(Natural News)—Three startup firms have announced plans to eliminate all human drivers and replace them with driverless trucks traversing through Texas highways by the end of 2024. The move comes amid objections from critics who warn that financial pressures, not safety, are behind the proposed timetable.
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.
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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:
Bypass Big Tech Censors
Two Storms, One Harvest
Every food crisis in living memory has been a one-shock event. The 2008 price spike was a commodity bubble. The 2020 shortages were a logistics failure. The 2022 grain scare was a war on one exporter’s ports. Each time, the system bent, adjusted, and recovered, and each time the experts assured us afterward that global markets are simply too big and too diversified to fail.
What nobody in Washington seems eager to discuss is that 2026 is shaping up to be something the modern food system has never actually faced. Two independent shocks, one climatic and one geopolitical, are converging on the same harvest cycle at the same time. Not sequentially. Simultaneously.
Start with the weather. The Pacific Ocean is currently building toward what forecasters now openly call a record event. NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center puts the odds of at least a strong El Niño near 88 percent, with roughly two in three odds it reaches “very strong” status, the tier reserved for perhaps three or four events in the entire satellite era. Every major global model now projects a median peak in Super El Niño territory, and most of them project it exceeding the 2015-16 event, which until now held the modern record. Sea surface anomalies were already brushing the super threshold in mid-July, months before these events normally peak. The atmosphere has already shifted into El Niño mode, and the event is forecast to crest in late fall and early winter.
This is not about “climate change.” It’s about the standard cycles of weather, and the cycle we’re currently in is one that has likely devastated societies in the past. We’re better prepared as a society today, but not all Americans are equally prepared.
Serious households have started doing the quiet math on their own. Grocery bills tell part of the story, and the forecast maps tell the rest, which is why long-term food storage has moved from fringe hobby to mainstream line item in the family budget, with established suppliers like Heaven’s Harvest seeing demand from people who five years ago would have rolled their eyes at the idea. That instinct is not paranoia. It is pattern recognition, and the pattern is worth walking through carefully.
Editor’s Note: Heaven’s Harvest IS a sponsor, but the warnings of this article are real and would be written even if we didn’t have a survival food sponsor. With that said, those who take advantage of what they offer can use promo code “Patriot” for 15% off.
The Fertilizer Clock Is Already Running
While the Pacific warms, the second shock has been unfolding in the Strait of Hormuz. The conflict with Iran turned the world’s most important energy chokepoint into a contested waterway, and the consequences reach far beyond the gas pump. Roughly a third of global fertilizer trade moves through Hormuz, and the disruption sent urea prices up 86 percent year over year by March, with a 53 percent jump in a single month.
The World Bank projects energy prices rising about 24 percent in 2026 and fertilizer about 31 percent. By its own accounting, fertilizer prices ran 35 percent higher in the first five months of this year than the same period last year.
Here is the mechanism the nightly news will not explain. Fertilizer is not a grocery item. It is a time-delayed input. The nitrogen a farmer in Iowa or Punjab could not afford to apply this spring does not show up as a problem this spring. It shows up as a thinner harvest six to twelve months later.
The World Bank’s own food security brief concedes that the effects of reduced applications earlier this season “are likely to become visible only later in harvest outcomes.” Translate that from institutional language into plain English and it means this. The damage is already done, it is already in the ground, and we are simply waiting for it to arrive on the shelf.
Now check the calendar. Six to twelve months from the spring planting season lands us squarely in late 2026 and early 2027. Which is precisely when the strongest El Niño in the instrumental record is forecast to peak, bringing its signature droughts to Southeast Asia, Australia, southern Africa, northern Brazil, and South Asia, the very regions that grow the world’s rice, sugar, and oilseeds.
The World Bank warns openly that a strong El Niño “could disrupt multiple crop belts simultaneously” on top of the conflict-driven input costs. Their baseline projection assumes the Middle East disruptions ease by autumn. What in the last two years of Middle East history suggests that assumption is safe?
The System Has No Slack Left
The comfortable answer is that global markets always adjust. But adjustment requires slack, and the slack is gone. Global cereal production is expected to decline from last year’s records even before El Niño does its work. The UN World Food Programme, hardly a den of right-wing preppers, is calling this the most significant disruption to its supply chains since Covid and the invasion of Ukraine, and its supply chain director put the stakes bluntly.
Today’s supply chain challenges are tomorrow’s hunger crisis.
There is also a political dimension that markets cannot price. When food gets scarce, governments do not behave like economists. They behave like politicians. Export bans, hoarding mandates, and panic buying at the national level turned the modest rice shortfall of 2008 into a global crisis, and analysts are already warning that import-dependent nations are the first dominoes.
The 2015-16 Super El Niño, a far weaker event than what is now forecast, threw tens of millions into food stress across Africa and Asia. This one is projected to be stronger, and it arrives with fertilizer already rationed by price and shipping lanes already contested by missiles.
What Joseph Knew
Scripture does not treat preparation for lean years as faithlessness. It treats it as wisdom delivered in advance to those willing to act on it.
Behold, there come seven years of great plenty throughout all the land of Egypt: And there shall arise after them seven years of famine; and all the plenty shall be forgotten in the land of Egypt.
Joseph did not respond to that warning with a hashtag or a committee. He stored grain during the years of abundance, and when the famine came, Egypt stood while its neighbors begged. The lesson is not that famine is certain. It is that the time to prepare is precisely when preparation still looks optional.
Nobody who filled a pantry in a year of plenty has ever regretted it, and nobody standing in an empty aisle has ever been glad he waited for certainty.
None of this calls for panic, and panic is the enemy of sound judgment anyway. It calls for the same unglamorous prudence our grandparents considered ordinary. Keep some cash margin, know your local growers, and put real food in deep storage while it is cheap and available, because the entire arc of this story is that cheap and available is a closing window.
Families looking for a straightforward place to start can visit Heaven’s Harvest and use promo code Patriot for 15 percent off long-term storable food. The forecasts may yet soften, the strait may yet reopen, and we should pray they do. But hope is a fine thing to hold and a foolish thing to eat.