Experts from Witherite Law Group say Autonomous Trucks are Not Ready for Texas Roads

DALLAS--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Attorney and truck safety advocate Amy Witherite warns that autonomous trucks still face serious safety gaps—acknowledged by their own developers, confirmed by independent studies, and underscored by industry experts.

Waabi CEO Raquel Urtasun has called her company’s simulator-based approach “provably safe,” saying real-world testing in the millions of miles “is nowhere near what would be required to provide the rigorous evidence necessary for a comprehensive safety case.”

Professor Philip Koopman of Carnegie Mellon University, one of the world’s leading autonomous vehicle safety researchers, cautions that true safety requires ultra-reliability:

“Safety isn’t about working right most of the time. Safety is all about the rare case where it doesn’t work properly. It has to work 99.999999999% of the time. AV companies are still working on the first few nines, with a bunch more nines to go.”

Witherite says those two statements highlight the gap between marketing promises and operational reality: “Even the most advanced companies admit they’re far from testing at the scale needed to prove safety under real-world conditions. Experts are telling us this technology is still working out the basics—so putting it on Texas highways is reckless.”

This comes as Aurora Innovation begins nighttime runs of its self-driving trucks on the Dallas–Houston route—still with a human observer in the cab “though no manual intervention is required”—and Texas A&M Transportation Institute warns that AI-driven systems remain limited by their programming, sensor range, and narrowly defined operational design domains.

Meanwhile, FMCSA’s 2023 Pocket Guide to Large Truck and Bus Statistics shows Texas is not only the deadliest state for large truck crashes in raw numbers—with 821 fatalities in 2021—but also has a per-mile fatality rate of 0.29 per 100 million vehicle miles traveled, well above the U.S. average of 0.19. While a few states have even higher per-mile rates, Texas still ranks in the higher-risk tier nationally and far exceeds states like California despite having a smaller population. In 2023 alone, Texas recorded 650 deadly large-truck crashes—52% more than California, the next highest state.

“Texas can’t afford to be the test track for unproven technology,” Witherite said. “We already have the highest truck crash fatality numbers in the country and a safety rate worse than the national average. Until autonomous trucks can meet the extreme reliability experts demand, they have no place in live traffic.”

Amy Witherite is the founding attorney of Witherite Law Group and a nationally recognized traffic safety advocate. She has represented hundreds of families affected by trucking collisions. Call 1 800 Truck Wreck or visit 1800TruckWreck.com to learn more.