The Deceptive Marketing of Autonomous Trucks

On false narratives and inevitability hype.

A scene from Maximum Overdrive, a prescient Sci-fi horror film where technology came alive and operated on its own.

Last month, Vox Media podcast “On with Kara Swisher” did a short, two episode mini-series on Autonomous Trucks, featuring in the first show Chris Urmson, co-founder and CEO of Aurora, a company developing self driving technology for commercial trucks, and in the second, Tekedra Mawakana, Co-CEO of Waymo, the self-driving car, truck, and ride hailing company, which is a subsidiary of Alphabet/Google, who are being evil in spite of their early company slogan.

Both are worth a listen, on the understanding that these are basically uncritical infomercials for both companies, with heaping side helpings of blatantly false information, condescension, and a not very subtle air of inevitability, as if these technologies are a fait accompli; The Gods of Tech have spoken, and you, citizen, will comply.

Right out of the gate, before even getting to the first guest, Swisher, and co-host Nayeema Raza, set the tone for the series with some very notable statements.

”I’m freaked out by people driving, I think people are terrible drivers in general … and that’s where all the accidents will be between humans and these autonomous cars.”

”There’s not enough truck drivers.”

(Fake driver shortage myth, drink!)

”It’s a very dangerous job.”

”The California State Assembly banning driverless trucks was just stupid.”

One might agree that people are terrible drivers in general, and that’s an opinion I (sometimes) share, but this does not necessitate technology as the solution when you could, with a little extra effort, make better drivers.

The claim that there is a shortage of truck drivers is, however, a certifiable falsehood, a falsehood that has been propagated by the American Trucking Association for decades, and which due to the efforts of many notable people and organizations, was beginning to become understood as such.


A few words on this issue from our man Justin Martin over at FreightWaves.

@fwwhatthetruck#truckers #truckersoftiktok #truckertok #ata #americantruckingassociations #lobbying #lobbyists #megacarriers #truckdrivershortage #freightwaves #whatthetruck

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One can see how this falsehood is now being resuscitated (regurgitated?) by the manufacturers of autonomous trucks, as it allows them to sell a solution to a (fake) problem.

Research conducted by CDL - Drivers Unlimited indicates that in 34 states which have provided data on active Commercial Driver’s Licenses, there are over 6.4 million, and using the same percentage averages across the other 16 states which have not provided this date, we can estimate that there are 8.8 million active CDLs in the United States right now, and only 3.5 million jobs which require one - not all of which are truck driving jobs.

Roughly speaking, there are nearly 3 times as many people holding a Commercial Driver’s License in America as there are jobs which require someone to hold one.

The ATA knows this, yet puts forth the myth anyways, because it financially benefits their membership to have a steady stream of new entrants into the truck driver market, thus giving them no reason to pay more for experienced, seasoned, and much safer drivers … the kind of drivers who wouldn’t give a reason for people like Swisher to falsely believe that trucking is a dangerous job that nobody wants to do, and the kind of drivers our friends in the autonomous technology space would like to eliminate altogether, despite their service as the backbone of our economy for decades.


If, by chance, the producers or writers from Swishers show happen upon this Substack, I would implore them to read up on the ATA.

Onwards to the guests of this series.

Chris Urmson sounds exactly like the kind of highly trained nerd that would be attracted to the engineering challenge of making trucks operate sans chauffeur, and, like Swisher, he traffics in the same clichés about the dangers and negative aspects of being a truck driver, how there aren’t enough of us, and really, we are here to help make your job better, not to replace you.


”I had just become a professor at Carnegie Mellon, that was up to that point, my life ambition, to become faculty somewhere.”

Kara Swisher - ”You’re helping them (truckers), but they don’t think like that.”


”Around 40,000 people die on our roads every year.”

”Truckers have ten times the rates of fatalities on the job as the average worker.”

He sounds earnest enough about his concerns for these two very legitimate statistics, but like every TechBro of this zeitgeist, fixing the human is not his business; having machines do it for us, however, is - at a price.

