An Exit Does Not Mean the End

By now you’ve probably heard the news that autonomous truck technology company TuSimple is looking to exit the U.S. market. The company launched in 2015 and looked like it had a bright future. More recently it has been plagued with personnel issues at the highest level, an end to its partnership with Navistar, a crash that involved its autonomous driving system and other issues.

While the company may be exiting the U.S. market, it does plan to continue to operate while focusing on the Asia-Pacific market.

The exit of an autonomous technology company from the U.S. market is not necessarily a bad thing. My colleague, Rick Mihelic, NACFE’s director of emerging technologies, has often written about what happens when a new technology is being developed. It is not uncommon for companies to start up, make some progress and then fail or fade away. And while some companies may fade away, others will enter the market, even some traditional manufacturers pivoting to embrace a new technology.

And this is not necessarily a bad thing. The experiences TuSimple had — including its December 22, 2021, experience traveling on surface streets and highways, in what it says was “the world’s first fully autonomous semi-truck run on open public roads without a human on board while naturally interacting with other motorists” — become part of the building blocks of moving the technology closer to reality.

No technology comes out of the box fully formed and autonomous trucking technology is no different. We have been building up to it for years with things like advanced driver assistance systems (ADAS) such as blind-spot monitoring, lane-departure warning, collision mitigation systems, adaptive cruise control, etc.

There are going to be a lot of two-steps-forward-one-step-back movements on the road to autonomous trucking and not all of the development in the AV space will depend on the technology developers and vehicle manufacturers. There is a fair amount of infrastructure improvements that have to occur before autonomous trucking can become a reality as well as issues concerning how vehicle inspections will be performed, etc.

And remember, TuSimple is not exiting the autonomous vehicle technology market completely. It’s just leaving the U.S. market. The company’s U.S. headquarters is in San Diego, CA — a state that has not exactly been welcoming of autonomous vehicles. Just look at the recent ruling from the California State Assembly banning driverless trucks from the state’s roadways. Talk about a momentum killer.

But the company is going to continue to work on its technology in other markets. Trucking, like almost every other industry, has become global in nature. Anything TuSimple learns from its work in the Asia-Pacific market will undoubtedly find its way to the U.S. at some point — whether the company resumes U.S. operations, or some other autonomous technology developer leverages the learnings and applies them here.

TuSimple’s exiting the U.S. market is not the beginning of the death knell for AV development. It’s just part of the normal development of nascent technology coming into a highly regulated market. While we likely are not going to see widespread deployment of autonomous vehicles on the highways tomorrow, in my opinion, some day they will be a normal part of the trucking industry.