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Grayson Brulte:
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Hello, I'm your host, Grayson Brulte. Welcome to another episode of SAE Tomorrow. Today, a show about emerging technology and trends and mobility with leaders and innovators who make it all happen. On today's episode, we're absolutely honored to be joined by Sam Loesch, Head of Policy and Public Affairs, Waabi.
On today's episode, he'll share his insights on policy and workforce development in the world of autonomous trucks. We hope you enjoy this episode.
Welcome to podcast, Sam.
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Sam Loesche:
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Thanks, Grayson, and great to be here.
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Grayson Brulte:
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I'm excited to have you here because as autonomy and autonomous trucks develop, professional drivers will play a very large role in the future of autonomous trucking and autonomous trucking point blank, and you and I both know we'll create jobs. There's a lot of chatter around the role of drivers. When trucks go autonomous, will the drivers be involved? Will they not be involved? And there's a lot of mistrust and a lot of misstatements out there. You have this unique insight from both sides of the aisle.
Can you shed some light on the topic and the role of the professional driver will play as autonomous truck scale please?
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Sam Loesche:
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Yeah, no, absolutely. And it's, and I'm glad you asked it 'cause I think it's a question as, companies like ours and the whole ecosystem gets closer to bringing the promise of this technology of the world a question that we're gonna be asked more and more, and really want to nip it in the bud and start talking about this in some detail. So I, I think first and foremost, the biggest, misconception as and a lot of other people who both follow this space closely, but also come from the trucking industry, know, is that there's this tendency to look at trucking as this giant blob where everything is the same, right? It's as if you're, acting as a Disney character and it doesn't matter which character you just run around in the costume or something. Couldn't be further from the truth. You talk to professional drivers who have been in the LTL space for 30 years, their experiences day to day, especially if they're doing, say city driving, doing local pickups and deliveries, couldn't be more different than a driver who lives on the road for six months at a time.
So even at the foundational point that any sort of technology that has a very specific and narrow to start and then slowly expanding use case like autonomous trucking does, is going to impact that entire, very diverse ecosystem. The same is just off base and more than that it's also the fact that a lot of this has really been studied and looked at in, in a lot of detail at this point. And, we have all seen over the last couple years what Covid did to the supply chains and how much we were really struggling to even get drivers into the industry, much less stay.
This is a job that is grueling and hard, especially on the long-haul truckload type operations. You know that a lot of companies, ours included, are really focusing on. And it's a very difficult job to, almost no matter what you pay people to get 'em to stay in because of the quality of life in there.
So we really see this as a way to, to bring the benefits of technology, letting a robot go and do some of the most grueling work to free you up, to do some of the slightly easier work as the perfect solution. And drivers are gonna play an essential and irreplaceable role in that for decades to come.
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Grayson Brulte:
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And it seems, when you, when I look at the trucking market as a whole, that there's a trend where drivers preferring the routes where they can go home at night versus the long over the road. And just looking at autonomy, autonomous trucks, okay, that's a really great application where drivers don't really wanna do, but you have the really great million-mile drivers, 2 million drive that really enjoy that.
But a majority of new drivers don't like that. Is that where you see autonomous trucks picking up the slack on those long-haul routes where the professional drivers will drive the local delivery routes, perhaps the under a hundred mile routes, under 50 mile routes?
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Sam Loesche:
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Absolutely. And even slightly longer too at times, right? Regional routes specialty tied to freight, right? Flatbed, operations, things like that, right? Where there are, unique kind of characteristics and concerns. Sometimes, even if it's a longer route, but you need to make multiple stops along the trip, that requires you to have a driver or someone else there to unload the freight and interact with the customer.
It has nothing to do with the technology. That's just the nature of, the business. But you hit the nail on the head in terms of where. We've seen the next generation of drivers really wanting to go hat tip to Uber Freight who did a really good kind of review of some market data on this over the years and, their look at kind of employment growth and the various sectors I think since about 2012 showed, that the local delivery side, completely irrelevant to of autonomy had almost 20 or 30% more growth than the long distance kind of truckload side.
And exactly your point. I think this reflects, you have a new generation coming in who values being at home? They're more connected, via social media and the internet to their peers. They understand that there are more options for them versus just going into a, a truckload job.
