The “driver shortage” myth has reared its ugly head again. This time, the claim is being used to support the adoption of driverless trucks.
Aurora Innovation plans to deploy driverless trucks in April along a dedicated route between Dallas and Houston.
During a presentation at the Cantor Global Technology Conference on Tuesday, March 11, Aurora Chief Financial Officer David Maday suggested that a truck driver shortage is part of the reason the company has focused on driverless trucks instead of driverless passenger vehicles.
“It’s a huge market, and there are driver shortages,” Maday said. “So, you don’t need to create this unnatural demand of more people taking rides in, say, the robotaxi space to succeed in the marketplace. The second thing is that when you just look at the raw economics, driver wages for a CDL compared to a gig economy driver is three times as high.”
But is there a driver shortage?
The American Trucking Associations has claimed for decades that the trucking industry has been plagued by a driver shortage. As recently as 2023, ATA said that trucking had a shortage of 60,000 drivers.
However, multiple studies conducted in recent years have debunked those claims.
The most recent report refuting ATA’s driver shortage claims can be found in the 2024 National Academies of Science’s driver pay study.
Assertions of a driver shortage conflict with the basic economic principles of supply and demand, the study said.
In 2023, economics professor Stephen V. Burks and colleagues published a study showing that there is not a driver shortage. A few years before that, the U.S. Department of Labor also published a study that found there wasn’t a shortage. Instead, the department said that any issues in the labor supply could be corrected by increasing wages.
Additionally, the trucking industry has been in a freight recession since 2022 and has been suffering from a persistent overcapacity issue.
Maday’s reference to driver wages appears to be a much larger motivation for motor carriers.
“Our first product introduction will be in trucking,” Maday said. “Why trucking? Well, first off, the market is massive. It’s a trillion-dollar market. There’s over 200 billion vehicle miles traveled every year. And the second thing is that we can provide incredible value right at the start, whether it be increased revenue through higher utilization per truck asset or lower total cost of ownership (through) fuel efficiency, driver wages, insurance costs, etc. And, of course, paramount to everything is the safety we can provide to the industry.”
Maday later referenced not having to pay a human driver and not “having to deal with all of the challenges of a human-driven fleet” as some of autonomous technology’s benefits to carriers.
What about safety?
A recent study suggests that driverless vehicles are not ready for prime time.
George Mason University Professor Missy Cummings’ latest research found concerns about “phantom braking” and an inability to navigate human driving behavior.
“I’ll tell you what really concerns me, and especially related to trucks, is the fact that we can start to see a very dangerous pattern of what we would call ‘phantom braking,’” Cummings said.
Phantom braking is when the self-driving vehicle sees something that is not there and makes a hard-braking maneuver. Data in the study suggests the self-driving vehicles’ phantom braking contributed to human drivers crashing into them. Nearly half of all crashes observed were rear-end collisions, which is about twice the rate of human driver crashes.
Additionally, a recent AAA survey revealed that only 13% of Americans trust driverless vehicles.
In a recent interview with the Central Penn Business Journal, OOIDA Executive Vice President Lewie Pugh said there are legitimate questions when it comes to the safety of driverless trucks.
“I’m a little concerned, because the weather changes in a split second, and I’ve asked all these companies to let me take a ride,” Pugh said. “I think if your stuff is all that you say it is, you would want to put as many experienced people in the seat and see how it works. I have a hard time thinking about driving beside a semi on an icy highway with a computer behind the wheel. Or driving on a road with black ice spots.”
What about regulations?
During the tech conference, Maday said that Aurora has regulatory approval in Texas, as well as in 38 other states.
However, the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration denied Aurora’s exemption request from a regulation that requires the truck driver to place warning devices when the vehicle is stopped on the shoulder of a highway.
Aurora filed a lawsuit over the exemption denial and has until April 9 to present its arguments.
According to a recent blog post by Aurora President Ossa Fisher, the exemption denial and pending lawsuit will not prevent the company from complying with existing regulations when the company releases its autonomous fleet in April. However, the company has not provided the details on how it plans to do that without a driver on board. LL
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