Feeling a little skeptical about the prospect of driving on the highway next to a truck with goods on board, but no driver behind the wheel?
Executives at Gatik get it. That’s why the autonomous trucking company, which is in the process of scaling a business around driverless freight deliveries, is committed to showing its work—and getting outside validation that everything is A-OK.
Gatik on Tuesday provided an update on a move it announced last fall: that it was commissioning a third-party assessment of its safety case, which is how AV companies determine their technology is safe enough for public roads.
“When there is rightly some hesitancy around autonomous vehicles—especially for those who are not building it, these are very complex systems—to have confidence that those who are making it are doing the right things, you need to be transparent,” Adam Campbell, Gatik’s head of safety innovation, told Tech Brew.
The move came amid efforts across the AV sector to build trust with the public, first responders, regulators, and other stakeholders about the safety of self-driving vehicle tech.
Gatik tapped independent testing and certification organization TÜV SÜD and autonomy risk management provider Edge Case Research to conduct the voluntary assessment. Now, Gatik says it has closed two pillars of its safety assessment framework: its safety case evaluation and functional safety phases.
“We strongly believe that the future of autonomous vehicles will be defined by those who prioritize safety above all else,” Gautam Narang, Gatik’s CEO, said in a statement. “This independently validated audit of our safety case and functional safety methodology represents a radical departure from the self-certified safety audits that have become the industry norm.”
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The company said TÜV SÜD had “provided independent, third-party validation” that Gatik’s approach to those two parts of its safety case “met the requirements of TÜV SÜD’s Autonomous Vehicle Conformity Framework, a globally recognized process for evaluating autonomous vehicle safety across development, testing, and deployment domains.”
Some of the elements TÜV SÜD reviewed included Gatik’s operational design domain, testing, hazard analysis and risk assessment, and safety culture.
Gatik launched in 2017, and has since been working to scale a business running logistics routes to connect locations like fulfillment centers, distribution warehouses, and stores. Its customers include Kroger, Tyson Foods, and Walmart.
Gatik said it would continue to share updates on its progress toward completing its safety assessment framework ahead of launching fully driverless operations.
“Safety is a journey. We’re by no means complete at the end of this milestone-based evaluation that we’ve undertaken,” Campbell told us. “But what has been done was a review of our safety case and our functional safety practices. These are two incredibly important foundational items to assure ourselves that we are tracking the right things.”