After years of testing, Aurora Innovation Inc., Kodiak Robotics Inc. and Gatik AI Inc. claim that they are ready to get rid of safety drivers of trucks being guided by software and different sensors including cameras, radar and lidar, which send pulses of light that bounce off objects.

The three startups have already hauled cargo for big companies such as FedEx, Kroger, Tyson Foods and Walmart.

In an interview, Chris Urmson, co-founder and chief executive officer of Aurora, said by the end of 2024, the company is slated to reach the point where it starts “operating those trucks without drivers on board.”

Mountain View, California-based startup Gatik AI has already driven trucks without a human driver in Arkansas and Canada. In an interview, Gautam Narang, Gatik’s co-founder and CEO, explained that the company uses smaller, box trucks and plans to deliver from distribution centers to stores. In 2024, the startup expects to deploy driverless trucks in the Dallas area “at scale,” added Narang.

Meanwhile, Kodiak CEO Don Burnette, said the company plans to “start small in 2024 and gradually ramp it up as we build confidence in the system that we didn’t miss anything.” Burnette added that Kodiak is aware of “the damage that can be done,” like the case of robotaxis in San Francisco.

Kodiak’s first operations without a human driver include short runs near the company’s truck terminal near Dallas and extend from there, added Burnette.

The three startups will be supported by truckport partners who will help with refueling their diesel-powered fleets and will offer roadside assistance in case of a flat tire.

Amid the various accidents linked to autonomous vehicles, the startups said the risk is worth it since the technology can allegedly help “improve highway safety and lower transportation costs.” (Related: California DMV SUSPENDS Cruise’s driverless car permits for misrepresenting information on safety.)

However, critics said these companies have an incentive to reduce the losses that investors have been financing during the delicate development and testing phase.

Driverless trucks lack regulation, transparency and comprehensive data collection

Cathy Chase, president of Advocates for Highway and Auto Safety, explained that they are worried about the lack of regulation, transparency and comprehensive data collection.

Critics have also warned that trucks pose severe dangers because they often travel at highway speeds and weigh as much as 80,000 pounds. This is more than 15 times as much as General Motors’ controversial Cruise driverless robotaxi.

For now, the federal government has left regulation of driverless large trucks mostly up to states, which resulted in a confusing patchwork of rules. California suspended Cruise operations in October after several reported incidents in San Francisco.

California’s absence of rules for allowing trucks to be tested on public roads encouraged the three driverless truck startups and others to target Texas for testing and deployment.

The problems that Cruise’s robotaxis faced on the streets of San Francisco, such as unpredictable pedestrians and sudden road closures, aren’t a major hurdle for driverless trucks, claimed the three companies.

Trucks usually transport cargo on fixed routes, usually on highways that require much less interaction with passenger vehicles and pedestrians.

Aside from saving money on trucker salaries, autonomous trucks can travel longer than the 11-hour limit enforced on human drivers.

Autonomous trucks also have sensors that scan in all directions several times a second to identify objects, which allegedly speeds up reaction time. The companies also said there are estimated savings on emissions of 10 percent or more because the vehicles will “stay just below the speed limit and travel at a steady cadence.”

According to statistics compiled by the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration (FMCSA), 5,700 large trucks weighing 10,001 pounds or more were involved in fatal crashes in 2021. The majority of those incidents were from trucks with a gross weight of 33,001 pounds or more. These Class 8 trucks are almost as big as those used in Aurora and Kodiak’s fleets.

Driverless trucks are not immune to road accidents

While driverless trucks haven’t had any at-fault incidents with other vehicles in testing with safety drivers, the FMCSA report suggests that they’re not completely accident-proof.

At least two-thirds of fatal accidents occur when a person, object, animal or other vehicle veers into a truck’s lane. Data collected by a self-driving truck’s computer system is essential to determining what caused an accident.

Brian Ossenbeck, a transportation industry analyst with JPMorgan Chase, warned that the companies planning to go driverless in 2024 can’t just claim that they are “better than humans.” He added that they must first “reach that superhuman level, at least initially, until there’s broader acceptance. And who knows how long that would take.”