Like a driver 40 years ago might have just been connected by a friend or a relative and stuck into that segment. They know they have more choices and they're making deliberate, intentional choices. To choose something that fits their value structure. And we're seeing more and more, 'cause drivers are people too.
They want to be home with their family. They want to be there at soccer practice. And they also wanna make a good wage to, to pay for, life that is getting more expensive by the year times.
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Grayson Brulte:
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Yeah. The inflation's not transitory. It's sticky. The Fed's gonna have to keep raising interest rates to get under control.
I've noticed a trend. I live here in Florida. I noticed a trend where I'm gonna call 'em entrepreneur. Professional drivers are doing car carriers, all these different car carrier brands around come October, the snowbirds come down and it used to be horseless carriages. That was the one company, and now you're seeing all these other carriers pop up.
I'm like, okay, somebody figured out a really good niche. Will these professional drivers, does that become a nationwide trend where they start to find these niches? Perhaps it's car carriers, perhaps it's getting a hazmat certification or oil and gas. Do we see those niches start to explode since you do need that human element, that human touch to move that type of cargo?
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Sam Loesche:
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Absolutely. I think you're completely right that is again, happening even irrespective of autonomy, right? And I think some of that is because, you have cycles in trucking, right? Where, especially on the spot market rates can go up and down and are constrained and impacted by macroeconomic effects.
The driver shortage plays into that, a bunch of other factors play into fuel prices, play into that. And you see there's a lot of drivers who, when times are good, get, decide to get into trucking, buy their own truck. Want to be in the business because they think those good times are gonna continue, and then they realize that's not the case.
And some of that is the beauty of the free market in some ways where they then face a choice and they choose to adapt, and they find those niche markets where they can exist for a long period of time and make good money too. You're not beholden to, to one or two customers or, a broker who you know you might need to build a relationship within order to make sure that you get good, reliable freight.
You're able to pick something that works for you. To your point about Florida, maybe you're on a repeated, repetitive route, going up and down 95 or something like that. But then you also, you develop a rapport with those customers. And I think that's happening in general for people who want to stay in the business and who wanna make money doing it.
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Grayson Brulte:
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Because if you look at the car carrier, you have the report, they trust you. That customer knows that car is safely gonna get to their house or to the landing area in certain towns. You have to go to a certain landing area to, to unload the cars. And they know that. So that's one little niche.
Then you have trucking. You have a lot of, some of the very large trucking companies, multi-billion dollar publicly traded enterprises. They have professional drivers that they, some of them run their own CDL schools. They've trained and these individuals will work their way up and they value the role of the professional driver. How are they looking at autonomous trucks where they have such a high value on the professional driver?
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Sam Loesche:
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Yeah, no I think it's always gonna, again, to the amorphous point of trucking, I think it's always gonna depend fleet to fleet, right? And don't wanna speak for all of our customers under one umbrella.
But I will say this, and to go back to the Covid times because I think that was a really important lesson learned in some ways about how kind of market dynamics could be shifted in a really unique time and what that means for the labor market. You have seen over the last few years, sign on retention bonuses that were absolutely sky high, right? That we're bringing people into this industry sometimes in droves, but other times it still wasn't enough to convince people to come into this industry. And I think that was a wakeup call for a lot of fleets that this wasn't a problem that you can buy your way out of.
Right? That there is a foundational issue with kind of the industry almost since deregulation of the trucking industry where you no longer had. Forcibly segmented or shortened routes, but you really could drive across the country. Great for, consumers, great for the price of goods, great for efficiency in the system, but that's a really challenging value proposition for a driver, no matter kind of what benefits or pay or bonuses you're throwing at 'em.
So I think there's been this collective acceptance. That you need some way to let off the steam valve right? To allow some of that extra capacity and pressure to be taken in a different direction so that you can, get freight there on time for your customers and, continue to develop a sophisticated industry that can survive both the ups and the downs as the market dictates.
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Grayson Brulte:
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I studied the freight market a lot during the pandemic. There's all the public reports and we saw the reports of the Port of LA, Goldman Sachs had a really good one about all the cargo backing up, and then I saw the shifting movements to the Port of Savannah and the various other ports around the United States.
