“Pretty freaking scary” is how Clint Kneip remembers one of his first interactions with an autonomous vehicle.
At the time, Kneip was with the California Highway Patrol, from which he retired in 2020 as the captain commander of the law enforcement agency’s commercial vehicle section.
What a difference time and tech advancements can make: Kneip is now a big enough believer in AVs that he’s on the other side of the equation, serving as the head of first responder engagement for autonomous trucking company Gatik AI. Kneip acts as a liaison between the company and the police officers, dispatchers, emergency medical services workers, firefighters, and other first responders who are increasingly likely to encounter a driverless vehicle in their line of work.
The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration started requiring companies to report crash data related to AVs and advanced driver assistance systems in June 2021. For vehicles with higher levels of autonomy, there were 165 crashes reported in 2022, 288 in 2023, and 543 in 2024, per NHTSA.
“A lot of first responders across the US have never interacted with an autonomous vehicle. They’ve never even seen one,” Kneip told Tech Brew. “The only ones that come up [are] in the news when something bad happens. An AV got hit, or they caused some type of damage, or they didn’t interact well with the first responder. They never hear about all the good things that they’re doing.”
Outreach: That’s where he comes in. When Gatik is scouting out a new route for its middle-mile logistics services, Kneip will reach out to local and state officials to introduce them to the company and offer a primer on how to interact with autonomous trucks.
Kneip’s outreach is based on his own firsthand experience. In his previous role with the California Highway Patrol, he was tasked with reaching out to AV companies in the state to learn about their technology and the safety cases they were building. He also led a working group on AVs and law enforcement for the nonprofit Commercial Vehicle Safety Alliance.
Since joining Gatik last year, Kneip’s been tasked with answering questions and responding to concerns that are familiar to him from his law-enforcement experience: How are you supposed to interact with an autonomous truck at weigh stations? How do first responders get in touch with a human from the AV company? Will the vehicle know what to do in the event of a collision?
These are some of the questions Kneip said he gets during training sessions he leads. He recently visited Sherman, Texas, for example, ahead of Gatik’s planned debut of freight-only operations there and in Denison, Texas, later this year. The outreach also coincides with a third-party audit of its safety case that Gatik is undergoing.
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“Engagement and sign-off from the first responder communities with whom we work closely is a critical component of that,” Rich Steiner, Gatik’s VP of government relations and public affairs, said in a company video.
Industry focus: The AV sector has numerous efforts underway to address concerns that first responders, law enforcement officers, and residents of local communities have raised about driverless vehicles.
Austin,TX, for example, has had dozens of complaints over nuisances and issues caused by robotaxis––for example, the vehicles not responding to signals from police officers directing traffic.
In September, the Autonomous Vehicle Industry Association announced its Law Enforcement and First Responder Engagement Council, “a new initiative to further enhance cooperation between the first responder and autonomous vehicle communities.”
“A strong partnership between the AV industry, law enforcement, and first responders is essential for the safe and successful deployment of this lifesaving technology,” Jeff Farrah, CEO of AVIA, said in a statement.
The council includes representatives from the California Highway Patrol, San Francisco Police Department, Texas Department of Public Safety, Kodiak, Waymo, Aurora, and others.
Waymo has said that it’s certified that its robotaxis are prepared to interact with emergency vehicles and first responders.
It’s essential “that law enforcement understands how to safely interact with self-driving vehicles,” Gary McCarthy, AV trucking company Aurora’s senior manager of law enforcement interactions, said in a 2022 blog post.
Education: Two of the most common questions Kneip said he gets are whether Gatik’s trucks can detect and appropriately respond to emergency vehicles, and what happens if they’re involved in a crash.
He explains that the trucks are “equipped with advanced technology to identify first responder vehicles, and they’ll respond safely and appropriately as each situation requires. If one of our vehicles detects a first responder vehicle trying to pull it over, it’ll slow down, just like we’re all trained to do.”
And in the event of a crash, Gatik’s AV system is trained to brake, turn on its hazard lights, and hand over control to a remote supervisor, Kneip said. Each truck displays a hotline number first responders can call to get in touch with a remote supervisor.
“These are true Level 4 vehicles,” Kneip said. “And when people know the difference of that, that’ll just help them be better educated on the technology itself.”