Selling Autonomous Trucks to Autonomous Truckers - Fact and Fiction

An examination of Aurora Technologies July 2024 Investors Report reveals the ultimate aims of these companies regards the American Trucker.

I can hear some of you breathing a long sigh of relief from here - Autonomous Truck(er)s is once again writing about Autonomous Trucks. Yes indeed, and though its been awhile since I’ve broached this subject, the nerds and Science Respecters™️ who want to make me unemployed have remained hard at work. Specifically, Aurora Technology has been aggressively pursuing a late 2024 target date for putting their driverless trucks on the road, and in this article I’m going to review their July investor report, and contrast that with a presentation I witnessed from them at the Mid-America Truck Show in Louisville, KY, back in March. Something myself and guests on my podcast have pointed out is that Aurora, amongst other of these Automated Vehicle Technology companies, has several different messages, depending on who the audience is - one for government regulators, one for the public, yet one more for truckers, and another completely different message for investors.

They can lie through their teeth to everyone on that list without repercussions … except for the investors. There are laws against lying to investors which are more heavily enforced than other instances of fraud and false advertising; let me contrast what Aurora is telling their investors, and what they told a small audience of truckers and industry figures in Kentucky.




The Mid-America Truck Show, or MATS, to regulars, is the biggest trucker and trucking industry party in the United States, if not the world, and is held at the Kentucky Exposition Center in Louisville. Over three days every year, usually in early spring, upwards of 55,000 people participate in the show, and as you might imagine, many of them are truckers. The outdoor part of the show is where one finds many beautiful rigs on display, with custom paint jobs and bespectacled in a shiny and chrome testament to the rugged individualism which animates their owners. Inside, displays of older trucks from organizations such as the American Truck Historical Society speak to that same culture, and to a time when drivers lives were less regulated and surveilled by state mandated electronic intrusions, nor the engines which power their trucks subject to the climate alarmism which animates the regulators of today. It’s a venue where you wouldn’t expect to hear from one of the companies seeking to replace the American Trucker altogether, but Aurora Technologies decided to attend and discuss their robotic driverless trucks anyways.

Perhaps the plastic testicles oft seen hanging from the backs of pick up trucks are likewise at home hanging on the doors of the C suite at Aurora.


In one of the meeting rooms in the East Hall of the Kentucky Expo Center, set aside for various presentations that MATS called the ‘Pro Talks Seminar Series’, Aurora gave a presentation called ‘Navigating The Future : The Transformative Impact of Autonomous Trucking’. Interestingly enough, Aurora sent a fellow who presented himself as a former trucker and now a ‘Safety Driver Manager’ for them named Bryan Jones. Perhaps Mr Jones has believed the hype and decided to transition early and guarantee himself a job.


One would think that a company like Aurora coming to MATS might elicit more interest from the crowd, especially when Aurora is explicitly seeking to replace many of the attendees at MATS and render them unemployed. No, not even righteous NeoLuddite rage could assemble a group of truckers, armed with snipe bars and tire irons, to at least show a force of intimidation against this nerd Jones and the robots he represents; by my count, there was barely 70 people in attendance, and Jones managed to bore about half of them away before he completed; the transformation alluded to in the title perhaps being an empty room from one once sparsely populated.

In his opening statements, Jones highlighted that one of the intents of Aurora’s technology was ‘not replace truck drivers, but add to the workforce.’

Let us consult with Aurora’s July investor report, shall we?

(If you would like to read it yourself in its entirety - click here.)


From page 8 -

1.2 million drivers over the next decade, eh?

It appears that, once again, and just like all of their competitors, Aurora is referencing reports from the American Trucking Association, a corporate lobby group who represent the interests of Mega-Carriers; which is to say, they really represent the interests of those carriers clients, whom are many of the major corporations in America that still produce things in the material economy.

Those corporations having their products moved at the lowest possible cost, being a basic function of capitalist logic, runs into another logic, that of the truck driver, who would like to maximize his own ‘profits’ in a business that has decidedly very narrow margins.

To say that the interests of these corporations are not aligned with those of the American Trucker would be an understatement.

