Driverless Semi-Trucks Are Here & Coming to a Highway Near You

Kara sits down with Chris Urmson, CEO and co-founder of the autonomous trucking company Aurora, and Johnathon Ehsani, a professor of public health at Johns Hopkins University and leading road safety researcher, for a candid look at the future of AI-powered freight transport. Recorded live at the Hopkins Bloomberg Center, the three discuss the rapid rise of driverless trucking, what it will take to convince a skeptical public that sharing the road with self-driving 18-wheelers will actually make driving safer, the potential for job losses, and how to regulate autonomous vehicles across state lines. It’s a deeply informed look at the promises and the trade-offs of autonomous trucking with two experts. Questions? Comments? Email us at [email protected] or find us on YouTube, Instagram, TikTok, Threads, and Bluesky @onwithkaraswisher. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Kara Swisher?

  I tried to get the car to run him over.

• 0:01Speaker 01

  Thanks for that, by the way.

• 0:02Kara Swisher?

  No problem. And it wouldn't do it, which was a great disappointment for me.

• 0:06Speaker 01

  Thanks for that also.

• 0:07Kara Swisher?

  No problem.

• 0:19Kara Swisher?

  Hi, everyone. From New York Magazine and the Vox Media Podcast Network, this is On with Kara Swisher, and I'm Kara Swisher. Today, I'm talking about autonomous trucking with Chris Urmson and Jonathan Assani. Chris is the co-founder, chairman, and CEO of Aurora and a true pioneer in the industry. He's one of the first people I started talking to about autonomous vehicles back in the mid to late 2000s. Back then, he was working at Google, where he helped launch and lead Google's self-driving car project, which is now Waymo. He co-founded Aurora in 2017, and last year, it began driving commercial freight in Texas. The Aurora driver system has already done over 100,000 solo miles in the real world, and by the end of 2027, Urmson plans to have thousands of driverless trucks hauling freight

• 1:04Kara Swisher?

  in the U.S. Jonathan is a professor at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health and an internationally recognized road safety and injury prevention researcher. He advises the U.S. Department of Transportation and has studied the public's perception of autonomous driving technology. I wanted to talk to Chris and Jonathan because I think it's really important to look beyond cars, because trucks actually are, carry most of the food and other stuff we get in our stores, and the innovations in it are critical to our economy. It's also got a lot of big issues, including jobs and safety. It can be scary to think of a semi-truck rumbling beside you on the highway without a human in the driver's seat, but the reality is, they're already here, and many more are on the way, and they'll actually make our roads safer.

• 1:49Kara Swisher?

  Our conversation was taped live at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg Center in Washington, D.C. as part of the Discovery series on AI, which was jointly presented by Johns Hopkins University and Vox Media. This is a good one, so stick around.

• 2:10Kara Swisher?

  Support for this show comes from The Guardian and their new show, Stateside, where journalists Kai Wright and Carter Sherman use the entire independent reporting resources of The Guardian to slow down the news and wrestle with the questions we all have about what is actually happening in the world. Join Kai and Carter three times a week as they utilize all the reporting resources The Guardian has across news, international coverage, climate, culture, wellness, and more. And The Guardian's not owned by a billionaire, they fearlessly report the facts without interference. Go to theguardian.com/stateside to learn more and listen wherever you get your podcasts or watch on YouTube. That's theguardian.com/stateside.

• 2:53Speaker 02

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• 3:24Speaker 03

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• 4:10Kara Swisher?

  Chris Urmson and Jonathan Assani, thank you for coming on, and thanks for joining me here at the Johns Hopkins University Bloomberg Center in Washington, D.C. for this special live conversation. Thank you, audience, for being here, too. So, Chris, I've interviewed a lot, but I interviewed in 2023 the last time. At that point, Aurora Driver hadn't done any solo drives on public roads. Now it's done over 100,000 miles, and you plan to expand exponentially over the next two years. And Jonathan, you study autonomous vehicles from a public health perspective, and you've searched public's acceptance of them. So as driverless trucking accelerates rapidly, let's talk about the

• 4:51Kara Swisher?

  challenges in persuading the public they'll be beneficial for society. There's, of course, all the negatives replacing drivers, although we don't have enough drivers, as most people don't know. So, Chris, explain what Aurora does so people who don't understand.

• 5:05Speaker 01

  Yeah, great. Thanks, Kara. Thanks for having us.

• 5:06Kara Swisher?

  Because all the attention goes to Waymos or cars or whatever Tesla's doing.

• 5:10Speaker 01

  And they're doing pretty awesome things, certainly Waymo. So Aurora, we're on a mission to deliver the benefit to self-driving technology safely, quickly, and broadly. And today, we're focused on trucking. And so we have big Class 8 tractor trailers, semi-trucks, driving on the highway. We use a combination of verifiable AI, interesting hardware, things like LiDAR, radar, and cameras to see the world, fancy computers, and then map data, offline data, to help these things drive safely through the world. As you said, we're the first and only company operating trucks regularly without a person on it. We're without a person in the loop. We're paying attention for keeping them safe on the road. And it's kind of off to the races. So we have about a handful of them running today. By the end

• 5:54Speaker 01

  of next year, we expect to have hundreds of them running across the Sun Belt, nobody on board, serving customers, delivering toilet paper and baked goods and whatever else you put in the back of a truck across the country.

• 6:06Kara Swisher?

  And these are on highways, public highways, correct?

• 6:09Speaker 01

  That's right. So today, we're running on I-45 between Dallas and Houston. We also run between Fort Worth and El Paso on I-10 and I-20. In January, we expect to expand that to be out to Phoenix. So at that point, it's 1,000 miles. And part of the benefit, what we think we can bring with this is, one, a safety improvement. So today, there's somewhere between 5,000 and 6,000 people killed in accidents with heavy trucks every year.

• 6:35Speaker 01

  We believe and we see a fuel economy benefit. So we've done modeling says we expect between 14 and 34% improvement in fuel economy. And so if you're a trucking company today, that's your third largest expense. So that's a big deal for you as a trucking company. And then for us as a society, that's a really big, meaningful impact for sustainability. And then, of course, because the computer is ever vigilant, because it's looking 360 degrees around it, it doesn't get distracted, it doesn't have an hours of service limitation. So we can move goods almost twice as far as a person driving a truck can without all of the negatives that come along with that person having to drive the truck, right? You should be very thankful for anyone who is willing to drive a truck.