So I started looking into the data and running different models and scenarios where, This is all hypothetical, so take it with that. If autonomous trucks were at scale, so lobby's operating at scale with your partners your peers in the industry you're operating at scale. I came to the conclusion that autonomous trucks could help to show up the supply chain.
And could have helped to unplug some of those ports, and it, to me became a hybrid solution. So you have the really great professional drivers on this side hauling, and you have the autonomous trucks on this side hauling. Is that where this is going? Do we get a hybrid approach when, while being and your peers begin to scale?
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Sam Loesche:
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I think for sure. Some of it is the dynamic racing that you know, which is. You need to build these trucks, right? Like we a lobby believe in making sure that this technology's integrated at the assembly line. And assembly lines can't produce an infinite amount of trucks every single year, right?
So the even if we were in a perfect world where we were pulling the safety driver today and everything was going to be deployed nationwide with absolutely no limitations on weather or anything else, people still need to build the actual trucks, right? They need to build a redundant platform, put our technology in, and I think that's going to.
At a bare minimum, really ensure that there is a phasing in of our technology into existing fleets. And that gets into that to, to the point that I think you're making too, which is, whether there's gonna be room for, say, a human driver in an autonomous tractor on the same lane for years going forward.
I think the answer is absolutely, it might be going to a different destination. One is just better suited for human driving, because of mountainous terrain or weather or other things, for the next couple years that are more difficult. But then an autonomous tractor can take it maybe three quarters of the way there and then, drop and hook and service another customer in a different direction.
I think, it's not only, it's not an, it's not an if and or or an if band. It's a, it's more of an or where, you're gonna be able to have a driver kind of driving on the same lane as an autonomous tractor, for years to come. In addition to the work that just doesn't, isn't really suited to autonomy. Those local pickup deliveries and other things that I mentioned before.
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Grayson Brulte:
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I think when you look at the local pickup and deliveries as the industry is clearly moving to a hub to hub and Uber Freight did another report on that, the hub to hub, the economics of the hub to hub, you're gonna have first and last mile jobs that are gonna be created.
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Sam Loesche:
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And then I look at this and say, you're gonna have a lot of economic stimulus. They can go to their kids' little league game, perhaps they go out for a hotdog and a hamburger and a milkshake after. Or they go to the movies, you're gonna have this really interesting economic stimulus that's going to happen 'cause we need it.
Me being me and you know me well enough, the Chattanooga, Tennessee, high concentration of truck drivers that live there. High concentration of trucking companies, the average home is $265,000 right now to buy a home in Chattanooga, Tennessee, 30-year fix at 8%, you're paying $565,000 for that house.
Almost double. What you're paying. We've got a problem. It's not gonna be able to survive. And that's where autonomy can come into the picture. We can, economic stimulus, create high paying local jobs. They can afford to buy that house. Now you've got something really special there with this industry.
But yet, why is that narrative never told about the positive economic benefits this technology is gonna have, not just for the companies developing it, not just for the companies that are using it. But for the communities that where this technology is gonna be deployed, they're gonna see the positive benefits as well. Yeah.
And the environment too, Grayson, right? As we shift more and more to EVs, the drayage and kind of local delivery industry is really, I think where we start to see, that, that makes a ton more sense, right? A haul of 50 or a hundred miles is much easier on electric tractor as you see everything that's going on in California with carb and the difficulties of the rollout there.
It's also, a lot of those drivers, especially they're doing local routes live in the communities where they're gonna be driving around, right? That's one, been one of the historic. Biggest problems, as in port communities is just the quality of the air as you have lines a mile long kind of waiting to get in and outta the ports of, the oldest dirtiest trucks that basically exist in the ecosystem.
Also sitting in your backyard essentially, waiting to pick up freight. So abs, it's gotta create jobs in parts of the country that otherwise, somewhat untouched. Right by trucking it's, they basically drive through because there isn't a consolidated market right there, to actually have that freight be the end destination to, I'm not gonna say Chattanooga, a smaller town, surrounding Chattanooga, right?
Where it doesn't have the volume, but it absolutely could make sense in say Chattanooga for instance, to have that be a, a hub where drivers go and service a mileage radius around them in a way that, you could really uplift and bring jobs to an area that was otherwise really depressed.
