Gatik, a leader in autonomous middle-mile logistics, said Monday it has reached a milestone toward its development of driverless trucks at scale. The company announced the successful review of two major pillars of its safety assessment framework, with independent assessment from TÜV SÜD, a globally recognized testing and certification organization.
This is a crucial step for Gatik as it prepares to launch large-scale Freight-Only driverless commercial operations in 2025. Notably, Gatik’s independently reviewed approach is a departure from other autonomous companies that use self-certification standards, as each company makes the case that its driverless option is roadworthy and ready for commercial operations. The most important part of these assessments begins with safety.
“We strongly believe that the future of autonomous vehicles will be defined by those who prioritize safety above all else,” said Gautam Narang, CEO and co-founder of Gatik in a news release. “This independently-review of our Safety Case and Functional Safety methodology represents a radical departure from the self-certified safety audits that have become the industry norm.”
The safety assessment framework developed by Gatik contains over 700 identified safety portfolios, including key pillars of AV safety like organizational safety culture, engineering quality, cybersecurity, vehicle safety and safety case conformity to industry standards.
TÜV SÜD’s assessment involved an end-to-end review of Gatik’s functional safety portfolios, covering elements such as operational design domain, item definition, testing, and hazard analysis and risk assessment.
“We’re both a developer and an operator of the technology. So the audit extends not just from how you develop the technology, how you test it and evaluate it, but also how you implement and operate it with your customer,” said Adam Campbell, Gatik’s head of safety, in an interview with FreightWaves.
While the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration currently allows voluntary self-certification, the autonomous vehicle space is heavily relying on transparency and data as a strategy to help shape future AV regulations.
“From a transparency and visibility and rigor standpoint, it’s a wide-open sort of big gray area about what is actually being deployed by which companies,” Campbell explained. “We have observed this and we’ve taken that sort of next major voluntary step forward to say that this isn’t enough. We need more.”
Gatik’s safety assessment framework is designed to be comprehensive, covering not just the development and testing of the technology, but also its implementation and operation with customers.
The framework also aligns with international standards, including UL 4600, which the company notes is currently the most extensive autonomous vehicle-focused standard.
As Gatik moves closer to its goal of large-scale driverless operations, the company remains focused on both technological advancement and business viability. To achieve that, Campbell added, technology must be paired with a business model to sustain it. To that end, Gatik has been testing small-scale deployment and limited operations since 2017 in various locations from Arkansas to Ontario.
For Campbell, the yearslong investment with pilot programs and partnerships from limited testing places Gatik in a favorable position in the race to successfully commercialize autonomous freight. “We understand given our position at the forefront of having executed driver-out deployments in the past what it means to be able to do this in a meaningful and safe way and what is necessary in order to support safety at scale,” he said.
“We’re at that moment now in our journey where scale is the target. It’s not just one or two trucks, it’s many tens if not hundreds of trucks coming in the not-too-distant future. And so readying ourselves and establishing that safety foundation now to justify safety at scale when we deploy at scale is what we’re executing on today.”
The completion of the two pillars of Gatik’s safety assessment framework is just the beginning. The company emphasizes that safety work is ongoing, with further stages of assessment and testing still to come before the full launch of freight-only vehicles on public roads later this year.
