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Dive Brief:
- Autonomous trucking developer Gatik AI plans to launch driverless operations in north Texas in early 2025, Adam Campbell, the company’s senior manager of safety innovation and impact, said in an interview with Trucking Dive.
- That goal hinges on closing a safety case, which has not been finished yet, Campbell said Wednesday. Safety cases from AV firms involve companies justifying their technology will work as intended and have the necessary back-up systems in place.
- “But that is to say we move at the speed of safety,” Campbell said. “We will not conduct operations until the safety case is fully closed and fully satisfied.”
Dive Insight:
Gatik previously rolled out its technology in Bentonville, Arkansas, in 2021 as well as the greater Toronto area in 2022, hauling commercial loads without drivers.
Those routes, which have since ended, served as starting points to help inform the company about how to scale its self-driving platform, Campbell said.
“So as we have moved away from the first sort of one or two deployments, now we are rating ourselves for scale,” he said.
Gatik is not alone. AV firms such as Aurora Innovation, Kodiak Robotics and Waabi are also looking to launch lanes without drivers in Texas. And companies see those initial networks as starting points.
“We will certainly be looking to expand, but our intentions are to densify networks," Campbell said.
