Driverless Trucks Are Coming. Good Luck Getting Them to Honk.

[00:00:03] Welcome to Tech News Briefing. It's Thursday, October 22nd. I'm Danny Lewis for The Wall Street Journal. A few weeks ago, I was driving on I-278 through Queens when I had a fun interaction with an 18-wheeler. The driver kept ducking into the exit lane and then pulled right back onto the highway at the last second, blasting its horn at me for my troubles. Another day on the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway. It was one of those moments you have sometimes on the road where you're left wondering,

[00:00:30] what were they thinking? But in the next few years, some of those big rigs might no longer have drivers at all. WSJ shipping and logistics reporter Esther Fung has been looking into what that future will look like, and she says these robo-trucks might actually be polite. She joins us now. Hey Esther, you've actually seen these vehicles in action on real roads. What's it like? So I did sit in three of these driverless trucks two weeks ago in Dallas,

[00:00:59] and I've been reporting on it for a while, so I know they have as much safety precautions as they can have. There are also other people sitting with me in the cab. But to see the steering wheel turn on its own was kind of freaky in the beginning. But after a minute or so, it's like just a normal ride. Yeah, I mean, what was it like driving in highway traffic in this thing? So I was just looking at how the truck navigated the traffic,

[00:01:28] and I could tell like every time there was a stopped vehicle on the shoulder. I don't know why there's always a stopped vehicle on the shoulder. The truck would very safely change lanes to the left, and then once it's passed the stopped vehicle, it would change back to the right lane. Once on a very congested highway, the truck allowed several vehicles to just cut in.

[00:01:56] And I remember as a driver myself, I'm like, no, no, no, I want an inch forward. But no, the truck let them all in, and then when there were no more vehicles, then it moved forward. And I remember asking like, why does it do that? I was anxious. I wanted to move forward. And the trucking company said, well, they had safety first in mind. And it didn't even honk. It didn't honk. Oh, and I found out later that the trucks cannot honk on their own.

[00:02:24] And this I found out after the truck pulled back into the terminal. A driverless truck can do almost everything a regular human driver can, except back in and honk. So they needed a human driver to hop in to drive the truck back to its parking spot. And before the driver started moving the truck, it pulled the horn. I turned around and asked the CEO, can this truck honk autonomously? And he said no.

[00:02:53] And I'm like, oh, that's interesting. I guess I won't have school kids on buses, you know, being able to do the honk the horn thing. Yeah, I don't know. I wonder if, you know, the technology companies would find a way if they see a kid doing the arm thing and then the truck would just honk. I don't know if they'll do that. They can make the truck autonomously honk if they need to do it.

[00:03:18] But the explanation was that these trucks already have really long vision. They can see potential hazards ahead and avoid them early. So there's no real need to honk for those type of situations. And even for like a situation where it's a sudden hazard, that truck can also like just pause. So you don't get the annoyed truck driver honking type situation happening.

[00:03:47] So that's a good point because so much of the self-driving vehicles we hear about are taxis. What else are robo trucks capable of? Well, they carry a lot of cargo from point A to point B. They are not limited by hours of service limits. So regular truck drivers, they have to rest after 11 hours on the road. And I was told that sometimes these truck drivers would speed because they have to get to their next stop

[00:04:16] before the hours of service comes up. For the driverless trucks, they're not limited by that. So they don't really have to speed. Where are these being tested? So these are now tested mostly in Texas. Texas is a pretty flat state with more predictable weather. It's pretty sunny. They don't really have to deal with a lot of ice. And the regulatory environment there has been really supportive for the testing of these vehicles.

[00:04:44] And there's a lot of freight in Texas. So Texas is like ground zero for the testing of driverless trucks in the U.S. And how many, do we know how many are on the road right now? Currently, there are dozens on the road. It's hard for me to say an exact number because the companies themselves don't really want to reveal that. Many of them still have a safety driver in the driver's seat. They are not really driving the truck, but they're there in case anything happens

[00:05:12] and they can intervene and override the truck's autonomous system. But for several of them, they said that next year, 2027, that's when they would have their trucks be fully driverless. No one in the driver's seat. How would you feel if you looked up at the cab of a big rig on the highway and didn't see a driver at the wheel? If you're a listener on Spotify, let us know in a comment. Coming up, why is long-haul trucking the next frontier of self-driving vehicles?

[00:05:42] That's after the break. Welcome back. We've been talking about the rise of autonomous trucks on America's highways. Esther, we touched on this a little bit a moment ago, but what is it about long-haul trucking that makes it an attractive business for these robo-trucks? So long-haul trucking is how Americans get their goods in the U.S.

[00:06:12] If you look at the back of trucks, they're always saying, we need drivers, we need drivers. And shippers, the companies that hire these truckers, they're always on the lookout for long-haul drivers too. So for a lot of shippers out there, long-haul trucking is really important to their business and they want this technology to work because they feel the logistics industry faces long-term challenges related to driver availability,

[00:06:40] increasing demand for freight movement, and the need for greater efficiency. Long-haul trucking is a job that's hard. So having these robo-trucks available anytime is really attractive to these businesses. I can totally see the logistics argument for this, but how are truckers feeling about these vehicles? So the really good drivers, they want other truck drivers who are also safe out there. Some of them are worried about their jobs.

[00:07:10] It's a very valid worry. Although the driverless truck companies themselves tell me that anyone who is a truck driver today can keep their job until they retire. And how about the unions too? You know, like for example, the Teamsters. So the Teamsters want a safety operator in these driverless trucks. For a lot of people out there, they're still unsure about how this technology could work and having a person in the cab

[00:07:38] would help assuage some of these concerns. The Teamsters are also concerned about jobs. They point out that truck driver is the most popular job for men in the U.S. without a college degree. So there are also political implications as this technology becomes more developed over the years. So safety features all aside, driving an enormous truck loaded down with really heavy cargo at highway speeds can be really dangerous if something goes wrong.

[00:08:07] That's whether there's a human behind the wheel or whether it's, you know, a robot. So how safe are robo trucks? The driverless truck companies told me that they have tested these robot trucks for hundreds of thousands of miles. They all established their individual safety cases. Now these are all self-tested. It's all like a self-assessment. So far, there are no fatal crashes involving an autonomous truck.

[00:08:37] So they are trying to push this out in a very steady, gradual pace. When I talk to shippers about it, they themselves also said that they want to do this gradually. Tech companies have been promising automated big rigs would be just around the corner for years now. How is this time different? So this time it's different because they said that they have completed hundreds of thousands of miles of testing and they are close to or they have completed their safety cases.

[00:09:06] The second thing that is really helping them move forward is a very supportive regulatory environment. The federal government recently granted a safety exemption to the autonomous trucks, allowing them to use cap-mounted beacons on their trucks if the driverless truck has to stop on the side of the road versus the regular rule, which is that the truck driver has to come out of the truck and place a warning triangle at the back

[00:09:35] to warn other motorists that a vehicle is now parked on the side of the highway. LIDAR has also improved over the years where they can see further and it's also not as expensive as before so they can roll it out faster. Of course, they also use artificial intelligence to test out the different scenarios that a driverless truck might encounter and would they take the right steps. So all these developments

[00:10:04] help propel driverless trucks to their current stage today. That was WSJ reporter Esther Fung. And that's it for Tech News Briefing. If you're a listener on Spotify, be sure to leave us a comment. Today's show was produced by me with supervising producer Katie Ferguson. I'm Danny Lewis for The Wall Street Journal. We'll be back tomorrow with a new episode. Thanks for listening. Guha! Thank you, ciao! Thank you.