• 7:19Speaker 01

  If you look around this room, there is literally nothing here that didn't move on a truck at some point.

• 7:26Speaker 01

  But American truck drivers are 10 times as likely to die on the job as the average American. They have other health challenges. They often have substance abuse challenges. They spend time away from family. It's just a really tough life. And so it's one of the reasons why, you know, we should be grateful that people are willing to do it. But much like, you know, the 20th century wouldn't have occurred without coal miners. It's also a really good thing. We don't have people mining coal or the same number of people mining coal as we do today. So that's how, you know, as we think about it.

• 7:58Kara Swisher?

  You're looking at it, but they talk about the challenges of the public protection is you're replacing truck drivers, of which we don't have enough of, which people don't realize.

• 8:05Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think that's the thing is like, as I look to the future here, my expectation is that if you are a truck driver today, you will be able to retire a truck driver if you want to. Right? The shortage is that dire. Over the next decade, we expect to need another million drivers in the US. And that was before the aggressive policies of the current administration, which are, you know, eliminating a significant fraction of our driver pool with these non domiciled CDL drivers. And so if we want the American economy to continue rolling, so to speak, we really need access to drivers. Now, of course.

• 8:41Speaker 01

  It's a thing, right, that years from now, there will not be as many people driving trucks. Eventually, my expectation is there will be no people driving trucks.

• 8:51Speaker 01

  And we have to help manage through that transition. As our technology comes to market, we expect it primarily to be driving in the middle mile, at least initially. Right, this is the between distribution centers. And these are kind of the the less desirable of the truck driving jobs. The ones that people want are the ones where they can stay at home every night, where they do more than drive the truck. Where they go to the store and they help unload, they are the customer service rep, they're the sales rep. And that's the jobs that I think that what we're doing certainly.

• 9:20Kara Swisher?

  Convincing people that you're not killing off an industry essentially or a job. Is that your biggest problem? Not that you're going to be mowed down by an autonomous truck.

• 9:31Speaker 01

  I don't like, I think our biggest problem is our internal execution and just making sure that we continue to execute well. At this point, the technology is working and that we can bring this to market and now we just need to scale it and get it out there. I think it's society's decision as to how we accept this technology or don't. I see my role in that to try to help educate and inform. And then as a company, we try to do our part as well. So we've worked with Allegheny College in Pennsylvania, Gallatin College in Montana. We've worked with Over the Road Garage in Texas to put in place training programs to help elevate truck drivers into other roles in logistics.

• 10:08Kara Swisher?

  So you're doing that part of it. Jonathan, what do you think the public feels about trucks? They're a little better about trucks, correct?

• 10:15Speaker 04

  Yeah, I mean, trucks are essential to the economy, as Chris mentioned. There are also truck drivers, just to, this is the premise is that they're among the safest drivers on the road. In terms of crashes per mile driven, they're extremely safe. However, when there is a crash, it's catastrophic, often not for the truck driver, but for the the the person or the object that's struck.

• 10:37Kara Swisher?

  Yeah, I've been there.

• 10:38Speaker 04

  So terrifying.

• 10:39Kara Swisher?

  Not in a, close to an accident.

• 10:41Speaker 04

  Yeah, so I think the the public acceptance of trucks is different to autonomous vehicles. Just because of the physics involved. However, as Chris mentioned, as they kind of grow the grow the platform and demonstrate safety time and time again, then public trust will build and experience hopefully will kind of yield the, you know, the expectation that these are safe and they're. They're part of a kind of an integrated transportation system.

• 11:09Kara Swisher?

  What do you think the biggest public problem they face in rolling out trucks? Is it the autonomy itself or the job loss? You know, just no one's there essentially.

• 11:19Speaker 04

  Yeah, I think it's probably a collection of things, right? In our, in our public policy and kind of public opinion research, we found that trust is an issue. The safety, the transparency, all of those become kind of one of the key pillars. But another one, which I think is often overlooked, is social good. If the vehicles, if the trucks or autonomous vehicles are being used for social good, we see public opinion double in terms of acceptance of accepting these vehicles on the road. So I think the, the industry can advance both through forging credibility through safety, but also through demonstrating that the social impacts are not only going to be minimizing job losses,

• 12:03Speaker 04

  but also serving society.

• 12:05Kara Swisher?

  Right, so through climate or efficiency, or they go through the night, so they're not as unsafe during the day, that kind of stuff.

• 12:12Speaker 04

  Exactly, yeah.

• 12:13Kara Swisher?

  Right, because the computer never sleeps presumably. So Chris, explain how the technology for people, the people are becoming increasingly familiar with autonomous vehicles. I've been in them forever.

• 12:23Speaker 01

  A lot, yeah.

• 12:23Kara Swisher?

  I feel very comfortable in them, but most people have not tried them. A lot in San Francisco, they certainly have gotten initially hesitant, and we've had our beefs with them and stuff like that. But in general, acceptance is rising. Those are commercial, those are, you know, consumer vehicles, just like a taxi. Talk about the Aurora driver and how it works, so people understand.

• 12:43Speaker 01

  Yeah, so, and my experience, by the way, has been very much the same as yours, that you can get very skeptical people and you get them in a vehicle for just a few minutes even. And, you know, it quickly goes from, oh my gosh, I can't believe this, to... That's kind of all it does to huh, okay, what's my phone doing?

• 13:03Kara Swisher?

  Yeah.

• 13:03Speaker 01

  And this happens within about 10 minutes or so.

• 13:06Kara Swisher?

  Yeah. I say, I had someone get in and I said, look, you can text and drink. You know, which isn't funny. It's a bad joke on drink driving, but.

• 13:14Speaker 01

  But, but there is a.

• 13:15Kara Swisher?

  They laugh.

• 13:15Speaker 01

  There's a thing underneath there, right? Which is our solution to problems like texting and driving, drinking, driving has been prohibition. And the challenge with prohibition is you want to do the thing that you're being told not to. The benefit with a technology like this is it enables you to do the things that you find more valuable. Uh, whether that's the social activity and drinking, or whether it's, you know, dealing with your text or email. While also having improved safety on the road.

• 13:42Kara Swisher?

  So explain what the actual technology is.

• 13:44Speaker 01

  So, so.

• 13:45Kara Swisher?