We really look at this as an opportunity. Again, trucking is the most common job in, I think 23 to 24 states across the country. This is already an industry that's big. Freight volumes continue to go up. As trucking gets more competitive, you could see a diversion of freight from say, air to and rail and back onto the truck.
There's more and more job growth to be had here. Why wouldn't we put this in regional and local communities where that otherwise tend to not be as serviced by the trucking industry just because of freight path.
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Grayson Brulte:
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Yeah, look this way. Take malls and we've seen the data around malls that are run, make 'em, logistics centers, they all the jobs.
So you took a mall that employed thousands of people and now it's logistics center employing thousands of people. 'cause the economic depression around where some of these large malls were is frankly sad. Because they're not going back and we have to do something with that land. The, they have very big parking lots.
It's not hard to get an a and e firm in there to go redesign it, to make it a logistic hub that will be realistic. When that happens, autonomous trucks are coming. You're at the forefront with Waabi. What does the adoption curve look like in your opinion?
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Sam Loesche:
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I think it depends again not to castigate it as an amorphous thing. I think, you know what Waabi is really focused on building is speeding up that curve. To be candid, right? Is understanding that you have an incredibly powerful technology in generative AI that can allow us to understand the diversity of the world at a pace and with an amount of fidelity that no one else can.
You know that otherwise you need to drive millions and millions and millions of miles on the road in order to do things that. AI based simulation and an AI based driving system can allow you to do in a fraction of that time. So we think we're really changing, the curve to make it, much more of a hockey stick so it can be adopted quickly.
But, again, this is gonna be incremental, right? It's, these are also. Not just the manufacturing of tractors themselves, the purchasing of tractors needs to also work into a fleet's purchasing pattern. As there, there are capital expenditures that are planned out years in advance and so all these factors are gonna go into it still being incremental.
First and foremost, the technology needs to be there, and it needs to be safe. And that's where we're really excited to be building at Waabi.
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Grayson Brulte:
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And you have a great name for your simulation platform, Waabi World. It reminds me of Wayne's World and it's party time, but on yours, it's simulation time. It's really great branding.
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Sam Loesche:
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It's, it may maybe not as fun as being in Wayne's basement, but a different kind of world for sure. And it's amazing to see as a non-engineer, as someone who really is in awe in some ways of what our technical teams can do.
We are able to basically drive down a road, capture information from our sensors, immediately transfer that into lobby world, which is our closed loop simulator, and turn that into a driving school or a playground, basically to train our autonomous driving school. System, it's something that no one else can do.
And it's because we have the absolute world leaders in artificial intelligence working at our company kind of beginning, and with our C E O who has been a leader in this space for, years. And it's allowing us to build a product that's not only to your point about adoption, going to be in our minds safer, but it's gonna be easily generalizable.
You know what? We can take lessons learned in one part of the country, easily transfer that in simulation into a base level of testing before we put it into a different road across the US or Canada or wherever we are going to deploy and get it much closer to the kind of driver out deployment than we otherwise could.
So we really think that this is the direction that the entire industry needs to go and it will go, and we're excited to be at the forefront of it.
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Grayson Brulte:
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I wanna give you credit 'cause you're an AI company at your core you have a simulation platform that I've spoken to some of your investors, and they speak volumes about your simulation platform that Raquel and the team has built.
But you have a lot of credit that you don't get enough for. You hired a trucker. You hired Dustin Cole. He comes from a trucking background. You have a trucking background. Then you put together the Million Mile Driver Advisory Board. To me it says, you’re showing respect to the professional men and women drivers, but it also says that you wanna learn from them.
Why did Waabi take the step to put together the Million Mile Driver Advisory Board, and what are you hoping to learn from members of that board?
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Sam Loesche:
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No, I and look, hat trick, I guess hat trick to Raquel for hiring Dustin and me and recognizing that this world needs. More people who are in the industry where we're deploying, but I think we're all ready to, to the million Miler drivers advisory board as well as just, the approach that we've been able to take on the commercial side is really, proving out that thesis, right?
That this isn't a technology that should be overlaid on top of an existing industry, but you need to bake it into. You know what the trucking industry has been, doing and know so well because, this is their business. We've really looked at this, whether it's on the advisory board or just interacting with customers as being a really collaborative close process through and through.
