A Wake-Up Call — An Army of Autonomous Chinese Trucks Arrives
Does the US have the political will to compete, or will we be left in the dust?
While we in the US are engaging in a political mud wrestling match to the death, the Chinese are rolling out autonomous trucks this year. Jair Ribeiro reports that Chinese autonomous truck company TuSimple completed testing over 45,000 kilometers in the last 18 months and has received a license to build a 5,000 vehicle fleet of autonomous trucks to circulate on the roads in China.
Serious money has started flowing. Chinese self-driving truck startup Inceptio Technology has raised $120 million.
Demonstrating how global and interconnected this emerging industry is, self-driving truck technology company Plus is selling on a Chinese investor’s digital freight-matching platform, Full Truck Alliance, which is backed by Google. If you have any doubt this market is real, Full Truck Alliance recently raised $1.7 billion. Ching ching ching.
Other self-driving truck companies are flooding into this game, including Embark, Waymo, Starsky Robotics, Ike, Kodiak Robotics, and the Chinese companies Pony.ai and FABU Technology.
American entrepreneurs in the past have created the first PCs in their garages and their first social media sites in their dorm rooms. Transportation infrastructure is owned by the government, so American entrepreneurs can’t succeed at innovating autonomous vehicles unless the government gets its act together and gets in this game with them.
There is some activity in the US. Autonomous trucks are being tested in Texas, for example. But this project is getting bogged down by bureaucracy that is questioning safety. Don’t get me wrong. Safety is important. But the pace of innovation in the US needs to match the Chinese, or we’ll get left in the dust. I walk a lot in my town, and I’m much more concerned about getting run over by a human texting while driving than I am by an autonomous truck on the road beside me. The autonomous truck likely knows I’m there. The texting human is clueless. In the US we too often hold new technologies to a standard of safety much higher than inherently risky technologies that are established.
Given the federal and state governments’ inability to respond as effectively as needed to the even more urgent COVID pandemic, is there reason to believe they can engage at the speed needed to compete with the Chinese in autonomous vehicles? Honestly, that’s hard to imagine.
