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In a battle as old as John Henry and the steam engine, flesh-and-blood truck drivers may soon find themselves competing for jobs against robots that don’t eat, sleep, or get distracted. How soon will these machines become commonplace? And do humans stand a chance?
The best-known developer of self-driving trucks is probably Otto, which was bought last year by Uber for $680 million. The company’s seven autonomous trucks drove 200,000 miles in 2016, including a successful 100-mile haul in Colorado. Otto has been earning a lot of publicity, but they still face several roadblocks.
California, where Otto is based and does most of their work, forbids the testing of autonomous vehicles weighing over 10,000 pounds. Although the company’s founders have attempted to negotiate their way around these regulations by describing their technology as “driver assistance” and “a collision avoidance system,” lawmakers are skeptical. This attitude was apparently justified when engineering documents revealed that self-driving Otto trucks had experienced numerous errors and “disengagements” along Bay Area highways. Uber faced a similar situation last year, when their experimental self-driving taxis faced stringent attention from California state regulators.
Adding to Otto’s challenges is a lawsuit from Google which threatens to spill over into criminal charges. Otto co-founder Anthony Levandowski previously worked on Waymo, Google’s self-driving car project, and the suit alleges that shortly before his resignation in 2015, Levandowski “took extraordinary efforts” to abscond with over 14,000 files detailing top secret engineering details of the project, as well as going to great pains to try to cover up his actions. Uber is accused of violating the Defense of Trade Secrets Act and the California Uniform Trade Secret Act, and of patent infringement. According to Chris Swecker, a former FBI assistant director who now specializes in corporate espionage, “I would be very surprised if there wasn’t a full criminal investigation behind this.”
Waymo has already logged more than 2 million miles on public roads, over nearly a decade of development, and protecting their “LIDAR” technology (the spinning bucket on top of both Waymo and Otto vehicles) is a top priority. If courts rule against Otto’s use of this technology, it could set their development back too far to remain competitive — bad news for already-embattled parent company Uber.
And the field’s competition is definitely growing. Automakers and tech companies alike are experimenting with a wide variety of self-driving technologies, any of which could potentially end up piloting long-haul trucks. These robot drivers never ask for pay raises, never need days off, and -according to advocates- would be significantly safer than human drivers, who can become tired, hungry, or distracted. From Drive.ai to Tesla, startups are competing to provide the most reliable replacement for long-haul truckers.
One such startup is Embark, launched out of Y Combinator last month and already testing semi-autonomous vehicles on public roads in Nevada. Unlike Otto, which was founded by a Google veteran, Embark was founded by students Alex Rodrigues and Brandon Moak, who dropped out of the University of Waterloo in 2015 to focus on self-driving technology full-time. From humble beginnings, the small team at Embark received seed funding from Maven Ventures and SV Angels, and includes specialists who previously worked at SpaceX and Audi. Rodrigues doesn’t view the technology as an attack on truckers’ jobs. On the contrary, he says, “No one really wants to be away from home for long periods of time, and there’s a 10x turnover rate for those drivers compared to people who work locally.” Taking on the same long-haul field as Otto, Embark and similar startups present yet another obstacle to Otto’s market dominance.
It isn’t clear how long it will take for autonomous driving tech to affect individual drivers, as competing technologies seek to navigate the legal and engineering challenges while staying a step ahead of one another. Unless new data shows that self-driving trucks are more dangerous than a human behind the wheel, however, it seems inevitable that we’ll all have to get used to waving at empty drivers’ seats as they pass by. Sooner, or later.
