Autonomy doesn’t scale without safety

Seven years ago, I joined Outrider to help bring a new category to market. I expected the hardest part would be explaining what autonomy could do. It wasn’t. In nearly every customer conversation, the real question was: what will it take for us to depend on this in our daily operations? Hundreds of thousands of autonomous trailer moves later, I’ve learned the answer starts with safety.

Our work with some of the world’s largest shippers across ecommerce, retail, consumer packaged goods, and package shipping has reinforced that lesson. Enterprises need more than proof of what autonomy can do. They need evidence of dependable, day-to-day performance.

Whether I’m speaking with operations leaders, supply chain executives, or safety professionals, their expectations are clear: the technology must perform safely, reliably, and predictably in the environments that matter most to their business. Those requirements have shaped Outrider from the beginning, making safety a design principle that guides how we build, test, and deploy our system.

In a logistics yard, that means more than completing a successful move. People, trucks, trailers, and equipment interact continuously. What happens when a destination is occupied, traffic crosses an autonomous yard truck’s path, or conditions change? Customers need to understand how the vehicle responds—and how those responses have been evaluated before it takes on responsibility in their operations.

Providing that evidence requires much more than advanced artificial intelligence. It requires a comprehensive approach to identifying hazards, mitigating risks, and validating the system’s behavior. Our trucks are instrumented to collect detailed operational data, which we use to evaluate system behavior and substantiate our safety claims.

Last year, Outrider announced the industry’s first safety system purpose-built for scalable, driverless yard operations in mixed-traffic environments. Our safety architecture includes 14 independent safety mechanisms designed to address more than 200,000 yard-specific hazards. These mechanisms enable autonomous vehicles to detect anomalies, respond appropriately, and safely stop when necessary.

Independent assessment also matters. TÜV SÜD determined that Outrider’s functional safety methodology aligns with the requirements of its AV Conformity Framework. That assessment gives customers additional evidence of the rigor behind our safety processes as they conduct their own reviews and make deployment decisions.

This safety foundation was essential to getting our first driverless deployments into customer operations, and it remains essential as we scale. Moving from tens of vehicles to hundreds and ultimately thousands requires a rigorous, repeatable approach to evaluating risk, validating system behavior, and supporting customer approvals across different sites. Safety must support every stage of growth.

The depth of our system safety approach and the rigor of our data-driven validation processes give Outrider a significant competitive advantage in autonomous yard operations – and will continue to matter more than ever as we scale with our customers from distribution centers and manufacturing facilities to becoming ubiquitous across rail yards, ports, and shuttle truck applications. Safety is the foundation for securing customer approvals, expanding driverless deployments, and supporting growth across enterprise networks.

On my seventh anniversary, I’m proud of the Outrider team and grateful to the customers who help us advance autonomous yard operations. 

In autonomous yards, efficiency, sustainability, and productivity are the payoff. Safety is how we earn it.