Vijaysai (Vijay) Patnaik, the Product Lead for Waymo's self-driving trucks program, tells HDT Talks Trucking podcast host Jim Park that he's confident the company will be able to safely and responsibly deploy this technology on public roads. These special reports are mid-season special-interest podcasts covering a single topic from several perspectives. He says he's confident the company will be able to safely and responsibly deploy this technology on public roads. In the interview, Vijay explains some of the intricacies of the autonomy that controls the trucks and how it interacts with other road users. He talks about how the autonomy handles some unique situations, and how public perceptions of the technology are changing for the better.

Two years after Uber paid $680 million to buy the self-driving truck startup Otto, the company is folding that effort. In this photo from 2016, an Otto engineer sits behind the steering wheel of a self-driving, big-rig truck during a demonstration in San Francisco. Two years after Uber paid $680 million to buy the self-driving truck startup Otto, the company is folding that effort. In this photo from 2016, an Otto engineer sits behind the steering wheel of a self-driving, big-rig truck during a demonstration in San Francisco. Uber is shutting down its self-driving truck program, nearly six months after it settled a lawsuit from Waymo, the Google spinoff that accused Uber of using its proprietary designs.

The race to create self-driving trucks just got a little less crowded. That's because Uber announced Monday that the ride-hailing giant is shuttering its self-driving truck program, a division that made history in 2016 by completing the world's first autonomous truck delivery -- 50,000 cans of Budweiser. That division -- a part of Uber's Advanced Technologies Group -- had other successes as well, including delivering freight on highways in Arizona using automated Volvo big rigs. The robot-driven Volvo trucks were rolled out in November and included a human backup driver, the company said. The company did not have a formal partnership with Volvo but, instead, retrofitted Volvo trucks with its technology.