Autonomous semi trucks to hit California roads

On Thursday, the California Department of Motor Vehicles issued a permit to Kodiak AI, Inc. to begin testing heavy-duty autonomous vehicles on California's roads for the first time. Until now, classification did not exist for — and therefore did not allow — vehicles heavier than 10,001 pounds. 

Yahoo! News compares Kodiak's first testing phase to a leaner's permit: "What the DMV actually issued is a drivered permit. Every Kodiak tractor operating under it carries a human being in the left seat, belted in, hands near the wheel, doing exactly the job California spent a decade insisting somebody had to do," writes John Lloyd. "Kodiak's permit is the first rung of a three-rung ladder: drivered testing, then driverless testing, then driverless commercial deployment." 

But Lloyd also emphasized how quickly the phase might pass. 

"Before a heavy-duty developer can run driverless freight commercially in California, it needs roughly 500,000 miles logged in the safety-driver phase and another 500,000 in the driverless phase, with about 200,000 of the total accumulated inside California... [but] a single long-haul tractor covers 500,000 miles in maybe five years of hard duty. A test fleet of 20 trucks running 500 miles a day clears the same distance in about seven weeks."

Lloyd's article gives a very thorough overview and analysis of Kodiak's history, the evolving regulations of heavy-duty autonomous vehicles, and what it all means. Have a read, below.