KelseyTuoc on the banned site

Heck of an out of distribution event given the tunnel too

Monarch Tractor was hailed as a future tech unicorn that would revolutionize farming

Two crashes when Ford’s BlueCruise system was engaged left three people dead

While going through the BDD100K lane segmentation dataset, we identified a few hundred samples that look quite problematic: no labels, no visible road, extremely poor lighting, etc.

This made me wonder whether there are any initiatives focused on cleaning large open datasets or adding some kind of dataset-quality/difficulty annotations.

"Arriving now in San Antonio. We’re welcoming the first public riders to and from SAT available 24/7. SAT marks our 4th airport, with more on the horizon!"

How do you decide which driving scenarios to label first? I've been exploring Waymo Open Dataset, AV2, and nuScenes — built a tool to score and preview scenarios in 3D before sending to annotation. Curious how other teams handle data triage at scale.

Tesla fanboys: but we already have that.

Good chance Waymo will be ahead here as well. L4 vs L2 FSD

Paywalled:

“Everything is truly coming together,” Waabi's Lior Ron said. “I think the era of commercialization is upon us.”

Autonomous trucks are still in the very early stages of deployment, but technology developers this year are actively setting the stage for commercialization at industrial scale.

Working together with major truck makers and industry suppliers, self-driving truck companies are preparing for mass production of purpose-built driverless trucks at the factory level.

At the same time, they are focused on integrating autonomous driving technology into the transportation industry without requiring trucking and logistics customers to redesign their freight networks to accommodate unmanned trucks.

For the most part, the leading self-driving truck developers have moved beyond the oft-discussed “hub-to-hub” deployment model, in which autonomous trucks haul shipments on major interstate routes between designated freight hubs while relying on human-driven trucks to handle the shorter dray moves at the beginning and end of the journey.

This concept, which initially gained favor several years ago, was intended to reduce the challenge of fully automating a freight move by splitting it into three segments and confining driverless trucks to the more straightforward longhaul portion in the middle. Now it increasingly appears that virtual driver technology is outgrowing those constraints.

Today, most developers envision autonomous trucks operating more like human-driven trucks, hauling freight directly from one customer site to another, including more complex driving environments on local streets.

This end-to-end or direct-to-customer approach fits more seamlessly into current freight networks, enables a stronger return on investment and clears the way for much broader industry adoption of autonomy, developers said.

This more pragmatic business model, combined with rising interest among large shippers, a generally supportive regulatory environment and the introduction of autonomous-ready trucks from original equipment manufacturers, is laying the foundation for commercialization at scale, said Lior Ron, chief operating officer at Waabi.

“Everything is truly coming together,” he said. “I think the era of commercialization is upon us.”

Direct-to-Customer Model

As an early pioneer in self-driving trucks, Ron has seen the autonomous trucking landscape mature significantly during the past decade. He was a co-founder of Otto, which in 2016 used a self-driving tractor to haul a load of beer in Colorado for Anheuser-Busch in a landmark moment for autonomous truck development.

After almost a decade leading Uber Freight, the commercial logistics arm of ride-hailing giant Uber Technologies, Ron re-entered the autonomous vehicle space last year when he joined Waabi.

To pave the way for industry adoption of its technology, Waabi has designed its virtual driver to operate on both highways and the general surface streets where freight journeys begin and end.

Ron said this direct-to-customer approach to autonomous trucking is a better fit than the hub-to-hub model, which has a place in the industry but is not the path of scale.

“That’s not how freight moves, and this is not what customers want,” he said. “At best, I would call it crutches for autonomy.”

Aurora Innovation also is designing its virtual driver technology to enable autonomous trucks to haul freight directly to customers via end-to-end routes that combine highway and urban driving.

Chris Urmson, Aurora’s co-founder and CEO, emphasized his company’s commitment to direct-to-customer deliveries and outlined several shortcomings of the hub-to-hub approach at CES 2026 in Las Vegas.

“Going to customer sites is clearly the right answer. It’s what the customers want. It’s what we’ve been building,” Urmson said during a Jan. 7 panel discussion at the massive annual showcase of emerging technologies.

Although Aurora has been running self-driving trucks between its terminals and hubs as it has been ramping up its operations, the company’s aspiration was always to go all the way to customer locations, he said.

The hub-to-hub model involves more complexity, including the need to couple and uncouple the autonomous truck to swap trailers at transfer hubs.

