Could autonomous trucks prevent accidents like the deadly I-20 crash, when an 18-wheeler driver allegedly fell asleep at the wheel?
Last Saturday's devastating crash on I-20 in Kaufman County left five people dead and one critically injured is raising new questions about the push toward autonomous trucking and whether the tech could help prevent crashes like this one in the future.
Authorities said 27-year-old Alexis Gonzalez Companioni was driving a commercial truck and fell asleep behind the wheel, triggering a multi-vehicle pileup, killing four members of the McKellar family who were inside a Ford F-150 and Nicole Gregory, who was driving a Jeep Compass. A fifth member of the McKellar family and sole survivor from the F-150, 20-year-old Evan McKellar, was critically injured in the crash and remains in the hospital.
Gonzalez-Companioni is charged with five counts of manslaughter.
Julius Reeves was driving one of seven vehicles involved in the mass casualty event. He was driving a semi-truck at the very front of the crash and was rear-ended by another semi.
"It's such a bad thing that has happened," Reeves said. He's recovering from a broken nose and two black eyes.
"To look at the vehicles on that horrific sight ... over 30 something plus years, I've never witnessed or been involved in a situation like that," he said.
"The research does show that drowsiness and drowsy driving is a common factor in crashes," Aurora's Chief Safety Officer, Nat Beuse said. "If you look at the top three, it's generally speeding, it's generally alcohol and generally belt use."
as the first to commercially operate self-driving heavy-duty trucks, launching here in North Texas.
Beuse said the technology eliminates human error.
"All the things that plague us as humans, it doesn't have those things," he said.
Some critics question how well driverless trucks handle challenges like bad weather or unpredictable traffic. Aurora said those scenarios have been thoroughly studied.
"We have an off-line suite that we use through simulation," Beuse said.
"You can think of our simulation suite as a collection of the world's hardest driving tests, and that is built off thousands of requirements, and those thousands of requirements result in millions of simulations, and that software has to pass through all of that before it's allowed on public roads" said Beuse.
The company has publicly released a safety report, working with federal and state agencies.
"We've been operating continuously, nearly seven days a week, since April, and we've accumulated nearly 15,000 miles of driverless miles already, and that number just keeps going up and up and up every week, and we've never had any incidents to speak of," Beuse said.
Aurora believes autonomous trucking is the way of the future and that it could help save lives. The company plans to expand operations to El Paso and Phoenix later this year.
