Podcast Summary: "Driverless Semi-Trucks Are Here & Coming to a Highway Near You"

Podcast: On with Kara Swisher, Vox Media
Date: December 29, 2025
Host: Kara Swisher
Guests: Chris Urmson (Co-founder, CEO of Aurora), Jonathan Ehsani (Professor at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health)
Recorded live at: Johns Hopkins Bloomberg Center, Washington, D.C.

Episode Overview

This episode dives into the future of autonomous trucking, exploring the seismic technological, economic, and societal shifts driverless trucks could bring. Kara Swisher is joined by Chris Urmson, a leading pioneer in autonomous vehicles and CEO of Aurora, and Jonathan Ehsani, a public health researcher specializing in road safety and transportation. The discussion covers the rapid rise of driverless semi-trucks, their potential economic and safety impacts, public acceptance, regulatory hurdles, labor concerns, and the role of universities in shaping policy and research.

Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. The State and Promise of Autonomous Trucking

• Aurora’s Progress

  • Aurora now has big Class 8 semi-trucks running driverless on public highways, particularly in Texas, and plans to expand rapidly:

    "By the end of next year, we expect to have hundreds of them running across the Sun Belt, nobody on board, serving customers, delivering toilet paper and baked goods and whatever else you put in the back of a truck." — Chris Urmson (04:01)

  • Over 100,000 solo miles driven already; goal of “thousands” of trucks by 2027.

• Why Focus on Trucks Rather Than Cars

  • Trucks carry most goods in the U.S. and offer a clearer economic case for autonomy compared to passenger vehicles.
  • Self-driving trucks can improve road safety, fuel efficiency (estimated 14-34%), and address the driver shortage.
  • Safety is a key motivator:

    "Today there’s somewhere between five and 6,000 people killed in accidents with heavy trucks every year." — Chris Urmson (04:41)

2. Public Perception and Acceptance

• Psychological Hurdles and Trust

  • Many people feel uneasy about autonomous trucks, imagining a scenario with "a semi rumbling beside you on the highway without a human in the driver’s seat." (01:42)
  • Public trust hinges on perceived improvements in safety and evidence that automation serves the social good (climate, efficiency, convenience, etc.).

    "If the trucks or autonomous vehicles are being used for social good, we see public opinion double in terms of acceptance." — Jonathan Ehsani (10:00)

• Experiential Learning

  • Skeptical individuals often change their minds after riding in an autonomous vehicle:

    "You can get very skeptical people and you get them in a vehicle for just a few minutes... it quickly goes from, oh my gosh, I can’t believe this, to that’s kind of all it does, to, huh, okay, what’s my phone doing?" — Chris Urmson (11:15)

3. Technology Deep Dive: How Driverless Trucks Work

• Hardware and Software

  • Trucks use LiDAR, radar, cameras, and proprietary lasers for 360° situational awareness.
  • “Verifiable AI”—guardrails and interpretability, ensuring the vehicle can’t make dangerous, random decisions (e.g., chasing confabulated signals).

    "By construction, we ensure we can’t take some of those actions that are completely ludicrous." — Chris Urmson (13:41)

• Continuous Learning and Superhuman Perception

  • Trucks see and track everything around them at all times, unburdened by human fatigue or focus limitations.
  • Explicit rules, like always stopping at a stop sign, are coded in, not just learned by imitation:

    "If you just trained the system to look at how people drove, you’d have robot cars driving through stop signs." — Chris Urmson (16:41)

• Balancing Human-Like and Safe Driving Behaviors

  • Early AVs “drove like grandmas;” now, they behave more like skilled, assertive drivers to avoid being overly cautious and thus disruptive.

4. Safety, Failures, and the Learning Loop

• Holistic “Safety Case” Approach

  • Aurora assesses safety via five pillars: performance, fail-safe design, continuous improvement, resilience to misuse, and cyberattack robustness.
  • Continuous improvement requires learning from field experience to make technology safer over time.

    "There’s no silver bullet. Our safety case is really this holistic view at both the company and the technology to make sure the thing we put on the road is safe." — Chris Urmson (24:20)

• Cybersecurity

  • A 50-person cybersecurity team protects fleets against potential attacks, though physical tampering is more likely currently.
  • Major concerns revolve around system-wide hacks as fleets grow.

• Challenging Conditions and Edge Cases

  • Highways may seem easier than cities, but high-speed “edge cases” (pedestrians, police chases, weather) are much riskier.

    "All the crazy stuff you see in the city, you see on the freeway, but you're moving at 70 miles an hour with a hell of a lot more kinetic energy." — Chris Urmson (27:00)

5. Jobs and Economic Impact

• Will Autonomous Trucks Kill Driving Jobs?