And that includes on, on, the drivers who are not only gonna see this technology on their own lots, being used by their companies, but are also gonna drive on the roads next to it. Our approach to the driver advisory board has really been twofold. One is, you would be crazy not to learn from someone who has driven two or 3 million miles on the road, right?
Who has seen absolutely everything that there almost is to see has made the highway their office for, decades at times often accident free that entire time. That is an accomplishment in and of itself. Why wouldn't you try to pick every little piece of information you could out of that person to help us build a better system?
We just had another meeting with our driver advisory board the other day, and. The details of what they have experienced the secondhand nonverbal communications that they're able to pick up just from driving on the road is so valuable to our engineers and to us as a company, as we understand the challenge of really building the stack and building something that is safer than the safest human driver that exists.
But the other part is to really not be just extractive, right? We want to give back and actually open up a dialogue for drivers. This is about opening up the hood a little bit so that they can see what the technology is, but they can also see what it isn't. To your point about why are we not talking about job creation on the local p and d side.
Some of it is, we think because people aren't doing enough of this outreach and direct communication with drivers, it's telling them that this technology is meant for a certain purpose, and it is not meant for other purposes. That local pickup and delivery times where you really need to interact with a customer in a lot of detail.
There is a very important, huge market that it's gonna fill. But that does not mean that it is going to take up every single tractor trailer that drives down the road. And being able to communicate that to drivers, have them get excited and understand kind of the possibilities for it. And also show them again, the road is their world. Show them how we're building this safely so that they know when they see a Waabi power truck driving, down the road next to them, they understand what went into building it and then they know that they can trust it and don't take other, divisive action that could even impact the safety of our drivers.
So we want to be a part of the community. We appreciate them accepting us and it's a conversation that we're really excited about continuing to have.
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Grayson Brulte:
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Trust is key. Without trust, autonomous trucks don't scale. At the end of the day, the public has to trust that the professional drivers have to trust it.
When you're going down the road with your family in a car and you look and you see a fully driverless truck, you have to trust and know that truck is doing safe driving. And then it, for me, being a dad, the one thing that I know my daughter's gonna want and that a lot of other. Parents, kids are gonna want the honk game.
You're gonna have to teach the truck how to play the honk game because then you're gonna build public trust with kids and that's a really good thing.
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Sam Loesche:
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Amen. No it's a great, it's a great point that’s, again, to the driver advisory board is one been one of the best things I think that we've really uncovered is those, non-verbal cues that people take for granted in some ways, and how we can make sure to adopt little pieces like that into our technology so that we are, we're not a random, secondary actor coming into the highway, right?
We want to be integrated seamlessly into the ecosystem so that, at times you might not even know we're there until you look over and see that there's not a driver in the cab. That's the goal, right? Seamless, boring implementation that it's, So safe, it really doesn't raise alarms and we'll need to make sure to put in a good horn for your daughter ‘cause keeping excitement in the industry is as important as anything.
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Grayson Brulte:
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Absolutely. Professional drivers and I've spoken to lots of them and some of them get very tactical when they drive. They're watching the wheel on a car, is it moving? 'cause it could potentially, come off.
And so they're trying to get evasive maneuvering, and they're really good at studying the road or patterns of a car, swerving. Perhaps they're on their phone or they're intoxicated. They're really good at reading the road. Are you taking those learnings from the professional drivers of reading the road and putting it into Waabi World where your autonomous trucks are knowing how to react to a situation just as a professional driver would?
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Sam Loesche:
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Absolutely. Some of this is we have what we think is the best technology in the space in order to drive. However, we think it's the safest driving behavior. But there is a, there is an art as well as a science, and the part of the art that we try to tap into is, what do professional drivers think is the safest maneuver in a certain situation, right?
Where you could take one of two options and. This is again, where Wabi world allows us to play with all these options, offline and the safety of a simulator instead of the real world. But we like to take the lessons and their advice into how we are, programming the technology.
Because again it's whether it's, the increased oil that has come up, the roadway after the first rain in a couple of months and what that can do to friction on the road or whether it's, how you adapt to looking into how a human looks into the car next to them and might see the person texting and maybe adjust their driving behavior. Those are all, that's all feedback that we want to take, to build into our system and then level up on top of it. We also have benefits that a human driver doesn't.
