Self-driving technology company TuSimple continues to notch off achievements while testing its autonomous trucks, but the San Diego-based start-up can’t always say the same for other vehicles—particularly those that don’t abide by traffic laws.
TuSimple Chief Administrative Officer Jim Mullen told Commercial Carrier Journal that a TuSimple test truck was recently side-swiped by a vehicle in Arizona that ran a red light. Nobody was injured in the hit and run, but police are taking a much closer look at the video TuSimple passed along.
“We have the video footage,” Mullen said “We’ve given it to law enforcement. They're looking at the video to see if they can identify the driver.”
TuSimple compiles plenty of travel data that has become important during an unprecedented time of nuclear verdicts. This, Mullen said, makes trucking companies excited. “Our technology—our cameras, our LIDAR, our radar—it detects everything that’s going on,” he said.
[Related: Volvo adds Aurora as AV partner to spur development]
Mullen was the former general counsel at Werner. Following a collision, accident reconstruction specialists are often hired to better gauge details and render an opinion on the collision, he said, but the high-level, unblinking eyes of TuSimple’s Level 4 autonomous technology provides much more information than carriers have had in the past.