Urmson’s machine is called Aurora Driver, a sensor and software suite that is, despite his and Swisher’s hilarious doublespeak to the contrary, absolutely meant to replace human drivers. Click on the link to Aurora’s website and read up on it for yourself.


”We’ve got tens of thousands of tests like that where we can see what the Aurora Driver would do, and make sure that its doing something safe, and that’s a level of testing that no human driver is ever put through.”

That’s quite a statement right there, which basically says “our computer modeling and testing regime is superior to the experience of drivers with millions of miles under their belts.”

It would be a little more understandable if Urmson was making a more legitimate critique of inexperienced drivers, who, in vehicles both large and small, make up a significant majority of those involved in incidents out on the road. This would lead one to question the barriers to entry of getting a license, and the issues with insufficient and substandard training that many new truckers receive, which also happens to be one of the primary areas of concern of this Substack. Mr Urmson, though, doesn’t work for the DOT or FMCSA, and it is not his job to clean up how they do things; though he would certainly be culling many of their enforcement jobs with the automation of every vehicle on the road; maybe there is a bright side?

”Part of our business model … yes it’s expensive really to invest and build the technology, but then our model is to provide the (Aurora) driver as a service, and so our business becomes very asset light, at that point. So if you are FedEx, you’ll call Paccar and say I would like a Peterbilt 579 with the Aurora Driver installed. You’ll pay Peterbilt for the truck and then you’ll have a subscription to the Aurora Driver which will then drive the truck for you.”

It is estimated that drivers wages cost the US trucking industry $200 Billion a year. Why would a company like Aurora merely sell you the robotic driver? One “self driving suite’ probably doesn’t cost that much, and you can only sell so many, but rent seeking with firmware upgrades? That’s the sauce right there.

Swisher, again showing her ignorance of the trucking business, asks Urmson about what unions have to say about this, even though the Teamsters only represent roughly 5% of all truckers in America (and if this issue with Yellow Freight isn’t resolved, that 5% could be a lot less.)

Regardless of what Urmson thinks about The Teamsters, or other skeptical drivers such as myself, let us think about the implications of Aurora’s subscription service for a moment.

Imagine you are running a smaller trucking company, maybe less than a hundred trucks, and maybe you service a specific region. Maybe you’re having some rough times, maybe we are in a slow freight market like right now, maybe you’re accounting department is having trouble with receivables. Maybe you get behind enough that your Aurora Driver subscription is imperiled. What then?

What if the further polarization of our society continues apace. Maybe you’re an America First type patriotic citizen, maybe you make some comments on social media in support of that type of candidate … and maybe Aurora (or TuSimple, or Waymo) has a new CEO with interesting past associations to various client groups of The Democratic Regime. These companies are mostly headquartered or were started in Silicon Valley, and nearly all of their employees are products of The Cathedral. Did you read the fine print for your subscription? Would be an awful bummer for your truck to freeze up on the side of the road because of something you said on Twitter, and an even bigger bummer for your customers, who could be a grocery store in a small town somewhere near you.


All of this is to say that Jimmy Hoffa may have had baseball bats, but he didn’t control the code for a subscription service.




On to Swisher’s next guest, Tekedra Mawakana, Co-CEO of Waymo.

In the opening banter of the show with co-host Nayeema Raza, we are once again offered a peek into Kara Swisher’s utter disdain for people, which made her a logical choice to host these infomercials for Aurora and Waymo.

Swisher - “We’ll see where it goes … People like a driver … I think they will be able to pick (a taxi) do you want a driver or driverless? Eventually, I think people would like driverless.”

Raza - “I’ve been in one of them before, it scares me.”

S - “You would get used to it in seconds.”

R - “I like the human interaction.”

S - “Well, you keep churning your butter.”

R - “Just because something is possible doesn’t mean it’s good or productive … There’s a Silicon Valley motif that all of these things are inevitable, as if we don’t have a choice.”

S - “Why would you choose … these cars are getting better. They’re safer … there will be different jobs.”

