Out of the cooler and into the history books.
Fully loaded with a cargo of Budweiser beer, a self-driving truck delivered the first known commercial shipment of goods under autonomous operations last week. With software created by self-driving truck pioneer Otto, a tractor-trailer departed a weigh station along Interstate 25 in Fort Collins, Colorado, last week, and drove without incident in fully autonomous mode 120 miles south to Colorado Springs, reaching a maximum speed of 55 mph along the way. Otto and Anheuser-Busch announced the development this morning.
The truck completed the on-ramp-to-exit journey without human intervention. Otto executives and Colorado Department of Transportation (CDOT) officials hailed the demonstration as a landmark step toward safer roads and a trucking industry that could be more nimble if drivers are able to rest while the truck drives for portions of the journey.
But there are questions about how the project was vetted. In a press release summarizing the venture, Otto says a professional truck driver was in the vehicle the entire route, monitoring the delivery from the sleeper berth—a location that would leave him or her unable to respond to any immediate problems that arose along the way.
For testing purposes, other states require a driver behind the wheel. In California, for example, where more than a dozen automotive and technology companies have logged years of experience testing self-driving vehicles, a law requires that a human operator be present behind the wheel for testing on public roads. Other states have similar laws that govern testing of autonomous vehicles on public roads. But not Colorado.
“We don’t really have regulations that have expressly enabled or prohibited a driverless vehicle,” Shailen Bhatt, executive director of CDOT, told Car and Driver. “So it was sort of in this gray area. We’ll work on this going forward.”
Otto contacted Colorado officials about three months ago to gauge their interest in partnering on the project. Since the state had no established parameters for examining or vetting autonomous technology, Bhatt said, they worked with Otto to set up benchmarks and used state troopers to monitor the technology on previous treks between Fort Collins and Colorado Springs.
“Over the last month, we’ve required hundreds of hours of testing, both with us and the state patrol in the vehicle, and said, ‘Prove to us that this technology works,’ ” he said. “Our state-patrol partners convinced us, through ride-alongs and data, that we can green-light this. We had to be careful of the driver at the wheel not taking control. So we said the truck had to complete the full distance, and only then we said okay.”
Bhatt said the truck completed the route six to eight times with troopers watching and no interventions prior to the demonstration. “Once they accomplished that, it was obvious the technology could handle it,” he said.
By contrast, Uber, which purchased Otto for a reported $680 million earlier this year, requires human safety drivers behind the wheel of its autonomous vehicles that are currently picking up passengers as part of a pilot project in Pittsburgh. Google, which tests extensively in California as well as in Arizona, Texas, and Washington, also has human safety drivers behind the wheel for its more than 2.1 million miles of testing in autonomous mode, an average of about 25,000 miles per week. Earlier this year, a Toyota executive said that millions of miles weren’t enough to measure the reliability of autonomous technology. He said, “We need trillion-mile reliability.”
On its website, Otto reports it has accumulated “hundreds of thousands” of miles of testing. A spokesperson did not return a request for specific information on the number of miles of autonomous testing it had conducted.
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“Our state-patrol partners convinced us, through ride-alongs and data, that ‘OK, we can green-light this.’ ”
—Shailen Bhatt
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CDOT workers ensured the road striping along I-25 was adequate during the testing. A convoy of state troopers and support vehicles escorted the vehicle down the interstate when the official driverless journey took place last week. That convoy included a state trooper who drove about a minute ahead of the vehicle, a trooper 10 seconds ahead of the vehicle and a lead car immediately in front of the truck, according to Bhatt. Another state trooper trailed the truck, along with two more vehicles with technicians and engineers aboard. Bhatt observed the testing from one of the trailing cars.
“You know, it’s incredibly boring and incredibly terrifying at the same time, to watch a driverless car carry a load of freight—and potentially your career—at a pretty sedate speed down the road,” Bhatt said.
He said that testing on public roads is necessary to ensure the safety of the technology before it’s deployed for widespread use. “This technology has been tested on tracks and roadways,” Bhatt said. “So this, at some point, had to happen. To the extent we can deploy this technology, it will help save lives and reduce congestion. So to me, that is the whole purpose.”
For whatever short-term concerns about the rigor of safety benchmarks for testing this fledgling technology, there’s potential for massive, long-term safety benefits. In 2015, there were 4067 fatalities on U.S. roads in crashes involving large trucks, according to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration. That’s an increase of 4.1 percent from the previous year, and it comes amid a series of high-profile crashes involving tired truck drivers.
Overall, 94 percent of all traffic crashes are attributable to human error or human behavior, according to NHTSA. Eliminating those errors, for Anheuser-Busch and Otto, is one of the biggest benefits of this self-driving technology.
“By embracing this technology, both organizations are actively contributing to the creation of a safer and more efficient transportation network,” said Otto co-founder Lior Ron. “We are excited to have reached this milestone together, and look forward to further rolling out our technology on the nation’s highways.”
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