  Nobody's in these trucks, right? Not, you had drivers along.

• 13:48Speaker 01

  So we, we have a person riding on board as observer, but they're not there to drive. They're not there to keep the thing safe. Um, the way it works is we've got a collection of sensors. So we use laser radar camera. And a special laser we developed in-house that can see, you know, hundreds of meters down the road. That's looking 360 degrees around the truck, understanding what's happening there. And then many times a second, it's both figuring out what it should do in response to the traffic to get where it wants to go safely. But then literally thousands of times a second, it's also checking itself, checking the truck to make sure everything isn't as safe and operating, and operating as it should be.

• 14:26Speaker 01

  So that if, if something is broken, it can identify that and come to a stop off the freeway somewhere safely. Um, this is, you know, our approach to do, and this is something we called verifiable AI. It's a way of using some of the most modern techniques that I'm sure you've talked about on the podcast. Putting guardrails around them and allowing us to make them, it interpretable. So that we can ensure that the concepts that it's learning are the ones that actually matter driving safely. And that it's actually responding to them and that it's constrained in how it can respond. Because what we can't afford to have is, you know, what they're, you know, gently called confabulations, right? This idea, let's, let's use glue to hold cheese on our pizza.

• 15:08Speaker 01

  Uh, right? Like, that's cute when I read it in a text box and it's disastrous operating at 70 miles an hour down, down the freeway.

• 15:16Kara Swisher?

  Right.

• 15:17Speaker 01

  And so by, by construction, we ensure that we can't take some of those actions that are completely, you know, ludicrous. And we have these guardrails.

• 15:26Kara Swisher?

  Would it, would it do that? Like? Ah, Cybertruck, I just think I shall run into it.

• 15:31Speaker 01

  No, we, we, we do not run into Cybertrucks.

• 15:34Kara Swisher?

  Gentle tap is fine with me.

• 15:36Speaker 01

  And I think this is why you don't work at Aurora.

• 15:39Kara Swisher?

  Correct.

• 15:39Speaker 01

  Yes. But, uh, no, so we, we do understand vehicles on the road, we understand, you know, people, we understand bicyclists, we understand trucks, Jersey Bear, like the stuff that matters. Uh, we respond to, and by separating the way we understand the world from the way we interact with it, again, we can make sure that it's actually responding to the vehicle or the painted lines and not some random signal that it kind of divined in the background. And it's not, and that's not like a hypothetical problem, you know, we've done experiments where, um, where we're trying to see, okay, how can we reduce the sensor input that's going to this? And eventually we were like, okay, well, let's try it with no sensor input.

• 16:23Speaker 01

  And it turned out it worked 90% as well as when we put the sensor input in. And we're like, that seems crazy. Of course you need to see the world to drive safely. Uh, and it turns out that what it had been doing is learning, well, basically if I look at the last five seconds of driving, uh, if I do that for the next five seconds, it's going to be mostly right most of the time.

• 16:42Kara Swisher?

  Right. So there's no such thing as mostly right.

• 16:44Speaker 01

  That's right. We need to be right.

• 16:45Kara Swisher?

  So that would be AI guessing again, right? Essentially.

• 16:48Speaker 01

  It's, yes, and it's also it, it figuring out what it thought was a smart way to cheat. Uh, and we don't want it to cheat. We want it to make sure it's using.

• 16:58Kara Swisher?

  Whatever the sensor happens to be at the moment, rather than.

• 17:01Speaker 01

  Whatever the best signal, best way to interpret the data gets from around it. I think one of the concepts is actually really interesting. What makes these things superhuman? Is one, they can look in all directions at the same time. So if I'm driving down the freeway, I don't, you know, many of you have had this experience, right? You shoulder check, uh, and then as you come around the vehicle in front of you, you hit the brakes. And it's kind of terrifying. The Aurora driver is looking at that vehicle in front of you and the vehicle beside you and the person sitting on the sidewalk and the person looking at the corner and is thinking about all of them constantly. And so as a person, we foveate on the thing we think is the biggest risk and will miss other actors. And that's a real opportunity for us as

• 17:44Kara Swisher?

  For the truck driver, right.

• 17:45Speaker 01

  As we're pointing the driver to be safer.

• 17:46Kara Swisher?

  But one of the things that you don't want, you wanted to teach other trucks these instances, but not rely on that.

• 17:50Speaker 01

  We certainly want to learn from them and we use that as part of how we train the system. But we also want to represent things explicitly. So as an example, there's this great study that looked at how often people actually stop at stop signs in America.

• 18:08Kara Swisher?

  Never.

• 18:09Speaker 01

  You're not

• 18:10Kara Swisher?

  That's me, I'm sorry.

• 18:11Speaker 01

  You're not wrong. It's about 11% of the time, right? And so if you just trained the system to look at how people drove, you'd have robot cars driving through stop signs.

• 18:23Kara Swisher?

  Yeah.

• 18:24Speaker 01

  And, you know, maybe society would accept that, but I don't think they should. And so we want to be explicit about, okay, no, this is a real constraint. You should stop at a stop sign.

• 18:34Kara Swisher?

  Right.

• 18:35Speaker 01

  Rather than hope it figures it out.

• 18:36Kara Swisher?

  Although I have to say, you do notice autonomous vehicles, like they used to drive like your grandma and now they drive like your aunt who's a good driver and a little more aggressive. And I've just noticed they've gotten more aggressive.

• 18:46Speaker 01

  And I think finding that right, and I think you see exactly this.

• 18:50Kara Swisher?

  Because then they were going too slow. You're like, really?

• 18:51Speaker 01

  And that doesn't quite work, right?

• 18:53Kara Swisher?

  Yeah, really. The plastic bag, you're going to stop for the plastic bag. Like, that's

• 18:57Speaker 01

  Please don't. Yeah. And this is the art, right? And this is where some of these modern techniques become really useful because you can say something like, you should stay three seconds behind the vehicle in front of you. That's a good rule of thumb driving down the freeway. Most drivers don't. But let's say we want to maintain that. And we can do a little better because our reaction time is better than people. But what happens when that driver cuts right in front of you? Right, you don't want to hammer the brakes and instantly create three seconds separation. But you don't want to wait until next week to have three seconds separation. There's some natural process that feels human-like and is acceptable of creating that gap.

• 19:34Kara Swisher?

  Which they're learning as they're doing it through AI.

