FMCSA gives Aurora and Kodiak a five-year exemption from the warning-triangle rule

A driverless truck develops a mechanical fault and has to stop on the shoulder ^[3]. For a conventional big rig, the federal rule starts a clock at that moment: the driver pulls over, switches on the hazard lights and puts reflective triangles on the road within 10 minutes ^[2]. A truck with nobody in the cab has no one to place them ^[3].

Daniel Goff, Kodiak's vice president of external affairs, said the exemption will help the industry "usher in an autonomous era of freight movement on U.S. roads, one that can save lives and improve the efficiency of goods delivery." ^[6] What the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration granted is narrower: five years of permission to use cab-mounted warning beacons where a conventional truck uses triangles ^[1].

Gerardo Interiano, Aurora's head of government relations and public affairs, said the beacons are a "critical, 21st-century solution that enhances roadside safety by immediately alerting other road users without ever needing to put a person in harm's way." ^[7] Interiano's statement is a design claim about what other drivers will do on seeing a beacon. The newsletter did not report a test of that claim or say whether the 10-minute window applies to the beacons.

A company that takes a rule to an appeals court regards it as blocking, and Aurora did that ^[4]. But companies already held a temporary waiver while the case was pending ^[5]. For anyone planning a driverless lane, the practical change is a fixed five-year term where there had been a stopgap ^[1].

To read any vendor's claim that it is ready to run without a driver, we'd sort each duty a driver used to perform on two axes: whether a substitute has been approved, and whether the approval has a fixed term or is a temporary waiver. The triangle duty now sits in the strongest cell, an approved substitute with a five-year term ^[1]. Before this week it sat in the weaker one, a temporary waiver while a decision was pending ^[5]. A duty with a substitute still pending, or none applied for, is a gap in the lane plan, and the vendor should say so in writing. A five-year term is a bound you can plan to. A driverless contract that runs past it needs a clause for the day the term ends.