Driverless trucks can save lives on America's roads

One day recently I met Apeksha Kumavat, chief engineer of the driverless-truck startup Gatik Inc., in the parking lot of a large retailer in Denison, Texas, about an hour north of Dallas, where one of the company’s delivery trucks had just dropped off PepsiCo Inc. merchandise. Kumavat jumped in the cab and settled in the middle of the bench seat. I hoisted myself up in the passenger seat. No one sat behind the wheel. With us buckled up and the 30-foot box truck in autonomous mode, it lurched forward to the end of the street and then waited. When traffic cleared, the truck made a wide turn to exit the lot without clipping the curb and headed toward our first stoplight. In an 8-mile jaunt between two retail stores, the most eventful thing was that it was an uneventful ride. The truck did slow for a pedestrian who was walking where he shouldn’t have on the shoulder of the road, but it sped up when the risk was behind us and motored on through a few lights before reaching its destination.

Companies with autonomous-vehicle ambitions are hoping these trips become more commonplace and just as uneventful on America’s roads. Gatik, Kodiak AI, Aurora Technologies Inc. and Bot Auto have moved into initial commercial operations for freight trucks without drivers, and others are soon to follow.

Their main obstacle is the concern that their driverless trucks will create a safety hazard among other motorists. To the contrary, these trucks have the potential to cut the number of accidents because of their advanced technology, and the entire industry rests on proving the technology is safe. Any slowdown in the adoption of autonomous vehicles threatens to cede the advantage to Chinese companies, which are developing the technology at full throttle with the backing of the Beijing government. U.S. policymakers should match that enthusiasm and not allow special interests to put up roadblocks.

Safety is a legitimate test case, and any reduction in risk would be welcome. There were slightly more than 3,600 fatal accidents involving large trucks weighing more than 19,500 pounds, which includes large box trucks and 18-wheelers, in 2024, the latest year for which data is available, according to Bloomberg Opinion’s analysis of data from the National Highway Transportation Safety Administration. Those accidents resulted in 4,100 deaths. The analysis doesn’t include tens of thousands of additional accidents that resulted only in injuries.

The state and local agencies that provide the crash data don’t assign who is at fault, which can be a nuanced legal process. However, the data — including police crash reports, vehicle registration files and medical examiner reports — indicate the factors most likely at play in each fatal accident. Bloomberg’s analysis of these factors revealed that in accidents involving trucks and other vehicles, the other motorists were three times as likely to be responsible. Still, that means truck drivers were likely to be responsible in accidents that killed about 600 people, and that number rises to 800 when including accidents that killed only the truck driver or pedestrians.

In other words, there will be accidents involving driverless trucks no matter how safe they are, but the technology could limit the potential hazards and reduce the overall number of deaths.

That’s because driverless trucks use cameras, radar and laser-based lidar sensors peppered around the vehicle to feed an onboard computer that is trained to navigate streets and highways while dealing with cars, trucks, buses, bicycles, motorcycles, pedestrians, stray animals or whatever else might wander into the roadway. These trucks may help reduce even those accidents where other motorists are at fault because the system, which has more situational awareness than humans, may be able to notice imprudent driving sooner and react quicker. For sure, an accident involving a driverless truck will have plenty of telemetry and visual data of what happened at the scene. In addition, driverless-truck companies know they will need a near-spotless safety record or they won’t be in business long. The scrutiny is and will continue to be intense for any fender-bender these vehicles would be involved in, much less a serious accident. To that end, these first operations are being done with extra caution, which means costs are higher. More humans are in the loop now either remotely monitoring or riding along in the cab than there will be as autonomous trucking matures. The challenge will be to reduce those costs enough to make a profit while maintaining safety.

It was a bit surprising that the data showed only about 50 fatal accidents that were likely caused by mechanical failures on the truck. These are the types of mishaps that could occur on an autonomous vehicle — a blown tire or a broken brake line.

All the autonomous truck companies are addressing this probability of mechanical failure by installing redundant systems for key components such as steering and brakes. For example, Gatik has partnered with Goodyear Tire & Rubber Co. to monitor tire health as well as road conditions.

Kumavat, a co-founder of Mountain View, California-based Gatik, explained the safety features of the truck, including how it reacts to unknown incidents and can call out for assistance. So far, Gatik’s trucks haven’t been involved in any traffic accidents. It gave me confidence that she seemed unconcerned with the truck’s maneuvers as she described how the system works. I was absorbed with how the in-cabin computer monitor showed an orange box closing in fast in the left lane and how that box turned into a real-life utility truck that just passed us.

Gatik’s trucks will have to deal with a lot of those boxes because the company is pursuing the so-called middle-mile market that takes goods from warehouses to stores, which means they’re operating more on urban streets. Gatik has nearly 100 of these trucks made by Isuzu Motors Ltd., which is also a major investor, operating near Phoenix, Dallas and northern Arkansas, and it plans to deploy hundreds more by the end of the year. The company has signed five-year contracts worth $600 million, including with PepsiCo, to provide driverless trucks, each operating a minimum of 12 hours a day. There’s upside to those contracts if the trucks drive more than 12 hours a day.

Driverless technology is gaining commercial footholds on several fronts. Truck manufacturers are already working on how to incorporate the systems, including redundancies, in trucks on their production lines. Daimler has its own in-house autonomous technology after purchasing Torc Robotics in 2019 and plans to go live next year. For an idea of the mix of startups and established vehicle makers pursuing this market, it’s worth noting that more than 100 companies are named specifically in a NHTSA order for crash-reporting requirements.

For their driverless trucks to continue to take over America’s roads, they will have to be safer than those driven by humans. The race for safe profitability is on.

This column reflects the personal views of the author and does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the editorial board or Bloomberg LP and its owners. Thomas Black is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist writing about the industrial and transportation sectors. He was previously a Bloomberg News reporter covering logistics, manufacturing and private aviation.