Aurora Innovation has announced it is rolling out driverless trucks in commercial service starting this month. The initial service will be launched in Texas. While they are not the only autonomous trucking developer planning to hit the roads this year in driver-out commercial operations, they are the first to officially announce it. With all the press and media coverage surrounding autonomous vehicles, what does this mean for trucking and roadside enforcement?  

 Ahead of the announcement, Aurora released its Driverless Safety Report 2025 which includes details on how they intend to approach safety engineering, cybersecurity, risk management, and remote assistance, among other things. In the announcement they also cite their Safety Case Framework as a basis for how they demonstrate that their autonomous trucks are safe to operate on public roads, which combines the best thinking and guidance from government, practices from safety-critical industries, voluntary standards, research, and their own learnings. As part of this ramp-up in preparation to launch, Aurora has completed a Voluntary Safety Self-Assessment (VSSA) to show how they address 12 critical safety elements in their approach to building and operating self-driving trucks that have been outlined by NHTSA for VSSAs. 

One of the ongoing conversations around the deployment of driver-out AVs has been what happens when something goes wrong out on the road. Critically, a truck without a driver presents operational challenges for enforcement. To contribute to this conversation, FMCSA recently released results from a field demonstration that examined how roadside inspections and other law enforcement interactions could be accomplished on ADS-equipped commercial vehicles. The project successfully demonstrated that electronic confirmation of ADS health and status, transfer of data from the enhanced pre-trip inspection, and interactions with law enforcement can be accomplished on ADS-equipped CMVs using real-time communications between the entities. The project testing demonstrated the data exchange between the test vehicle, mobile weigh station bypass unit, and weigh station bypass station by a combination of cellular and RFID communications.  

 Additionally, FMCSA and CVSA are in the middle of testing Level VIII electronic roadside inspections with several large motor carriers. The results thus far show promise with the limited data exchange that has been occurring. One of the challenges going forward will be how to scale these inspections, as the data sharing that occurs is quite substantial.  

As AVs continue to gather steam and are being rolled out in commercial operations, some have expressed concerns that once they are on the roadways with other drivers, who often make unpredictable decisions that computers can’t predict, incidents will occur. And, while there are many safeguards being put into place, this will be an important bellwether as to how quickly AVs are rolled out and accepted by the public and industry.  

In STC’s view, AVs are being held to a higher standard for safety than other vehicles. As the technology continues to advance and evolve, and more vehicle-enforcement interactions take place, we will continue to accelerate our collective ability to demonstrate the safety case. It will be a game changer, but it will be important to not get ahead of ourselves. The traveling public is watching closely.