If things go as planned, safety drivers, whose hands usually hover above the wheel without touching it while the truck is in transit, will no longer be needed by 2024.

Urmson said the company plans for things to feel like a normal day, but with their trucks transporting cargo without human drivers. Watch the video below as driverless trucks are being tested on public roads.

This video is from the ZGoldenReport channel on Brighteon.com.

More related stories:

• Amazon prepares army of 750,000 ROBOTS to eliminate HUMAN workers.
• “Confused” industrial robot crushed a worker to death at a vegetable packing plant in South Korea.
• Uber Eats to deploy an additional 2,000 delivery robots, putting more jobs in peril.

Sources include:

• Bloomberg.com
• CNBC.com
• Brighteon.com

The collapse was the word used by one industry CEO to define what just happened to freight rates, and that is putting several trucking companies at serious risk of bankruptcy. But according to Western States Trucking Association, the ongoing downturn in the freight market is only a sign something far more distressing is about to break out in America.

When the health crisis locked people at home and Americans started to order more goods online, the freight market boomed, and rates shot up by up to 500% in some areas. But things have started to cool off in 2022, and since then, per-mile rates have been plunging at the fastest pace on record.

By November, prices were already nearing pre-pandemic levels. On the other hand, higher maintenance prices, as well as an increase in the cost of capital, and other difficulties in operating have resulted in a brutal mix for a notoriously cyclical industry — one that has the potential to be worse than famous trucking downturns experienced in 2019 and in 2008-09.

Today, instead of a shortage, the freight market is flooded with thousands of small-scale owner-operators and carriers of all sizes. But the threat of a deep recession is now reducing demand for goods, and as a result, cargo volumes are plunging all over the US. On top of that, data provided by Freight Waves shows that the per-mile rate fell to $1.49. At the peak of the boom in 2021, drivers were pulling in as much as $3.01 per mile. This means that freight rates declined by 52% so far, and could go even lower in the months ahead.

This means that there is far less money to be made in the sector. For those who made high investments to be able to enter the industry and profit from the boom, this may be just the beginning of a financial disaster. Since December, thousands of small carriers have revoked their operating authority, and bankruptcies started to arise in the truckload industry.

To make things worse, a recent CNBC supply chain survey that analyzed inventories and warehouse space tracked a decrease in truck movements in and out of the warehouse, revealed that ocean freight orders are down 50% year over year and that will keep impacting both rail and road Transportation in the short and long run, with trucking executives calling it “freight recession.”This along with a 40% decrease in manufacturing orders, are very bad news for the freight market.

The economic recession that is now upon us is going to shake entire industries to the core, millions of layoffs are expected, and economic and financial uncertainty will only grow worse. The crisis that is now unfolding before us will be unlike anything we’ve ever experienced, and the freight market meltdown is just one of the multiple indicators that something is terribly wrong in our system and that the dominoes have already started to fall.

Article and video cross-posted from Epic Economist.

In addition to the direct impact on California’s 70,000 owner-operators who have seven days to cease long-standing independent businesses, the impact of taking tens of thousands of truck drivers off the road will have devastating repercussions on an already fragile supply chain, increasing costs and worsening runaway inflation.

The new law, passed and signed by Democrats, essentially outlaws independent contractors from operating transport trucks in the state of California. When it goes into effect later this week — after the US Supreme Court refused to intervene last week — California will be hit with a “truckpocalypse” shutdown of transportation capacity.

While some transportation companies maintain full-time employees to operate long haul rigs, many drivers are “owner-operators” who own their own trucks and who pick up contract jobs from the hundreds of shipping and transport companies that operate in California. These owner-operators pay their own taxes, buy their own health insurance and cover their own fuel costs. California Democrats, however, think that independent freedom for truckers should be criminalized, since they want all drivers to be union workers in corrupt union organizations that Democrats routinely use for money laundering operations (dems vote to award public money to the unions, and the unions agree to kick back campaign donations to Democrats).

