What happens when an autonomous truck breaks down on the highway at 2 AM, or when cross winds blow hard enough to push over semi trailers, or a tornado kicks up and heads toward the interstate, or there is black ice on the road?

Aurora Innovation is running driverless Class 8 trucks commercially between Dallas and Houston. Kodiak Robotics is operating driverless trucks in the Permian Basin. Both companies have logged real commercial miles, reported real safety data, and announced scaling plans that extend to hundreds of trucks by the end of 2026 and thousands beyond that.

An experienced driver hears the tire that is losing pressure before the monitoring system registers it. They feel the brake pulling to one side before the alignment is measurably off on any sensor. They smell an electrical component beginning to fail before it generates a fault code. They notice the shimmy at 65 miles per hour that the ECM has not translated into a diagnostic event. They see the passenger car drifting in the next lane and recognize — before any algorithm has processed the trajectory — that the driver is asleep.

Who places the reflective triangles 100 feet, 200 feet, and 300 feet behind the disabled vehicle as FMCSA regulations require?

https://www.freightwaves.com/news/nobody-is-asking-the-hard-questions-about-what-happens-when-an-autonomous-truck-breaks-down-on-the-highway-at-2-am-let-us-start