The switch to our self-driving future has been far from smooth so far. In San Francisco, restless natives have come out in force against the rollout of autonomous taxis, Tesla has given self-driving capabilities a bad name with the hundreds of crashes linked to its autopilot systems and governments around the world are bickering about the best way to regulate autonomous cars. Now, a fleet of autonomous trucks is ready to complicate matters even further.
Long distance trucking has been seen by many as the logical fit for self-driving vehicles. Autonomous trucks can cover mile after mile without needing a break, they won’t complain about being away from their families for days on end and they won’t need to occupy an enormous rig with space to sleep and eat built in. It’s because of this that companies such as Volvo have plowed millions into the development of autonomous trucks.
Now, a company called Aurora Innovation is closer than anyone to safely deploying autonomous goods vehicles onto our roads, according to a new report from the Associated Press (AP). As the site reports:
Within three or four years, Aurora and its competitors expect to put thousands such self-driving trucks on America’s public freeways. The goal is for the trucks, which can run nearly around the clock without any breaks, to speed the flow of goods, accelerating delivery times and perhaps lowering costs. They’ll travel short distances on secondary roads, too.
The trucks are fitted with an array of sensors to read the road ahead, this includes laser, radar and camera sensors. All that tech has so far been put through its paces at a test track, where the truck has shown how it can spot and avoid obstacles on the route ahead. The Aurora trucks are also being tested on the roads of Texas with safety drivers at the wheel, where AP reports they hit highway speeds of 65 mph or more safely.
Now, those tests are reaching their conclusion and it will soon be time for the trucks to hit the highway of certain states – specifically ones that don’t get much snow, as they haven’t quite mastered ice driving just yet. As AP reports:
“We want to be out there with thousands or tens of thousands of trucks on the road,” said Chris Urmson, Aurora’s CEO and formerly head of Google’s autonomous vehicle operations. “And to do that, we have to be safe. It’s the only way that the public will accept it. Frankly, it’s the only way our customers will accept it.”
That safety will be of paramount importance as these enormous, driverless trucks begin operating alongside regular, human drivers on highways in Texas. So far, Aurora trucks have only been involved in three crashes while hauling freight more than 1 million miles on public roads. In each case, the AP reports that the crashes were “minor” and all of them were caused by “mistakes by human drivers in other vehicles.”
Are stats like that enough to quell your fears about a driver-less behemoth cruising up behind you the next time you’re driving on the highway? Or is your perception of self-driving vehicles marred by the constant bad news bears associated with Tesla’s Autopilot and Full Self-Driving tech? Let us know in the comments section below.