• 19:35Speaker 01

  And that's where these kind of modern techniques really come to the fore. Like, we can say at steady state, keep, you know, in our case, you know, something less than three seconds, but roughly three seconds. And in transition, learn how to open that gap.

• 19:47Kara Swisher?

  Right, because it matters a great deal more with trucks. So Jonathan, you're bullish on autonomous vehicles and the ability to reduce traffic deaths, speaking of knowing when to stop. Talk about traffic deaths and injuries, because that, to me, is the greatest, one of the greatest inputs. And what are some of the potential externalities? For example, an increased capacity to haul freight could lead to more emissions, which would lead to negative health. You know, the more we can do it, the more they will, essentially.

• 20:12Speaker 04

  Thanks, this is a terrific question. You know, motor vehicle crashes are a public health crisis. I mean, we, in this country, alone, last year-

• 20:19Kara Swisher?

  Which we've accepted, like gun shootings.

• 20:22Speaker 04

  Exactly, exactly. And I think we've accepted it for really, you know, terrible reasons. For the cost of doing business, for the cost of getting places. We've accepted, last year, NHTSA, the US DOT's safety agency, estimates 39,345 lives were lost in 2024. That's about 100 lives a day are lost from crashes. The potential for the autonomous vehicles and autonomy in general is that they can learn from their mistakes, which regular drivers, human drivers, us, generally don't. Say, for example, I didn't sleep well last night, or I was taking some medication that meant that I was very, very drowsy, or I was impaired, or whatever it may be. Today, we allow anyone to drive, basically,

• 21:07Speaker 04

  and many people who may not be fit to drive. So I think the role of autonomy in getting to safety is critical. The challenges or the externalities that you point out is that autonomy will solve some safety issues, but then it will introduce nuance, potentially. So, right now, when I'm driving a vehicle, there's no privacy or cybersecurity threat. But autonomous vehicles, as a system, are vulnerable to them.

• 21:34Kara Swisher?

  Well, there are some, because they can program cars that people are driving in. There's so much- Stuff on the cars now.

• 21:41Speaker 04

  There is today, right? There is.

• 21:43Kara Swisher?

  Yes.

• 21:43Speaker 04

  And the mix of the vehicle fleet such now is that that that is penetrating the vehicle and there is kind of cyber and privacy concerns today. But if you look at the traditional fleet, I think it's a mix of kind of old school vehicles, kind of more more instrumented or tech, you know, tech heavy vehicles and then the fully autonomous vehicles. And so I think as those technologies penetrate the fleet, we introduce a new set of challenges. They're not insurmountable. We just have to be very clear about what they are and how to navigate them.

• 22:11Kara Swisher?

  And then in terms of, once they can use them, they'll use them a lot more, which means emissions will presumably go, unless they're electric, right? Or or except that kind of thing. If it's going hand in hand, EVs and although we're seeing a decline in that today, just Ford just took a massive.

• 22:27Speaker 04

  And you're raising a terrific question about, you know, the mobility system in general, like, how will it play out in terms of convenience and access, public transit? What's going to happen to buses and trains, investment and so on? Those are questions that we still need to figure out. I think the economic model of the autonomous vehicles themselves is also something that we're only at the very beginning of figuring out.

• 22:47Kara Swisher?

  Right.

• 22:47Speaker 04

  And so understanding how this is going to scale to operate at a society level is going to be, it's going to take some time.

• 22:54Kara Swisher?

  We'll be back in a minute.

• 23:02Kara Swisher?

  Support for this show comes from The Guardian. Trying to locate news sources that reliably separate fact from fiction can seem like looking for a needle in a haystack these days. Social media feeds, cable news and subscription based news outlets might be able to give you one version of the news, but not in the way that you need. You want news fast, but slow enough to actually absorb the information. Stateside with Kai Wright and Carter Sherman is here to do just that. The podcast tries to slow down the news and wrestle with the questions regarding the world at large at your own pace. Three times a week, hosts Kai Wright and Carter Sherman bring their expertise together to showcase different and engaging perspectives regarding the world today. They will use their collective knowledge to discuss the news, international

• 23:44Kara Swisher?

  affairs, climate, culture, sports, lifestyle, fashion and wellness. Plus, The Guardian wants to emphasize they're not billionaire owned, meaning they're free to report the whole picture without interference. Go to theguardian.com/stateside to learn more and listen wherever you get your podcasts or watch on YouTube starting May 13.

• 24:05Speaker 02

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• 24:36Kara Swisher?

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• 25:42Kara Swisher?

  Chris, a lot of human drivers are nervous around semi-trucks, for good reason, right? But I'm nervous around every semi-truck in existence, actually. If the car gets hit by an 18 mile on a highway, passengers don't do well, as you noted. And even though autonomous trucks are much safer than human drivers, there's no perfect system. And often, it's a human's fault, typically, right? I know that, I've seen the statistics. But they have, as we just talked, cyber attacks. So what are the failures that you're looking for now? And maybe explain... What conditions are you particularly looking at right now as you move to hundreds of thousands of driving hours?

• 26:21Speaker 01

  So, part of how we've approached this is to build something we call a safety case. Because there's no silver bullet, I can't say do A and you're done. Our safety case is really this, you know, kind of holistic view at both the company and the technology to make sure that the thing that we put on the road is safe. So, in our case, it's got five pillars. The first is that it needs to be performant. So, when it's driving, that it behaves the way it's supposed to, responds appropriately. And we put the thing through something like four and a half million tests to have conviction that, yep, this is going to behave as it should on the road. The second is that it has to be fail-safe, that it's not okay for us to say, oh, that broke, that's why this accident happened. We need to be able to identify what might break.

• 27:06Speaker 01

  We do all these kind of systems engineering things like FMEAs and DFMAs and hazard analyses that allow us to get convinced that, okay, we've thought about the way this could break systematically and we've used that to design the system so that should that computer fail or this tire blow out or that sensor fall off the truck, that the vehicle's going to be, find a way to respond safely to that, not create undue risk on the roadway. The next is we need to be continuously improving, right? As you point out, we're human and fallible, and so we need to be able to have processes at our company where we learn from what we see in the field, where we learn from our new experiences, and we feed that back in to refine the requirements, refine the system,

• 27:49Speaker 01

  and make it incrementally safer over time. We need to be resilient, which means that we need to foresee how people are going to misuse the technology. And importantly, we need to be robust to cyber security attack or cyber attacks, right?