One of the things is you've heard over the years too, Grayson, is just, drivers have a huge blind spot.
Oftentimes on the far side of the truck, especially as they're pulling a 53-footer, we don't have that blind spot. So what can we take in terms of their advice level up with the 360 degree, vision that our sensors give us and create a holistically safer product than a human being really ever could do.
Because, even if you're checking your blind spots on one hand, on one side, you're turning your head to, the blind spot on the other side. So combining those two worlds to come create a perfect product is what we're aiming to do.
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Grayson Brulte:
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You're making it safer. I'd much rather be on a road with one of your autonomous trucks than a human driver, because I know your truck is not gonna get distracted, and I know your truck has one mission to go from destination A to B safely. That's all your truck's focused on.
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Sam Loesche:
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Yeah. And back to the quality of life of current drivers too. Which is. It's something I keep in the forefront of my head all the time. We, you also have the opportunity to maybe shift drivers from off peak hours, or back to peak hours where they can actually get their circadian rhythm right.
And be driving during the day again. Autonomous tractor can do some of the hauling at night because it can go coast to coast when there's left traffic. And do things like that. There's just a, there's just a host of benefits we see here. The increased pay, increased ability to get home at night.
The ability to have more routine and predictable freight. Hopefully this will help dig into, so the frustration a lot of drivers have of waiting hours, if not days at a shipper's facility, sometimes, waiting to pick up a load or drop one off, more consistency, reliability in the system. More optimization of the network in general, right? Because we know where assets are all the time. We can avoid, empty back hauls, which is also terrible for the environment, and not as efficient as it could be. So we see all these things playing into making a driver's world better, but also making the network better, which, Also at the end of the day, you gotta remember, drivers get paid by their company unless they're independent or operators.
If there's more margin for the company, that's more money that can go into drivers' pockets. That's more retention bonuses that can go out to them. And we just see efficiency as better for everyone in the entire supply chain. From dock workers to refuelers to drivers themselves.
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Grayson Brulte:
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It benefits everyone. We haven't talked about this, but for the professional drivers, it's gonna increase their health. They're gonna get healthier. And that's gonna have a really big impact and the consumer's gonna benefit 'cause some of those cost savings will be able to be passed on to the consumer.
At the end of the day, there's the jobs and do you have the individuals that unload a truck, load a truck, do the inspection? What type of jobs do you see being created in the future? And I start seeing a lot of jobs around the depots. The, or if you wanna use the term the transfer hubs being created.
In your opinion, what are some of the other jobs that are gonna be created in the autonomous trucking ecosystem?
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Sam Loesche:
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Yeah, absolutely. You're gonna need people, those depots who can help with calibration, right? Of the truck sensors. You're gonna need people who are remote dispatchers, right? Who can plug in and help, breadcrumb or direct the truck to, answer questions that it pings off of them, when it's out on the road.
You, you're still gonna be the base type operations though, too, which is, people doing the pre-trip, people doing the post-trip. People refueling and just making sure that everything in the truck is in good working order, as well as the loading and unloading.
But, for all the job creation that's gonna happen there, to, to the, to what we're talking about the, out the outset of the conversation I don't want to acknowledge that there's really gonna be any job loss. In the grander ecosystem for those drivers themselves, right? So in, in our mind, the job creation is an awesome, great addition to the entire ecosystem.
But you're also going to have, just by nature of the slow trickle of job creation that's existed in the human-driven space, a ton of drivers who are gonna continue to be able to drive and then in added efficiency in the system was gonna allow, fleets to hire more and more drivers.
So we see it as a win-win. In kind of both buckets, but there is gonna be some really awesome, exciting jobs that are created that don't exist now.
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Grayson Brulte:
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It's gonna be fun 'cause you're gonna get individuals who had never thought of a career in trucking and say, this is cool. I get to work in technology. And I get to go home at night. Okay. This is great. So you're going to have those individuals that go there. Overall, how should the industry approach workforce development? It seems that we've had some start stops. We haven't collectively come together with around a clear messaging.
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Sam Loesche:
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Yeah I think honesty too, right? And transparency is always key. We've made a center of our communications to drivers is really being clear with them about, again, what the technology is capable of doing and what it isn't. What the adoption timelines are and what they aren't. And drivers are very smart people.
