The Race to Revolutionize Autonomous Trucking
Waymo and TuSimple are leading the charge in the burgeoning autonomous trucking industry, but their approaches to solving the sector’s toughest challenges couldn’t be more different. At TC Mobility 2020, TuSimple founder Xiaodi Hou and Waymo’s Trucking Head Boris Sofman offered rare insights into their competing visions for self-driving freight transportation.
Why Trucking? The Billion-Dollar Opportunity
Both executives highlighted the massive potential of the trucking market:
- Market Size: \(700-\)800 billion annually in the U.S. alone (Sofman)
- Driver Shortage: Growing deficit of qualified drivers
- Cost Efficiency: Trucking offers better ROI than passenger vehicles (Hou)
“It’s not going to be overnight — there’s still a really long tail of challenges,” cautioned Sofman, who joined Waymo from Anki. “The things that are hardest are just different.”
The Perception Problem: Seeing Like Humans vs. Systems
The leaders revealed fundamentally different approaches to creating AI perception systems:
Waymo’s Custom Hardware Solution
- Developed proprietary sensors over five hardware generations
- Includes custom lidar, radar, and camera systems
- Designed specifically for challenging road conditions
TuSimple’s Neuroscience-Inspired Approach
- Focuses on reconstructing human-like perception (“qualia”)
- Emphasizes understanding objects and their attributes
- Builds on Hou’s background in neuroscience
“I’m always thinking about building a machine that can see and think, as humans do,” Hou explained.
The Great Highway vs. City Driving Debate
The executives diverged on whether highway and urban driving represent distinct challenges:
Hou’s View:
- Highway driving is highly regulated
- Urban driving involves complex social constructs
- Minimal overlap between the two environments
Sofman’s Counter:
- 85-90% of technology transfers between domains
- Same sensors, compute infrastructure, and simulation frameworks
- Perception systems largely carry over
The Long Road Ahead
While both companies are making significant progress, they acknowledge the immense technical hurdles remaining in creating truly autonomous trucking solutions. The discussion highlights how different philosophical approaches can lead to equally valid paths toward solving one of transportation’s most complex challenges.
For more insights from TC Sessions: Mobility 2020, including full video of this discussion, visit the event archive.
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