Autonomous trucks appear headed to the Valley. Pittsburgh-based Aurora Innovation says it’s planning to expand its Fort Worth to El Paso route into Phoenix next year.
Metro Phopenix is home to lots of autonomous vehicles, from companies like Waymo and Cruise. People have been able to use the former as a taxi service for some time now.
Andrew Hawkins, transportation editor at The Verge, joined The Show talk about this new driverless venture into the region.
Full conversation
MARK BRODIE: So what is the significance of autonomous trucks now coming to the Valley? As I mentioned, we've had autonomous cars for, for quite a while.
ANDREW HAWKINS: Yeah, it's a, it's a big move by this company Aurora to expand into Arizona. Currently, they're testing their trucks pretty much only in Texas, I believe. And so, they see Arizona as sort of another market in which they could potentially find new customers, find a lot more revenue.
This is a company that is not bringing in a lot of revenue still because they are still sort of in a, a testing phase. But they're hoping to enter into more of a commercial phase later this year, and they have said that Arizona and Phoenix in particular is going to be sort of a key to that, starting next year.
BRODIE: Are these trucks mainly on highways? Are they on surface streets as well?
HAWKINS: Yes, so, I believe that Aurora only operates its trucks on highways right now. I think it's key to point out that they have yet to pull their safety drivers out of the trucks. They have said that they plan on doing that later this year, and that they won't be doing that until the end of next year, specifically for the Fort Worth to Phoenix route. They're going extremely cautiously. They have not quite achieved the same level of technological successes like for example, Waymo has with its Robo taxis in Phoenix. But they do, have expressed a lot of confidence that they're going to be eventually testing their driverless, fully driverless trucks, but exclusively on highways starting at the end of next year in Phoenix.
BRODIE: What are the technological challenges in trying to build a truck that is autonomous relative to like the Waymo or the cruise cars we see around the valley?
HAWKINS: Yeah, so there's a couple of things, there's both challenges, but there's also some advantages as well. The challenge is obviously you have a much bigger vehicle, so there is something more of a safety risk involved with letting you know, several tons of a truck, go autonomous as opposed to a minivan or a crossover SUV. There needs to be, you know, a lot more concern over things like braking and stopping power.
But that said, there's a lot about the sort of the operational domain that trucks operated and that makes them a little bit more, have more of an advantage over surface streets, residential areas and sort of more of an urban setting. And that is, you know, you have long stretches of just highway without any intersections or cross traffic. There aren't any traffic signals, there's no stop signs.
For the most part, it's a very, much more simplified operational domain than, than it is for, for Robotaxis. But that said there still are a lot of safety concerns around this and that's why I think you've seen companies like Aurora, going about it a lot more conservatively, one could argue even more slowly than maybe a lot of experts might have originally predicted.
BRODIE: Right. Well, I would imagine also there's a difference between, for example, driving I 10 from El Paso to Tucson where there's a lot of nothing in between, where as opposed to, for example, I-10 in Phoenix where you have a lot of traffic and a lot of stop and start and it's more of an urban environment.
HAWKINS: Yeah, that's correct. And I think that Aurora is definitely aware of some of those challenges on their own. So I, I, I do think that they need to demonstrate that these trucks can operate sort of, whether or not it's in a setting like you described, where there are a lot of commuters say, or, or, or business travelers, people that are using the highways as opposed to long stretches in which there are less, less, there's much less traffic. So, I think Aurora needs to demonstrate that its trucks can operate safely in, in both of those settings before they can successfully take their safety drivers out of the vehicle and start to operate fully driverless.
BRODIE: Has Aurora said why they're expanding their testing to Phoenix? Is it a matter of we have autonomous technology here, so why not add one more?
HAWKINS: I, I do think that it has some something to do with it, right, that Arizona has demonstrated itself as a friendly place for driverless testing for driverless technology. That said it's also, I think a lot of the conditions are pretty, pretty, good for, for a company like Aurora. They're flat, it's dry conditions, there's not a lot of variations in the weather, for example. So, I do think that those types of places are good for testing autonomous technology, at least in the early days.
But, you know, for a company like this and, and others, they need to demonstrate that they can operate in a variety of different settings regardless of the weather. But, I do think that that's why you see so many companies looking to Arizona and the Southwest in particular because of these sort of favorable conditions and these sort of early days of testing this type of technology
BRODIE: Within the industry, what is the sense of the potential of autonomous trucking? I mean, we know for example, that the trucking industry has been short of drivers for a while and it's very challenging and in some cases kind of boring work to do. What is the potential of having trucks that can essentially drive themselves in terms of getting stuff from point A to point B?
HAWKINS: Yeah, I think the, the driver shortage issue is definitely something that a lot of the companies have been cited as a, as a one of the potential advantages of having autonomous trucks. There's obviously, there's so much commerce that goes on in this country, especially with e-commerce now, especially that there's just, there's been a huge spike in the amount of goods and, and, and, and things and packages that are being shipped across the country.
And the, the companies, the carriers themselves have been struggling to find enough drivers to do this work. It's long, it's tedious, takes you away from your family for, for a long time and often it doesn't pay the greatest. So I think that that's definitely one of the things.
But then also there's the safety case that a lot of these companies make, you know, there were thousands of people that have died in accidents and crashes involving large trucks in the past years. I think in the last one that I've seen, I think was 2022 where there was at least 6000 people that died in these crashes involving heavy trucks.
And so the autonomous companies will say, you know, ‘our, our company, our, our trucks never get tired, they never get sleepy, they never fall asleep at the wheel, they never make mistakes’. So, that's something where they could potentially be some benefits as well.