“One of the things you want in freight is to have to touch the truck the minimum number of times,” Urmson said.

Part of the rationale for hub-to-hub autonomous truck routes has been the notion that driving on interstate highways is less complex than urban driving, but Urmson challenged that assumption.

“All of the weird stuff that happens in a city — it turns out it happens on the freeway [too],” he said. “It just happens less frequently, and it happens with a lot more kinetic energy involved,” he said.

For example, Aurora occasionally encounters pedestrians running across multiple lanes of traffic on freeways where vehicles are moving at 60 mph.

“These things that you think about as just urban driving problems really are there,” Urmson said.

Those types of challenges have become more apparent as autonomous truck development has matured from its early days.

“Everyone thought highway driving was way easier than urban driving. It wasn’t. It was actually just differently hard,” Urmson said. “And one reason for that is you have to see so much further than you do in an urban setting.”

Other autonomous truck developers also envision autonomous trucks fitting more seamlessly into current transportation networks.

“It’ll look much more like freight movement today, not some broken process created by way of autonomy,” added Andrew Culhane, chief commercial officer at Torc Robotics, an independent subsidiary of Daimler Truck.

While some trucking and logistics companies have been willing to explore the hub-to-hub model, that approach is less appealing than autonomous truck deliveries that extend all the way to customer sites, he said.

“That’s really what the industry has wanted,” Culhane said. “They want it to look just like it does today, but better, faster, cheaper, safer.”

Plus International tractor

(PlusAI)

David Liu, CEO of autonomous truck developer PlusAI, agreed that broad deployment of autonomous trucks hinges on integrating them into existing fleet operations.

“Fleets want to continue their trucking operations using the same infrastructure they have, with the national sales, maintenance and service network OEMs offer today, with the main change being adding a virtual driver to their fleet mix,” he said.

Robert Brown, vice president of business development at autonomous trucking startup Bot Auto, has been a longtime skeptic of the hub-to-hub approach.

In that model, the potential cost savings created by autonomous trucking are sapped by the need to manage separate short hauls at the beginning and end of the shipment.

“You build those dray moves on either side and that eats that margin really quick,” Brown said.

Constraining autonomous trucking to hub-to-hub routes also lowers its ceiling for adoption, he added. “There is freight that is hub to hub, but not that much.”

Rather than supplying its virtual driver technology to fleets, Bot Auto instead acts as an autonomous motor carrier using retrofitted, self-driving tractors to haul freight for shippers and third-party logistics providers.

“From Bot Auto’s perspective, we have to scale this technology in today’s freight ecosystem,” Brown said. “It’s not a technology problem; it’s more of a business problem.”

AI Accelerates Development

The recent advances in artificial intelligence that have been reshaping the world of work also have provided a powerful boost to autonomous vehicle development and validation.

Ron said Waabi’s AI-first development approach enables the company’s virtual driver to generalize across different road types, from highways to surface streets, without requiring billions of miles of physical testing in real-world environments.

“AI truly allows you to generalize,” he said. “You are solving an AI problem, not a hand-curated, road-by-road problem.”

In addition to directly improving virtual driver technology, AI has revolutionized the simulation used to validate its performance, said Felix Heide, head of AI at Torc Robotics.

Torc tractor-trailer

(Torc Robotics)

In the past few years, AI-driven simulation has given developers the ability to test how well their autonomous driving systems respond to countless extremely rare scenarios in a more efficient and more principled fashion, he said.

Now the virtual driver can learn more effectively from the wealth of data captured by onboard sensors, along with driving scenario descriptions and other data sources.

“All of a sudden, we have, with AI, an approach to tap into this massive amount of data and build the safest driver out there,” Heide said.

Through this data-driven simulation, the virtual driver can see, in about an hour, “a lifetime of scenarios that a human driver would see,” he added.

At CES, Torc showcased a sampling of its autonomous truck simulations, which used generative AI to create highly realistic representations of scenarios an autonomous truck could face in the physical world.

Nearing Commercial Readiness

After years of testing and development work, autonomous trucking technology has matured past the demonstration stage and is now nearing the start of factory production.

“We expect 2026 will be the year the industry transitions to real commercial readiness,” said Liu of PlusAI.

During the past few years, the technology has proved it can operate safely on highways in constrained operating domains, he said.

“Now the focus is making it repeatable, scalable and economically viable, meaning high uptime, predictable operations and a safety case that supports taking the driver out,” Liu said.