• 28:02Kara Swisher?

  Which are open, that's one of your biggest challenges.

• 28:05Speaker 01

  Well, it is, I actually agree with you that today's vehicles have enough, right, have enough footprint that you can do real damage with a cyber attack if you could do it in a broad-based way. It's a lot easier to do damage to a vehicle by going up and physically touching it, right? And so- I'm not particularly worried about any individual vehicle because it's just cheaper, easier to go and cut a brake line or stab the tires or do whatever. And so we do have, you know, a 50 person cybersecurity.

• 28:37Kara Swisher?

  But you're in the south, you're in the southwest, very straight roads, highways which are standardized around the country, which is good for you. So you have something that's pretty, you know what a highway looks like. Wherever you drive, a highway is a highway.

• 28:49Speaker 01

  I think that's one part of it.

• 28:49Kara Swisher?

  And they're flat and warm, correct?

• 28:52Speaker 01

  They're not always warm. It's pretty cold in Texas right now.

• 28:55Kara Swisher?

  Okay, but it's not heavy snow.

• 28:57Speaker 01

  It's not heavy snow. But that's not really, so the shape of the road is not really the thing you worry about. That's like, we solved that in computer science and robotics decades ago. It's really the interaction with other actors in the road. And this is one of the places where I think people have had this misconception about, you know, city driving hard, freeway driving easy. And the truth of the matter is, you're right, most of the time driving down the freeway because it's kind of straight and it's limited, you know, it's pretty easy. The problem is we don't care about the most of the time. That's not the limiter. If most of the time, we could have launched self-driving cars 20 years ago. What we really care about is those events. And what happens is all the crazy stuff you see in the city, you see on the freeway,

• 29:40Speaker 01

  but you're moving at 70 miles an hour with a hell of a lot more kinetic energy. And so the outcomes are worse. And so we have to be really careful. We have to push the perception horizon out. You know, we see, we literally see people running across the freeway, five lanes of freeway in Dallas, or in Houston, you know, 60 mile an hour traffic, person playing Frogger going across the road. We saw, you know, a police chase going the wrong way down the road, right? And so we need to think about those. We need to design the system to be robust to them.

• 30:09Kara Swisher?

  Yeah.

• 30:10Speaker 01

  Even in those situations.

• 30:11Kara Swisher?

  People are crazy. Yes, I'm aware. So.

• 30:14Speaker 01

  It is annoyingly so.

• 30:15Kara Swisher?

  It is. So Jonathan, but people have to decide how, when safe is enough, right? And I'm going to agree with Elon Musk here for a second. But one of the things he said, when one bad thing happens to one of his cars, it gets tons of attention. He was whining again about it. But he's right, like, people get in accidents all day long. Or, you know, there's all this damage by gas guzzling vehicles. But we've sort of gotten used to that. When, what is the, what has to change? Is it younger people? What are the main factors? Is it just older people have to just die and then like younger people are comfortable in them?

• 30:49Speaker 04

  So I think there's, well.

• 30:52Kara Swisher?

  Sorry, folks.

• 30:53Speaker 04

  Hopefully, none of those bad things is gonna happen.

• 30:54Kara Swisher?

  Right.

• 30:56Speaker 04

  I think there's, there's a paradox that you've just pointed out, that we hold these vehicles to a higher standard than we do to ourselves.

• 31:04Kara Swisher?

  Mm hmm.

• 31:04Speaker 04

  And I think, you know, the truth is that it feels scary to put your trust in something that you don't understand or don't, don't know how to relate to. I think there's also a challenge that we all face, which is something we haven't resolved about the transportation system in general, which is that, you know, we've never answered this question before. Like, no one ever sat back and asked how safe is safe enough for any of the vehicles that we have, for any of the systems that we have. So I think autonomous vehicles are forcing us to kind of ask questions that have always been there. These are deep questions. And I think part of this is also bumps up against human values. I think what we're, what we're really feeling the friction on is like, I don't want to be killed by a machine.

• 31:47Kara Swisher?

  Right.

• 31:47Speaker 04

  Well, well, guess what? You don't really want to be killed by anyone, but today it can happen.

• 31:52Kara Swisher?

  Right.

• 31:52Speaker 04

  And so I think what we need to center is, what do we want out of our transportation system? We want a safe system for everyone, for all road users. And autonomous vehicles are kind of adding a lot of momentum to that conversation because they're forcing us to kind of come to grips with things that we really haven't resolved for a hundred years.

• 32:11Kara Swisher?

  Right, for a long time.

• 32:11Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 32:12Kara Swisher?

  Besides getting seat belts and airbags.

• 32:13Speaker 04

  Right.

• 32:13Kara Swisher?

  There hasn't been a lot of that. So let's pivot to jobs. As we said, we talked a little bit, but you, you basically, trucking jobs aren't good and Aurora will create better jobs, right? But you haven't been able to persuade the Teamsters Union, which represents Truck Drivers or the Owner-Operator Independent Drivers Association. They fought you in court and in state houses. And promises of, you know, new jobs, you've got to give them the jobs, right, presumably? So talk about why they're pushing, continue to push back on you.

• 32:42Speaker 01

  You have to ask them why they continue to push back on us, right?

• 32:45Kara Swisher?

  Right, okay.

• 32:45Speaker 01

  That's their perspective.

• 32:46Kara Swisher?

  I'm asking you.

• 32:46Speaker 01

  Um, you know, I, from our perspective, right? And everyone can have their own perspective.

• 32:54Kara Swisher?

  It's not a surprise that they're doing.

• 32:56Speaker 01

  No, it's not, right? They, they have an entrenched interest that they're defending, right?

• 33:01Kara Swisher?

  Have they been a real detriment to you? Obviously, unions are losing power across the country, but...

• 33:07Speaker 01

  What, what I would say is that, you know, we are a democracy. We have elected policymakers and they're forcing a conversation, right? And, and I may not agree with their viewpoint. I have a viewpoint and we're having the conversation. And to date, consistently, the conversation is netted out on the side of progress, right? That they have challenged in many states and pushed for requiring a driver in a driverless truck, and they've lost every time to date, right? And, and I think that is because there's a compelling argument around road safety. There's a compelling argument around economic growth. There's a compelling argument around sustainability.