The ATA reports that Aurora is referencing are like the reports that the ATA has been putting out for decades - screeches of DOOM! about a cataclysmic shortage of truckers that never seem to materialize, all the while ignoring that there are 3 times as many CDL holders in America as there are jobs available for them.

But this is only the first of Aurora’s deceptions.

‘not replace truck drivers, but add to the workforce.’

Page 19

Throughout Jones presentation, he reveals himself to either be a programmed robot, not unlike the product he is selling, or suffering the world’s most severe case of Tourette’s Syndrome, with Jones particular phonic tic being not unlike that of Beavis from Beavis and Butt-head, except he just keeps saying the word ‘SAFETY!’

Jones, over and above repeating extremely boring bromides about safety throughout his presentation, also re-enforced and highlighted Aurora’s claim that they did not want to replace human truckers, but offer them better jobs.

”Remote support specialist to AV trucks ratio”

It follows then that one of those jobs would be ‘remote support specialist’, which in Aurora’s telling is analogous to that of a drone operator, but instead of flying drones Kamikaze like into soldiers on the battlefields of Ukraine, or raining hellfire missiles on weddings throughout East Africa and the Swat Valley of Pakistan, the operators here would be keeping Aurora’s trucks out of rivers or from rear-ending other vehicles and killing everyone inside.

The tail end of the above graph from Aurora indicates that they’re looking to have a back-up remote ‘safety driver’ at the rate of one per 100 trucks on the road, which shows they’re lying about the fact that they cannot possibly exchange truckers job for job, but are seeking to eliminate us altogether, and to keep the numbers of remote operators as low as possible.

One wonders what kind of arrangement a ‘remote support specialist’ will find themselves in at Aurora. If the system on one of these trucks spergs out, or something happens so fast on the road the truck can’t possibly stop or slow down in time, will the specialist be on the hook for any liability, as a driver in the seat is supposed to be now?

Another consideration is that drone operators in the US military suffer from a substantial amount of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, which is unsurprising, given the repeated exposure to ‘front row’ video footage of the murder and mayhem they are orchestrating from afar. And what do you know, drone operation appears to have a turnover problem just like trucking.

There are roughly 1,000 such drone pilots, known in the trade as “18Xs,” working for the U.S. Air Force today. Another 180 pilots graduate annually from a training program that takes about a year to complete at Holloman and Randolph Air Force bases in, respectively, New Mexico and Texas. As it happens, in those same 12 months, about 240 trained pilots quit and the Air Force is at a loss to explain the phenomenon. (The better-known U.S. Central Intelligence Agency drone assassination program is also flown by Air Force pilots loaned out for the covert missions.)

The Air Force explains the departure of these drone pilots in the simplest of terms. They are leaving because they are overworked. The pilots themselves say that it’s humiliating to be scorned by their Air Force colleagues as second-class citizens. Some have also come forward to claim that the horrors of war, seen up close on video screens, day in, day out, are inducing an unprecedented, long-distance version of post-traumatic stress syndrome (PTSD).

But is it possible that a brand-new form of war -- by remote control -- is also spawning a brand-new, as yet unlabeled, form of psychological strain? Some have called drone war a “coward's war” (an opinion that, according to reports from among the drone-traumatized in places like Yemen and Pakistan, is seconded by its victims). Could it be that the feeling is even shared by drone pilots themselves, that a sense of dishonor in fighting from behind a screen thousands of miles from harm’s way is having an unexpected impact of a kind psychologists have never before witnessed?

Is it much of a stretch to imagine that ‘remote support specialists’ for Aurora, or any other autonomous truck manufacturer, given the task of monitoring 100 rigs at a time, will not be able to respond quickly enough when a problem on the road arises? What happens if, God forbid, an ‘Aurora Driver’ system fails, and crashes into a stalled minivan? At 100 trucks per operator, it seems that some poor bastard who takes on that role is going to bear witness to something, and unlike a drone operator, they don’t have the thin and transparently dubious veneer of dehumanizing the real people involved as ‘bad guys’.


Getting back to Bryan Jones and his presentation at MATS, he alludes to replacement jobs for ‘CDL holders’, a phrase he used often, rather than ‘truckers’, which is one area where Jones and I agree, even if he doesn’t realize why and would never admit to it himself.

