The Self-Driving Truck Race Heats Up With a Driverless Test

[Narrator] At first glance,

it sounds like you're typical Florida man story.

Some guy rigs a truck to drive down some stretch

of sunshine state road with nobody inside.

But this is no crazed bit of hijinx.

It's a major milestone for Starsky Robotics,

a startup aiming to make driverless trucks

that never need a human inside.

So as you'll see, there is no one in our truck.

No one hiding back there.

And especially not anyone here in the driver seat.

[Narrator] In mid-February,

Starsky CEO, Stefan Seltz-Axmacher,

sent his truck on a seven mile journey

down a closed and very straight highway.

The trip proved yes,

the startup can produce a completely driveless truck.

Starsky's just one name in a crowded field.

Uber is testing its own robo-trucks in Arizona,

and building the logistical know-how to make it work.

Embark, another startup, is sending refrigerators

from Texas to California in self-driving semis.

In the Uber and Embark models,

the human handles the trucks on tricky surface streets

from their starting point to the highway,

then hops out of the cab,

and lets the machine do the simple,

long distance hauling on its own.

At the end of the journey,

the truck exits and meets up with another human,

who drives the last few miles to its destination.

Starsky, too, wants a human in charge

when it comes to non-highway driving,

where intersections, pedestrians, and cyclists

can stump the computer.

But it doesn't want that human anywhere near the truck.

We came out of this from the gate

hoping to make trucks drive

without a person sitting in them.

That's why what we're doing is we're making trucks

autonomous when they're on the highway,

but tele-operated, or remote controlled, off of it.

[Narrator] Like the pilots controlling predator drones,

Starsky's professional truck drivers do their work

from what looks like a combination call center slash arcade.

It's hard to say which model will win out,

but the stakes are clear.

Trucking, as they say in the valley, is ripe for disruption.

There aren't nearly enough drivers

to move all those trucks and cargo,

and the shortage will probably only get worse

as online retailers encourage Americans to ship more goods.

That's why Tesla, Google's sister company, Waymo,

and old timers like Volvo and Daimler

are getting involved, too.

There are all sorts of questions left

about how federal regulations

will handle these rolling robots,

what people in regular cars will think,

and what happens in the inevitable event of a crash.

But if the future is really on its way,

just one question really matters.

In this robotic vision,

who will blast their horns

to delight America's road-going children?

(honking horn)