  • U.S. faces a massive shortage of truck drivers now.

    "If you are a truck driver today, you will be able to retire a truck driver if you want to. The shortage is that dire." — Chris Urmson (06:37)

  • AVs will first replace “middle mile” jobs (long hauls between distribution centers), often seen as less desirable, while “last mile” and customer-facing jobs remain longer.
  • Aurora is partnering with colleges to reskill displaced workers.

• Resistance from Labor Unions

  • Teamsters and other organizations fight AV truck deployment in legislatures and courts for fear of job loss:

    "They have an entrenched interest that they're defending." — Chris Urmson (30:55)

  • States have consistently rejected laws requiring drivers in AV trucks, with arguments for road safety and economic growth winning out (31:06).

6. Policy, Regulation, and Global Competition

• Federal and State Regulations

  • Currently a patchwork, but U.S. DOT is moving toward specific rules for AV trucks.
  • Some regulatory flexibility has allowed innovation (e.g., Aurora’s blinking light “breakthrough” to replace reflective roadside triangles, after a lawsuit).

• Global Stakes

  • U.S. must not fall behind China in autonomous or electric vehicle technology.

    "This will be the next platform for transportation, and we cannot afford to cede that to our adversaries." — Chris Urmson (31:47)

7. Universities as Neutral Arbiters and Innovation Hubs

• Role in Research and Oversight
  • Universities provide independent data, frameworks, and facilitate multi-party consortia for sharing safety-critical information.

    "Universities offer a neutral and independent place for data, for ideas, and for kind of arbiters of new technologies and emerging things in the innovation ecosystem." — Jonathan Ehsani (40:44)

  • Potential for academia-led safety data pooling, similar to aviation industry standards.

Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• "We use a combination of verifiable AI, interesting hardware, things like LiDAR, radar, and cameras to see the world… The computer is ever vigilant, looking 360 degrees around, doesn’t get distracted… We can move goods almost twice as far as a person driving a truck can."
  — Chris Urmson (03:56)

• "Truck drivers are among the safest drivers on the road… However, when there is a crash, it’s catastrophic, often not for the truck driver, but for the person or object struck."
  — Jonathan Ehsani (08:46)

• "One real opportunity that exists with autonomous vehicles and trucks is that once one catastrophic thing happens, it should never happen again because the entire vehicle fleet should learn from it."
  — Jonathan Ehsani (42:04)

• "I joke that what a person does is they drive down the road and they can’t see anything. So they drive at freeway speeds. It’s like faith-based driving… And the self-driving truck is going to go, oh geez, that’s a blizzard. I can only see so far. I’m going to slow down."
  — Chris Urmson (47:07)

Important Timestamps & Segments

• Understanding Aurora's Mission and Technology — 03:36 – 06:29
• Public Safety, Acceptance, and Trust — 08:46 – 11:15
• Deep Dive on "Verifiable AI" and Autonomy — 12:19 – 18:05
• Externalities: Crashes, Emissions, Cybersecurity — 18:43 – 21:25
• The Five “Safety Case” Pillars — 24:20 – 27:00
• Labor Markets, Job Loss, Industry Pushback — 30:10 – 33:28
• Regulatory Landscape and Federal Role — 36:59 – 39:29
• University as Neutral Broker and Safety Data Consortia — 40:44 – 42:44
• Future Scenario: Driverless Trucks on I-95 (2035 Prediction) — 45:43 – 48:39

Conclusion: What Must Happen for Normalization

• Relentless focus on safety and transparent cultural adaptation.
• Robust data-sharing and industry learning to eliminate repeat errors.
• Smart, adaptable regulations, ideally at a national level.
• Clear government, academia, and industry partnerships to steward innovation and manage workforce transitions.
• Gradual, evidence-based public exposure to build trust and acceptance.
• Jonathan Ehsani: "Safety first has to be that… the paradigm that Chris articulated, the safety first is going to build trust and it's going to be demonstrating time and again also the learning that's happening with these vehicles." (46:16)

Final Words

• Chris Urmson: "Certainly before 10 years from now" driverless trucks will be on highways like I-95; Sun Belt routes will expand first, then up the country. "People make a big deal about snow. No, it’s not that big a deal… Just another thing to add at some point." (47:56)
• Kara Swisher: "Owning a car will move as quaint as owning a horse someday…"

For listeners: This episode is a must-listen for anyone curious about how AI and automation are already reshaping the core infrastructure of the U.S. economy—and the road ahead for technology, jobs, and public trust.