They are able to connect the dots and understand what that means for them. There's a lot of macroeconomic factors to what we talked about the outset. That impact whether driving does a good job for them, even prior to auto autonomous tractors, right? It's, if the, if they're operating on the spot market with the spot market makes sense.
If they're gonna have enough contractor freight to exist for years at a time. We see this as something that's gonna add stability and reliability to them and just, communicating that to them directly. Not being afraid of drivers. Some of you have talked to more drivers over my career than I can even count.
And drivers are just good, hardworking people in my experience. They want to make a good wage, they want to be able to get home to their family. Then they, and they want to do it with their limbs intact and healthy. And that's the other part too, of communicating the benefits to your point about health of drivers, anyone who's lived down the road has seen, how much of a taxing lifestyle that is.
Not just because you're driving and away from home and sleeping in the. A truck stop or, in, in the sleeper berth for days at a time, but you're also eating fast food. You don't have access to any sort of, outdoors facilities to go for a walk or stretch your legs.
And drivers have seen that. You have the rise of sleep apnea and, other physical issues impacting the community more than anyone. I think if you ask drivers in an honest fashion, they will acknowledge things need to change in this industry, and we're excited to be part of that revolution.
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Grayson Brulte:
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You should be excited. You're doing good. There's no other way to describe it. You're doing good. The drivers are gonna have a better lifestyle and they're gonna make more money, and they're gonna be able to be there for their family. And that's a win-win. And it's gonna benefit their local community as well.
There's gonna be a lot of positive benefits that come from autonomous trucking, so thank you for highlighting those on this conversation. There's the million dollar one. I'm giving you a huge softball, so I want a Babe Ruth home run on this one. What is the future of autonomous trucking?
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Sam Loesche:
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I think the future of autonomous trucking is incredibly bright. I think it is incremental at first and then going into rocket ship speed a couple of years after initial integration. Yeah I liken this, Grayson, into something that we can't comprehend in some ways now until it really becomes ubiquitous. And a hat tip to some of my robo taxi colleagues in the same way you're seeing with robo taxi deployments. It's almost unbelievable until you see it and you take a ride and you go into it and next thing you don't, you don't think about it anymore. That's what I see as the future of autonomous trucking. More efficiency. It makes the trucking industry as a whole better.
It makes drivers' lives better. It increases efficiencies for our entire supply chain and just. It helps unleash the US to do things that, we otherwise are constrained to do because of the inefficiencies of our supply chain. That efficiency, that the positive job creation impacts everything across the board. I think it's really gonna take off and change a way that we move goods in this country forever.
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Grayson Brulte:
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Autonomous trucks become part of the fabric society as they scale at the end of the day. And if America can have a stable, secure supply chain, it's good for national security. It, and it's good for the economy and then the entire country benefits and hopefully at some point we get a national framework that'll can allow Waabi and all of your competitors in the industry to operate across state lines and all 50 states 'cause the American public will benefit when the American public benefits, the economy benefits. When the economy benefits. Everybody wins. As we look to wrap up this insightful conversation, Sam, what would you like our listeners to take away with them today?
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Sam Loesche:
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You should understand that the fear and consternation that people might have heard from truck drivers is real. But don't be scared of it, right? Embrace it. Take that as an opportunity to talk to drivers directly, understand where they're coming from, have, reasonable and open and transparent conversations with them, and I think you'll be really surprised for the results. Drivers are savvy, smart people who have seen more and more technology come into the cabs of their trucks over not only the years, but decades now and understand what the future holds.
They just wanna make sure it works for them and doesn't isn't thrown on top of them. We see this as a huge and amazing opportunity to start that conversation with them now. And, we have really been seeing the results already for a driver advisory board. We'd say to other people, get on board. Let's go talk to people.
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Grayson Brulte:
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Get on board, sit down and have a coffee with an individual professional driver or somebody that works in the trucking industry. I've done it. They're fascinating conversations, and the best part is I learned something that I didn't learn, and you get to meet really great men and women.
Today is tomorrow. Tomorrow's today. The future is autonomous trucking job creation. Sam, thank you so much for coming on SAE Tomorrow Today.
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