• 33:48Speaker 01

  And importantly, as you kind of alluded to, this is probably the biggest change in transportation infrastructure in a century. The internal combustion engine, right? That built the 20th century American success, right? That allowed us to have interstate commerce and grew that, that, that basically built America, ultimately enabled us to win World War II, right? It was, it was kind of the platform that lifted the American economy. This will be the next platform for transportation, and we cannot afford to cede that to our adversaries. And, you know, this is the other winning argument, right? China is pursuing automated vehicle technology aggressively.

• 34:29Kara Swisher?

  Indeed. Although China's always like, China, like whatever they want to make an argument.

• 34:33Speaker 01

  Yeah, but, but there's, there's a reality to it.

• 34:34Kara Swisher?

  There's some reality, yes.

• 34:35Speaker 01

  Right? In that, you know, I, I think it was a legitimate concern we would have about having the American internet run through Chinese hardware. And if we were concerned about the bits, we should be equally concerned about the atoms, right? That will move on these trucks. Then so we've got regulation in the US. But this competition is going to play out globally. And I believe.

• 34:57Kara Swisher?

  Where you I assume you have aspirations of global.

• 35:00Speaker 01

  We would love to, right? We would ultimately like to be driving equipment around the world. And I think that having a US underpinned transportation economy globally is much better for the world and better for the US than having a Chinese.

• 35:15Kara Swisher?

  There's certainly a lesson in BYD, which is taking over the whole world. Well, we're not.

• 35:19Speaker 01

  And and why? Because we collectively did not get behind electric vehicles in the same way that the Chinese government did.

• 35:28Kara Swisher?

  We'll be back in a minute.

• 35:38Kara Swisher?

  Support for this show comes from Indeed. When the pressure's on and you need to hire the right person for the job, Indeed Sponsored Jobs has got your back. Instead of forcing you to spend tons of time searching, Indeed Sponsored Jobs matches you with quality candidates fast. According to their data, sponsored jobs posted directly on Indeed are 95% more likely to report a hire than non-sponsored jobs. Join the 3.3 million employers worldwide that use Indeed to connect with quality talent that fits their needs. Spend less time searching and more time actually interviewing candidates who check all your boxes. Less stress, less time, more results. When you need the right person to cut through the chaos, this is the job for Indeed Sponsored Jobs. And listeners to the show will get a $75 sponsored job credit

• 36:23Kara Swisher?

  to help get your job the premium status it deserves at indeed.com/podcast. Just go to indeed.com/podcast right now and support our show by saying you heard about Indeed on this podcast. That's indeed.com/podcast. Terms and conditions apply. Need the right hire fast? Then this is the job for Indeed Sponsored Jobs.

• 36:49Speaker 03

  Support for the show comes from Engine. Running a small business means every dollar has to work hard. But if your team is still booking travel the old way, it's costing you more than you think. Engine is the fastest growing travel and spend platform in the country, built specifically for businesses like yours. Book a trip in as little as two and a half minutes, earn up to 10% back on hotels. And in 2025, Engine customers save more than $300 million on travel with zero booking fees, no contracts, and no BS. More than 1,000 businesses join Engine every month. Join them and get $500 when your business signs up and starts traveling at engine.com/box.

• 37:33Kara Swisher?

  I'm Kara Swisher, and I like people who say the quiet part out loud. In fact, I love it. That's Tiger Sisters, a new podcast that recently joined the Vox Media Podcast Network. Cherie Brooke Lu and Jean Lu are real sisters who built their careers at LinkedIn and Goldman Sachs. On their weekly podcast, they're giving the next generation practical tips on how to get ahead, how to write emails people actually answer, how to make your LinkedIn profile stand out, and how to keep learning as an adult. It's straight talk about money, career, and relationships every Monday. Follow Tiger Sisters wherever you get your podcasts.

• 38:09Kara Swisher?

  So, Jo, we have seen this pattern before in transportation, these changes, the automation improved safety, but also eliminated job categories. In aviation, there used to be a pilot, a copilot, a commercial, in commercial cockpits. There used to be a radio operator, navigator, flight engineer. But planes are safer than ever, right? For the most part, except in disasters. But from a public health and policy perspective, what happened with that transition? Because it's still a vibrant industry for some of it. It's just not as many people. They don't need as many people. And someday, you know, they're working on autonomous planes right now, obviously.

• 38:44Speaker 04

  Yeah, I mean, I think a lot of planes could presumably just kind of fly themselves.

• 38:48Kara Swisher?

  They can now.

• 38:49Speaker 04

  You have the pilots there and the copilots for almost, for, you know, keeping an eye on things. As a transportation researcher, I think we can, we can definitely look to the past to learn lessons about the future. Um, these transitions are gonna take some time. I mean, I think I'm fundamentally optimistic and bullish on autonomy and autonomous vehicles and trucking. Uh, but I think, you know, one thing to keep in mind, and perhaps it's not the kind of uh popular view, is that these transitions are gonna take time. Right now, the vehicle fleet in this country takes about thirty years to turn over. And so if every single vehicle sold today was fully autonomous and every truck, uh, it's gonna take us really until like, you know, thirty or so years until we see this mix turn over. So I think we've got time

• 39:32Speaker 04

  for this transition to take place and to manage these transitions. I think what we need to be clear-eyed about is what is our vision for the system? And what's our pathway to get there? And part of our pathway is we don't want s- big social externalities like loss of jobs. Okay, that's part of our pathway. Let's prioritize that. Let's put that in the center. Um, right now, it doesn't feel like we've got a clear vision or a coherent pathway to get there. And so I think that's part of the challenge that we're trying to resolve.

• 40:01Kara Swisher?

  Yeah, clear vision and coherent pathway is not really America these days. But um, the Department of Transportation recently approved Aurora warning device to replace the reflective triangles truckers use when they stop on the side of the road and took a lawsuit to get there, though. Um, the DOT says it's developing regulations specific to automated trucks right now. Um, but basically, there there aren't any. What's it gonna take to get updated federal regulations here?

• 40:26Speaker 01

  I think getting to the point where there's something to regulate, right? I've actually been pretty um positive about the way the federal government has approached this, that they've put guidelines in place. You know, the idea that there's no regulation is kind of i- is not accurate.

• 40:43Kara Swisher?

  Well, you're under trucking regulations.