So they’ve outlawed independent contractors in the trucking industry. The new law goes into effect this week and is expected to cause widespread logjams, cost increases and delays to transportation across America. Say hello to accelerated food inflation…

Catastrophic collapse of trucking and transportation in California

As FreightWaves.com reports, the implications of this law will be nothing short of catastrophic for transportation infrastructure in and out of California:

Matt Schrap, the CEO of the Harbor Trucking Association, which represents drayage companies, issued a brief but harsh statement in response to the high court’s decision.

“It is extremely unfortunate that this Court couldn’t see through their own political agenda to identify the obvious preemption that exists under the F4A,” he wrote in an email to FreightWaves. “This ruling will have far reaching impacts that will upend the industry as we know it. Tens of thousands of truck drivers will be driven out of established business relationships within a week. No doubt this will further stress the supply chain.”

Not only do transport trucks carry food and consumer goods in and out of California, they routinely distribute ocean freight containers from California ports to inland destinations. The containers move from ships to trucks, and those trucks take them to retail distribution hubs or domestic manufacturers for offloading.

Under California’s new AB5 law, the logistics challenge of receiving good carried by road are going to be a nightmare. Added to this is the fact that Union Pacific railroad is already slashing the number of rail cars it carries for existing customers (such as CF Industries, a fertilizer manufacturer), which means railroads have no excess capacity to pick up the slack from trucking.

America’s logistics infrastructure is crumbling. And with diesel engine oil additives in short supply and expected to run out in about 7 weeks, a huge question looms over America: How will food, coal, spare parts and consumer goods get delivered anywhere? If the truckers are blocked from California’s highways, and diesel engine oil is running out, and railroads are slashing rail cars, and diesel fuel itself is running out in some areas, the scenario for the second half of 2022 doesn’t look very rosy at this point.

Stolen elections have catastrophic consequences.

And preppers are the new geniuses.

Get more details on all this and much more in today’s Situation Update podcast: Brighteon.com/5b129bb4-9a37-4451-868f-a8453d16dd10

Editor’s Commentary: For years, I was the guy who called out “Chicken Littles” for saying the sky was falling when it wasn’t. I ripped on people for buying two-year supplies of toilet paper in early 2020. Today, I’ve reversed course completely because now I DO believe the sky is falling. What changed my mind? I realized that what we are seeing is a manufactured financial collapse designed to usher in The Great Reset and subjugate the people.

What we are seeing is a perfect storm in which various factors are tearing down the foundations of food infrastructure, financial stability, and societal order. The Truckpocalypse is just one of those factors. This is why we work tirelessly day and night to highlight articles and videos telling the truth. Corporate media isn’t going to do it. They’re helping make The Great Reset happen.

We launched two new Substacks to highlight stories like this. The Economic Collapse Substack is all financial news as it pertains to the manufactured crisis that is designed to bring down capitalism and establish a Neo-Marxist world order. The Late Prepper Substack is, as the name implies, for people like me who are late to the game in getting prepared for what seems to be coming. We are facing unprecedented challenges and the United States is not immune. The most dangerous words still being spoken by many patriots today is, “That could never happen in the United States of America.”

It can. If we don’t do what it takes to stop it, then it most certainly WILL happen here. Now is not the time to watch Netflix and hope everything works itself out. Now is the time to get ready and to fight the powers-that-be through protests, raising awareness, and praying for a reprieve.

I wasn’t Chicken Little before, but today I’m finally jumping in the game to let as many people as possible know three things. First, this is not all coincidence. The crises we’re facing are manufactured. Second, political solutions are not really solutions at all because far too many of our elected officials are part of the problem. Lastly, we are not done yet. As bad as things may seem, we can still fight the good fight until the day they come to our doors in an attempt to take away our freedoms. Be ready for that day as it seems almost certain to be coming. If that means buying a two-year supply of toilet paper, I’m with you.

Discover more information-packaged podcasts, raw intel reports and interviews each day: https://www.brighteon.com/channels/HRreport

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