’CDL holder’ rather than ‘trucker’ insinuates something deep within the psyche of our managerial class that shows what they really think about us. To them, there is no craft or trade to be learned here, we are merely human resources slurry, sloshed off to a state subsidized CDL mill for the barest minimum of training before being sent down the road to ensure that trucking rates remain as low as possible, forever, experience and skill be damned.

’CDL holder’ indeed.

One of the replacement jobs he discusses is that of an on-site ‘inspector’, someone who conducts the mandatory pre-trip inspections on trucks, and engages in basic maintenance and preparedness for the vehicles. Perhaps with enough training, these drivers could also expect to become technicians, what we would have once called a mechanic.

Once again, what Jones giveth to his fellow ‘CDL holders’, the executives taketh away in their investor report.

Page 20

I had a colleague with me at MATS to bear witness to Aurora’s presentation, James Year, whom regular readers of this Substack and listeners to my podcast will be familiar with. James has been following the development of autonomous trucks and has been studying their impact on truckers as part of the research for his recently completed Masters Degree project at Syracuse University called ‘Stealing Fire’.

Jones, to his credit, opened up a Question and Answer session at the end, and James made a very pointed query, derived from a previous Aurora investors report which indicated that Aurora’s own terminals would close, and as in this new report, they would ‘unlock customer endpoints’, which is corporate speak for ‘park the trucks in your own facilities’.

The question was, how many jobs of ‘Aurorans on the ground’ would be lost once Aurora started to move from using their own facilities to those of their clients?

Jones didn’t have a number, nor much in the way of an answer.


Moving on in the investor report, there are some interesting tidbits about Aurora’s projected costs, and savings estimates they are offering to prospective customers.

Pages 28 through 32

Using estimates made by the American Transportation Research Institute which put the average cost of employing a human driver at .97 cents a mile, Aurora is claiming that their ‘Driver as a Service’ model will be substantially cheaper, and I don’t doubt them for a minute, but we should be clear eyed about what they’re doing here.

The ‘DaaS’ is a subscription service - anyone who buys an Aurora equipped automated truck is not ever going to have any meaningful ownership of this rig, as Aurora is telling you right off the bat that the cost savings in ‘owning’ one of these trucks is contingent on the subscription. Just like your phone and computer operating systems require frequent updates, so to the ‘Aurora Driver’, and you can imagine that if you are behind on your payments to Aurora, well, so much for your update, and now your truck is bricked in the yard, just like if you’re company sucks and couldn’t keep human drivers around.

Unlike the human driver, who once he learns how to drive that truck and gains a few years of experience, is unlikely to forget the skill, the ‘DaaS’ model is merely swapping out drivers wages for the subscription. Trucking companies will be paying less, but they will still be paying, and instead of the money going to one of approximately 3.5 million American truckers and their families, that money will be going to the investment portfolios of whoever purchased stock in Aurora. So much for all of those local economies, who, through the imposition of technology that no one asked for, will once again be viciously hit by those forces who would seek to financialize every part of the material world.


There are quite a few more concerns to be discussed about autonomous truck technology which I will save for future correspondence, but I want truckers to be clear eyed about what they’re being told by companies like Aurora, and listen to what they’re telling investors instead of what they might tell you in deceptive PR stunts like they pulled at MATS.

It might only be ‘middle mile’ and line-haul jobs at first, but ultimately the goal of these companies is to make human driving obsolete, and render you unemployed; any claims that they will find you new and better employment are hokum. That’s not their objective - their objective is to save trucking companies money, and transfer your salaries to returns for their investors.

You ought to view any and all claims they make about any aspect of their development of this technology through that lens.


In a second part to the examination of this piece, I hope to disentangle other claims and rhetoric on display in this report which are not focused on the replacement of human drivers, but with deeper questions about AI and where it meets material reality that can be seen in how Aurora is selling their technology.


Thanks for reading, and as always, stay tuned.


Questions, comments, suggestions, corrections and Hate Mail are welcomed and strongly encouraged - gordilocks@protonmai.com