I guess Kara Swisher hasn’t checked in with the Twitter Files, or how basically everyone outside of Blue America (and even many on Team Blue) doesn’t trust the tech companies as far as they could drag them to the trash icon.

Speaking of human interaction, one of the most interesting statements of these two shows comes from Tekedra Mawakana, when discussing mobility options for the many people in America who cannot drive due to disability.

”What we’ve learned is that people really value independence, and the ‘independence’ of being driven by an Uber driver isn’t that much different than being driven by mom or dad, or a friend. So we know that there’s a real chance here, the independence people want, the access to mobility … without needing to talk to someone.”

I get it, maybe it’s difficult for those with these issues to have to talk to an Uber driver every time they need to go somewhere, maybe it does grate on them for whatever reason, maybe this is a good choice for them. Beyond what this statement says about the increasing atomization of our society, however, comes another question buried in Mawakana’s statement about the value we attach to independence and autonomy.

Of the many speculations about a future where autonomous vehicles rule the road, and a speculation Swisher alluded to in the previous episode with her ridiculous comment insinuating that it would be human drivers at fault for any problem experienced when they interact with other cars operated by code, is that sooner or later, the government just might feel compelled, either by a loud minority of the same type of Safetyism Cultists who just drove society into the wall over Wuhan Plague, or by the insurance lobby, to make human driving illegal.

Tell me, Ms Mawakana, Co-CEO of Waymo, just where is our independence to be found when 100 years of independently operated mechanized mobility is flushed down the toilet in the name of your shareholders? Perhaps the dystopia foretold in ‘Red Barchetta’, a song by the Canadian progressive rock band Rush, is sooner upon us than we think.

Though the song is not about autonomous vehicles, it might as well be. Read the Wikipedia entry here and a complete rundown of lyrics here.


Waymo, Aurora, and the hosts of On are not the only people crafting narrative marketing in service of an “inevitability” that would be highly profitable.

Waabi is a Canadian autonomous truck technology company, and their version of the “Aurora Driver” suite is called …. “Waabi Driver”. Huh, very …. creative.

It’s almost like these guys are trying to mask the fact that there won’t actually be a driver involved at all, as if invoking the title of a job held only by humans for a century grants these machines a right to said title.

On Waabi’s website, we have a page called "Introducing the Waabi Driver" and right off the hop they are employing the same falsehoods and mischaracterizations of truck drivers and the trucking industry as Swisher and her guests.

”Trucking is the backbone of our economy, but an acute labor shortage, safety concerns and the industry’s environmental impact are wreaking havoc on its future. Autonomy will solve many of the industry’s woes, but this promise has yet to be realized.”

Environmental impact? So replacing the driver with a robot is supposed to do something about the power requirements of moving loads across distance?

We shouldn’t be surprised at all that Safety Cultists are also Climate Cultists, and after 3 years of the Wuhan Plague Overreaction, any excuse for the TechBro caste to claim to be the saviors for all of these chicken littles is basically Standard Operating Procedure, and a potentially highly profitable enterprise.

At least one company in all of this should be given some props for honesty - a scroll down the website of TuSimple immediately brings you to this display.

Maybe honesty doesn’t fit with the bogus narratives and faux-concern about safety or drivers jobs - it appears TuSimple is leaving the US market.


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Though I remain skeptical of the claims that autonomous trucks are going to replace truckers like me anytime soon, I can’t predict the future, nor can I say wether or not there will be some advance in technology soon which will assuage the government and the motoring public of the absolute safety of driverless trucks, and further hasten their arrival. That said, I won’t be caught dead being a test driver, nor a babysitter for a level 3 or 4 autonomous truck.

What I can tell you, though, is that they need some better marketing. Those of us who know the trucking industry inside and out, as well as understand the human element involved here, can see right through all of this.

Any human endeavor requires thoughtful and inspired leadership; autonomous truck system manufacturers and their boosters relying on disproven propaganda from lobby groups like the American Trucking Association, or wanting to scapegoat one group as the cause of major safety concerns, doesn’t qualify as inspired leadership at all. The lack of honesty about what is going on here is easy enough to see, and belies something else.

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