• 40:44Speaker 01

  Well, we're under trucking regulations and car regulations, and there's always a backstop, right? That both at the state and federal level, if the state authorities or the federal authorities believe you're creating unreasonable risk on the roadway, you can kick those vehicles off the roadway. We've seen that actually in use with Uber back in the day. Um, where they were kicked out of both Arizona and California. And so so there is a stick that's available. Um, but to to answer your question directly, I think there is value in federal regulation because this is fundamentally interstate commerce issue. Um, and that avoiding fifty different regulations would be helpful. Now.

• 41:24Speaker 01

  We don't need it, uh, that we will adapt and work and, you know.

• 41:30Kara Swisher?

  But there'll be certain states that are more willing than others.

• 41:33Speaker 01

  And today, the majority, the vast majority of US states are either open to or enthusiastic about this technology. And when it comes to the warning triangle thing, like, again, it's great that we got this waiver. We would have found a way to drop triangles if that was it. But it's also common sense, right? The truck drivers walking down the side of the freeway to drop cones is immensely dangerous. And other ways, like, other vehicles that are stopped on the freeway, what they do? They turn on blinking lights. Because that's better than walking down the freeway and putting cones. And, you know, the technology breakthrough we had for this was turn on blinking lights on the truck. So, yeah, we're, yeah, that's what we do at Aurora.

• 42:10Kara Swisher?

  And that took a lawsuit, too, yeah?

• 42:12Speaker 01

  Well, and we've got to, we've got a waiver from them. The lawsuit has moved on, and we're now engaged constructively.

• 42:18Kara Swisher?

  Were you against the cone people?

• 42:22Speaker 01

  Uh, yeah, Big Cone, Big Cone, Stephen is down, yeah. No, um, so, so there's a rule on the books.

• 42:29Kara Swisher?

  I even believe you should win on that one.

• 42:31Speaker 01

  Yeah, on Big Cone, yeah, we did too. And ultimately, we're kind of continuing through the process. And, you know, what we see with the current administration is that Secretary Duffy's innovation agenda is pretty well aligned with this. We've seen positive comments from the Secretary and from the Vice President about the importance of automated trucking. We've seen legislation introduced at the federal level by Representative Fong from California, who's a Republican, called America Drives. And so, we're seeing some momentum here. And I think that's great.

• 43:04Kara Swisher?

  Was that different with Democrats?

• 43:06Speaker 01

  Uh, it depends on which Democrats. Under the Obama administration, that was when I first started talking with Secretary of Transportation and DOT about this, very enthusiastic and positive. Under the first Trump administration, enthusiastic and positive. The Biden administration was not focused on this at all. And then, with this administration, we're seeing, again, support.

• 43:28Kara Swisher?

  Right. So now universities are one of the few institutions that are structurally designed to think beyond political and market considerations. So Jonathan, as an academic researcher, talks to lawmakers, policymakers, industry stakeholders. Do universities have any role in the web of interest between private industry and government agencies?

• 43:46Speaker 04

  Definitely. I think I can speak from my own experience with respect to transportation safety in this area is that universities offer kind of a neutral and independent place for data, for ideas, and for kind of arbiters of new technologies and emerging things in the innovation ecosystem. And so I think in that way, they become a kind of a one of the pillars that can advance the innovation in this country and the competition. We see this all the time, actually, and I think one of the, you know, we poke fun at academics for taking forever to write a paper or so on, but there's more and more industry leaders and companies coming to universities and wanting to work with us on issues related to safety and autonomy.

• 44:25Kara Swisher?

  And the broader AI advancements in public transportation, right?

• 44:28Speaker 04

  And I'd say beyond that, I think what's most striking about this is that it's often the leaders who are coming to us. It's almost like those who are ready to prove their technologies work and that they're safe come knocking. And I think in a way, it's a test. I think the other role that universities can play in this ecosystem is that they can begin to advance the kind of the broader societal agenda of the public good that can come of these. So one real opportunity that exists with autonomous vehicles and trucks is that once one catastrophic thing happens, it should never happen again because the entire vehicle fleet should learn from it. And so the opportunity for something like data pooling for safety critical incidents.

• 45:11Kara Swisher?

  Between all the companies.

• 45:12Speaker 04

  Between all the companies. It's not happening right now.

• 45:14Kara Swisher?

  Right.

• 45:14Speaker 04

  But universities could form consortia where these data are shared. There is precedent. It happens in aviation industry already. And these and everyone can learn from those events.

• 45:23Kara Swisher?

  Right. There's not they're not operating autonomously from a safety point of view. Airlines are. That's certainly a good comparison.

• 45:28Speaker 04

  Yeah. So I think that in that way, I think universities and research can play a critical role in advancing this and not slowing down the industry. I think. That's the other kind of stereotype is that, you know, things are, things are moving quickly. Academics and researchers can move rapidly with them.

• 45:46Kara Swisher?

  With them. So Chris, right now you have no competition really that I can see it. But at some point, many other, there's going to be other successful autonomous trucking companies, including from China, as you noted. You'll have to compete on price, speed. Pressures will be to cut costs to get from point A to point B faster. Presumably, there are at least one company that's willing to cut corners or to gain market share. That's often a way to do it. Do you, how do you look at? I mean, there's more competition in the, in the autonomous vehicle, the car space than there is in the truck space. Why is that? And you moved from the car space to the truck space.

• 46:21Speaker 01

  We focused, we were intending to operate cars and vehicles. And we've decided to focus on trucks because we just think it's, it's a better, more impactful market for us to go after. And one where we think we have some unique advantages.

• 46:35Speaker 01

  How do we think about the, the kind of the impact of pressure for shipping versus safety? Like I mentioned, the company's mission is to deliver the benefits of self-driving technology safely, quickly and broadly. And that safely is first for a reason. And it's kind of a decision-making paradigm for us, right? Do it safely, move as quickly as you can, think about scale.

• 46:56Speaker 01

  For us, you know, when we talk to our customers, the trucking companies, safety is top of mind for them. And so by continuing to be transparent, right? If you want to see something really boring, youtube.com at Aurora Driver. We live stream the Aurora Driver every day, right? That kind of transparency builds trust. And we think the customers who, who have an experience with us, work with us. We step the, the standard for what it means to be safe in the road. It's going to be hard to unseat that.

• 47:27Kara Swisher?

