Oct 10, 2018   SOURCE: BusinessWire

Joint Industry Statement on Self-Driving Trucks and Federal Automated Vehicle Guidance 3.0

Embark Trucks, Kodiak Robotics, Starsky Robotics, and TuSimple issued the following statement in response to recent United States Department of Transportation federal guidance on autonomous vehicles:

As leaders of the emerging self-driving truck industry, we would like to thank Secretary Chao, Administrator Martinez and the United States Department of Transportation (USDOT) for their leadership and vision in releasing Automated Vehicles 3.0: Preparing for the Future of Transportation (AV 3.0) on October 4. We are grateful to USDOT for providing a sound, flexible, and safety-oriented framework for self-driving commercial vehicles.

We support the six automation principles outlined in AV 3.0, and welcome USDOT’s commitment to a technology-neutral approach that encourages competition and innovation. Given the rapid changes in our industry, we strongly agree that USDOT’s voluntary, consensus-based, and performance-oriented standards will provide a sensible approach to ensuring safety while creating a path for the integration of Automated Driving System (ADS) technologies into the freight ecosystem.

Specific to commercial vehicles, we concur with the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration’s position that existing administrative processes are sufficient to allow operation of ADS-equipped Commercial Motor Vehicles (CMV), and that regulations should not assume that the CMV driver is always a human or that a human is necessarily present onboard a commercial vehicle during its operation.

Given the interstate applications of our technology, we are encouraged to see USDOT call for a consistent regulatory and operational environment across states and reiterate its preemption authority in the application of Federal Motor Carrier Safety Regulations. Creating a seamless national regulatory structure for self-driving trucks is critical to ensuring their safety and efficiency benefits are fully realized.

We believe AV 3.0 lays out a common-sense pathway for the operation of self-driving trucks in interstate commerce and applaud USDOT’s work in achieving this milestone. We look forward to continuing our work in consultation with USDOT to develop and deploy this important technology.