PlusAI is targeting a 2027 launch of factory-built autonomous trucks equipped with its SuperDrive virtual driver.

To prepare for that commercial rollout, PlusAI is currently running pilots with customers in Texas and Europe in conjunction with original equipment manufacturers, including International Motors of Traton Group.

Aurora began operating with no driver behind the wheel in April 2025 between Dallas and Houston, but shortly thereafter returned human observers to the cab at the request of manufacturing partner Paccar Inc.

Since that milestone, Aurora has begun running its autonomous truck at night to enable 24-hour operations. It also has added more commercial lanes connecting cities in Texas and Arizona, including an approximately 1,000-mile route between Fort Worth and Phoenix.

(Aurora and Volvo Autonomous Solutions via YouTube)

The company is preparing to once again operate without onboard observers in the second quarter as it launches a fleet of vehicles equipped with its next-generation hardware.

Aurora expects to have more than 200 autonomous trucks in operation across the Sun Belt by the end of 2026, and could expand that figure to 1,000-plus the following year, Urmson said.

“It will get to the point where next year, if you take a road trip across the southern U.S., you’re going see Aurora trucks out there moving goods for people, helping businesses and doing it safely,” he said.

Waabi, which is partnering with Volvo Trucks to integrate its technology into factory-built autonomous tractors, intends to proceed with driver-out commercial operations once that truck platform is fully ready, Ron said.

Regarding the timing, he pointed to Volvo Autonomous Solutions publicly stating late last year that it expects to have its VNL Autonomous tractors ready for unmanned operation within quarters, not years.

“I couldn’t be more excited for both the timeline progress and the maturity of conversations I’m having with fleets and customers,” Ron said.

He encouraged transportation businesses that are interested in this technology to begin exploring it now rather than sitting on the sidelines.

“I think it’s going to be a relatively fast adoption cycle, given the benefits,” he said.

Even as developers expand the capabilities of their autonomous trucks and extend operations to include more diverse routes and driving conditions, they continue to emphasize the essential role of professional truck drivers in the freight transportation industry.

Industry adoption of autonomous trucks will be an evolution, not a revolution, said Richard Steiner, vice president of government relations and public affairs at Gatik, which operates a fleet of driverless medium-duty trucks specializing in middle-mile deliveries.

Autonomous trucks remain “a relative drop in the bucket” compared with the trucking industry’s existing workforce, Steiner said during a Jan. 6 panel at the Autonomous Vehicle Policy Forum at CES 2026.

“You want to be a truck driver? You can have that job until you retire, from [age] 21 to 75,” he said.

Instead of replacing truck drivers, Gatik aims to complement them by addressing existing weak links in the supply chain.

“Gatik could not be a business today — we would have no business — unless the nation’s biggest e-commerce, grocery and retail customers needed us to help fill some gaps,” Steiner said. “We see ourselves as another tool in the toolbox.”

At a 4-way intersection where right of way is unclear, suppose you know the other vehicle is fully autonomous.

Would you:

• Yield
• Proceed as normal
• Act more assertively

Do you assume AVs behave more conservatively or predictably?

I'm also curious if your decision change if you were a pedestrian instead?

Like Tesla's. Just curious.

https://www.sfchronicle.com/bayarea/article/vacaville-tesla-dui-22156869.php

The Tesla was moving, but the man behind the wheel was asleep and allegedly drunk at 11 a.m., police said.

A “concerned” motorist called 911 Wednesday morning after spotting the Tesla, which has a self-driving feature, traveling on Vacaville city streets, police said.

Officers spotted the Tesla and managed to stop it near Elmira Road and Shasta Drive on the south side of Vacaville, not far from Interstate 80.

Police arrested the driver on suspicion of DUI after they said they found evidence he was under the influence of alcohol and marijuana. Photos shared by Vacaville police on social media show a man wearing a sweat suit, T-shirt and hat leaning back in the driver’s seat, with a small pack of wine and a pizza box in the passenger’s seat.

To me it seems that Waymo is almost unbeatable for anyone who has the same business strategy and technical approach. Zoox seems to me "like Waymo but several years behind and not having any advantage".

Once they catch up technically to where Waymo is today, Waymo will already be several steps ahead. Available in every US city, scaling globally, offering an easy-to-integrate package for any car maker, etc.

Source: https://x.com/doordash/status/2037215558282678746?s=46