  Unless like there's a catastrophic accident, right? With you in the middle of it.

• 47:31Speaker 01

  And again, part of building trust is also to position yourself for forgiveness, right? That, that by demonstrating that we're doing these things the right way, that we are, we've taken the steps, that we engage appropriately with the regulators and the policymakers, that we're transparent about this, you know. It's how you get through those moments. And I actually think it's warranted, right? That we are doing something new. There should be scrutiny. We should be held to a standard. And what happens, you know, you remember the days, right? The very first days of the first accident we had at Google with self-driving car. National news.

• 48:08Kara Swisher?

  Yes.

• 48:08Speaker 01

  Right? And then the second one, slightly less visible, national news. At this point, just given the scale of operations, I am sure there is a way more crash every day.

• 48:18Kara Swisher?

  Mm-hmm.

• 48:19Speaker 01

  Right? Not because they're bad, not because there's any kind of problem with the system, just because of scale and people on the road.

• 48:23Kara Swisher?

  Well, they had a good one in San Francisco the other day where three of them were facing off.

• 48:27Speaker 01

  That one made national news.

• 48:28Kara Swisher?

  Yeah, that was good though.

• 48:30Speaker 01

  But that was novel, right?

• 48:31Kara Swisher?

  That was in my neighborhood, yeah.

• 48:32Speaker 01

  But what happens is people are like, okay, we've scrutinized this. We get it. We understand it. Okay.

• 48:36Kara Swisher?

  Yeah.

• 48:37Speaker 01

  Right?

• 48:37Kara Swisher?

  Chris and I were joking, that just happened to me the other day with some lady who was texting and driving and wouldn't move her car out of the middle of the road. So it's common for people, but as you said.

• 48:45Speaker 01

  People make mistakes, yeah.

• 48:45Kara Swisher?

  So last question, we only have just two minutes. Let's fast forward 10 years. I'm driving down a busy stretch of Interstate 95 here on the East Coast in December of 2035. I probably shouldn't be driving, so I'll be really old, but.

• 48:57Speaker 01

  Be driven by some self-driving vehicle, yeah.

• 48:59Kara Swisher?

  Whatever, I'm driving probably. I don't actually like to drive. It's after dark, it's windy and snowing. Driverless freight trucks are all around me. I hate driving around trucks in general, especially on 95. What happens for that to be a totally normal occurrence? What has to happen? Jonathan first, and then Chris.

• 49:17Speaker 04

  The safety first has to be.

• 49:20Kara Swisher?

  That I don't feel nervous, I feel nervous around trucks when I drive now.

• 49:23Speaker 04

  And so the paradigm that Chris articulated, the safety first is going to build trust and it's going to be demonstrating time and again, also the learning that's happening with these vehicles, so that they've been in this situation, they've learned, they know how to operate, they know also how to handle the unpredictability of human drivers. Because I think part of the challenge here is that the mix of road users is going to create new vulnerabilities. And so I think you may actually end up driving with more confidence in that circumstance than what you would know.

• 49:54Kara Swisher?

  No, I'd like to get all people off the road. That's my goal. You know, I wrote a column in the New York Times where I said, only but Carl will move as quaint as owning a horse someday, which I didn't think would happen. But so you think safety is the critical thing, that people feel safe. What about you, Chris?

• 50:09Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think that's it, right? I think as a company, we need to continue to execute. We're doing a great job of that today, but we need to continue to put safety first. And I think you will be safer on the road. You know, in those situations, I joke that, you know, what a person does is they drive down the road and they can't see anything, so they drive at freeway speeds. It's like faith-based driving. There's nothing there. And the self-driving truck is going to go, oh, jeez, that's a blizzard. I can only see so far. I'm going to slow down. Right? And that will enable the roadway to be safer. You'll avoid these 120-car pileups that you have in snowstorms today because they just won't happen because these vehicles are controlling their speed appropriate for the conditions in a way that people are too impatient and too self-confident to really do themselves.

• 50:54Kara Swisher?

  So where, when will they be on 95?

• 50:58Speaker 01

  Certainly before 10 years from now.

• 51:00Kara Swisher?

  Before 10 years from now? So that's the, that's the goal, is to get them all over the country?

• 51:04Speaker 01

  We expect to be driving, like I said, across the Sunbelt next year, and then we'll start to work up through the country. People make a big deal about snow. It's not that big a deal. You know, when you're building an engineering system, you want to kind of find the parts that you can get done and get that out and start getting, get out and benefit from it. And then you add little bits here and there. And we've done that over the course of this year, driving from just daytime to day and night to in January, day, night, and in the rain. Still, it's just another thing to add at some point.

• 51:31Kara Swisher?

  And where's the worst place that you don't, you're like, oh, I better not go there with my truck?

• 51:34Speaker 01

  Um, I have seen those crazy internet videos of traffic in India. I think we're going to be a little ways off from that.

• 51:41Kara Swisher?

  Okay. All right. Well, on that note, thank you so much, Chris Urmson and Jonathan.

• 51:45Speaker 01

  Thank you.

• 51:46Kara Swisher?

  Thank you.

• 51:47Speaker 01

  Thanks, Bill.

• 51:50Kara Swisher?

  On with Kara Swisher is produced by Christian Castor-Russell, Michelle Aloy, Megan Burney, and Kalen Lynch. Nishat Kurwa is Vox Media's executive producer of podcasts. Special thanks to Catherine Barner and Madeleine LaPlante-Duby. Aaliyah Jackson engineered this episode, and our theme music is by Trackademics. If you're already following the show, you get a free traffic cone. If not, you'll be stuck watching the Aurora YouTube livestream all day. Go wherever you listen to podcasts, search for On with Kara Swisher, and hit follow. Thanks for listening to On with Kara Swisher from New York Magazine, the Vox Media Podcast Network, and us. We'll be back on Thursday with more.

• 52:33Speaker 03

  Support for the show comes from Engine. Running a small business means every dollar has to work hard. But if your team is still booking travel the old way, it's costing you more than you think. Engine is the fastest-growing travel and spend platform in the country, built specifically for businesses like yours. Book a trip in as little as two and a half minutes, earn up to 10% back on hotels. And in 2025, Engine customers save more than $300 million on travel with zero booking fees, no contracts, and no BS. More than 1,000 businesses join Engine every month. Join them and get $500 when your business signs up and starts traveling at engine.com/vox.