with some lady who was texting and driving and wouldn't move her car out of the middle of the road. So it's common for people. But as you said. People make mistakes, yeah. So last question. We only have just two minutes.

47:19Kara Swisher:Let's fast forward 10 years. I'm driving down a busy stretch of Interstate 95 here on the East Coast in December of 2035. I probably shouldn't be driving because I'll be really old. You'll be driven by some. Whatever. I'm driving, probably. I don't actually like to drive. It's after dark. It's windy and snowing. Driverless freight trucks are all around me. I hate driving around trucks in general, especially on 95. What happens for that to be a totally normal occurrence? What has to happen? Jonathan first, and then Chris. the safety first has to be that i don't feel there i feel nervous around trucks when i drive now and so the the the paradigm that chris articulated the safety first is going to build trust and it's going to be demonstrating time and again also the learning that's happening with these vehicles so that they've they've been in this situation they've learned they know how to operate they know also how to handle the unpredictability of human drivers because i think part of the challenge here is that the mix of road users is going to create new vulnerabilities.

48:17And so I think you may actually end up driving with more confidence in that circumstance than what you would know.

48:25Kara Swisher:Oh, I'd like to get all people off the road. That's my goal. You know, I wrote a column in the New York Times where I said, owning a car will move as quaint as owning a horse someday, which I didn't think would happen. So you think safety is the critical thing, that people feel safe. What about you, Chris? I think that's it, right? I think as a company, we need to continue to execute. We're doing a great job of that today, but we need to continue to put safety first. And I think you will be safer on the road. In those situations, I joke that what a person does is they drive down the road and they can't see anything, so they drive at freeway speeds.

48:57It's like faith-based driving. There's nothing there. And the self-driving truck is going to go, oh, geez, that's a blizzard. I can only see so far. I'm going to slow down. And that will enable the roadway to be safer. where you'll avoid these 120-car pileups that you have in snowstorms today because they just won't happen because these vehicles are controlling their speed, appropriate for the conditions in a way that people are too impatient and too self-confident to really do themselves.

49:26Kara Swisher:So when will they be on 95? Certainly before 10 years from now. Before 10 years from now. So that's the goal is to get them all over the country. We expect to be driving, like I said, across the Sunbelt next year, and then we'll start to work up through the country. People make a big deal about snow. It's not that big a deal. You know, when you're building an engineering system, you want to kind of find the parts that you can get done and get that out and start getting – get out and benefit from it. And then you add little bits here and there. And we've done that over the course of this year, driving from just daytime to day and night to in January, day, night, and in the rain.

50:00Snow is just another thing to add at some point.

50:02Kara Swisher:Where's the worst place that you don't – you're like, oh, I better not go there with my trucks. I have seen those crazy internet videos of traffic in India. I think we're going to be a little ways off from that. Okay. All right. Well, on that note, thank you so much, Chris Urmson and Jonathan. Thank you. Thank you. Thanks, Bill. On with Kara Swisher is produced by Christian Castor-Russell, Michelle Alloy, Megan Burney, and Kaylin Lynch. Nishat Kerwa is Vox Media's executive producer of podcasts. Special thanks to Catherine Barner and Madeline LaPlante-Duby. Aaliyah Jackson engineered this episode, and our theme music is by Trackademics.

50:39Kara Swisher:If you're already following the show, you get a free traffic cone. If not, you'll be stuck watching the Aurora YouTube live stream all day. Go wherever you listen to podcasts, search for On with Kara Swisher, and hit follow. Thanks for listening to On with Kara Swisher from New York Magazine, the Vox Media Podcast Network, and us. We'll be back on Thursday with more.