Driverless Semi-Trucks Are Here & Coming to a Highway Near You

On with Kara Swisher

New York Magazine

Society & Culture

4.2 • 3.2K Ratings

🗓️ 29 December 2025

⏱️ 47 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Kara sits down with Chris Urmson, CEO and co-founder of the autonomous trucking company Aurora, and Johnathon Ehsani, a professor of public health at Johns Hopkins University and leading road safety researcher, for a candid look at the future of AI-powered freight transport. Recorded live at the Hopkins Bloomberg Center, the three discuss the rapid rise of driverless trucking, what it will take to convince a skeptical public that sharing the road with self-driving 18-wheelers will actually make driving safer, the potential for job losses, and how to regulate autonomous vehicles across state lines. It’s a deeply informed look at the promises and the trade-offs of autonomous trucking with two experts. Questions? Comments? Email us at on@voxmedia.com or find us on YouTube, Instagram, TikTok, Threads, and Bluesky @onwithkaraswisher. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.0	I tried to get the car to run him over.
0:01.8	Thanks for that, by the way.
0:02.8	No problem.
0:03.3	And it wouldn't do it, which was a great disappointment for me.
0:06.6	Thanks for that also.
0:07.5	No problem.
0:08.0	Hi, everyone from New York. This and the Vox Media Podcast Network.
0:22.4	This is On with Kara Swisher, and I'm Kara Swisher.
0:25.4	Today I'm talking about autonomous trucking with Chris Irmson and Jonathan Asani.
0:30.5	Chris is the co-founder, chairman, and CEO of Aurora, and a true pioneer in the industry.
0:35.3	He's one of the first people I started talking to about autonomous vehicles back in the mid to late 2000s.
0:41.3	Back then, he was working at Google, where he helped launch and lead Google's self-driving car project, which is now Waymo.
0:48.3	He co-founded Aurora in 2017, and last year it began driving commercial freight in Texas.
0:53.3	The Aurora driver system has already
0:55.8	done over 100,000 solo miles in the real world, and by the end of 2027, Ermson plans to have
1:01.8	thousands of driverless trucks hauling freight in the U.S. Jonathan is a professor at Johns Hopkins
1:07.2	Bloomberg School of Public Health and an internationally recognized road safety and injury prevention researcher.
1:13.7	He advises the U.S. Department of Transportation and has studied the public's perception of autonomous driving technology.
1:19.9	I wanted to talk to Chris and Jonathan because I think it's really important to look beyond cars because trucks actually carry most of the food and other stuff we get in our stores,
1:29.9	and the innovations in it are critical to our economy. It's also got a lot of big issues,
1:35.1	including jobs and safety. It can be scary to think of a semi-truck rumbling beside you on the
1:40.8	highway without a human in the driver's seat, but the reality is they're already
	...

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