Self-driving truck startup Starsky Robotics shutters operations

Starsky Robotics, the self-driving trucking company responsible for a number of autonomous testing milestones, has shut down.

Stefan Seltz-Axmacher, the company's CEO and co-founder, said Thursday that fundraising conditions had become more arduous over the past year. A funding round expected to close in November instead fell apart, setting in motion Starsky's sudden demise.

But the reasons for a once-promising company's fall extend beyond a single circumstance. Collectively, they might send a chill through the rest of the self-driving industry.

In addition to the financial squeeze, Seltz-Axmacher said unrealistic promises surrounding the capability of artificial intelligence, investors who place profits ahead of safety and a trucking sector already enduring economic weakness all contributed to the company's end.

Those challenges, he says, aren't necessarily specific to Starsky. Across the industry, they're contributing to delayed deployment timelines that might soon bring forth a widespread reckoning.

In a blog post published Thursday, Seltz-Axmacher lays bare the substantial potholes on the road to autonomy. He lists the "professorial" pace at which many companies develop their products, the lack of tangible deployment milestones and the "open secret that there isn't a robotaxi business model" as key hurdles.

"The biggest, however, is that supervised machine learning doesn't live up to the hype," he wrote. "It isn't actual artificial intelligence akin to C-3PO. It's a sophisticated pattern-matching tool."

Self-driving systems developers have relied on machine learning to teach self-driving smarts. Early on, swift advances led to the belief there'd be exponential improvements in the competence of these systems.

But they require vast amounts of data and have not yet reached a level of sophistication that would enable the widespread deployment of self-driving technology. As they improve, they require even more data to identify rare traffic occurrences known as "edge-case'' scenarios, which in turn get more expensive and harder to find.

Solving remaining edge cases in a way that enables commercialization of the technology might cost billions more, Seltz-Axmacher said. At the same time, investor enthusiasm for self-driving tech has cooled.

"The VCs started to realize early last year that something was amiss in the autonomous industry," he tells Automotive News. "They're putting a lot of money in, and they're not getting anything out."

Founded in 2016, Starsky Robotics quickly established a series of industry milestones. It was the first trucking company to haul cargo with autonomous trucks for hire, doing so in private truck yards. In 2018, it conducted an unmanned test run on a closed road. Last summer, one of Starsky's big rigs traveled a nine-mile stretch of the Florida Turnpike without a human aboard.

Yet competitors garnered more funding. TuSimple has raked in nearly $300 million from investors, while Embark has received $117 million, according to Crunchbase records. Starsky, on the other hand, had raised $20.3 million to date. The expected funding round would have brought the company into line with others such as Ike Robotics, which has $52 million in funding, and Kodiak, which has received $40 million, per Crunchbase.

Starsky differentiated itself from those upstarts by owning and operating its own fleet of trucks. In the end, that became a sticking point in negotiations with prospective investors.

Seltz-Axmacher wanted to handle the fleet not only to manage the self-driving technology itself, but to ensure the self-driving systems were only deployed on routes and conditions they could handle.

"Investors really didn't like the business model of being the operator," he said, "and that our heavy investment into safety didn't translate for investors."

While competitors expended effort adding machine learning-based features such as enabling trucks to change lanes on their own, Seltz-Axmacher said he threw resources into safety engineering. The company was the first autonomous trucking company to submit a Voluntary Safety Self Assessment to the U.S. Department of Transportation.

But a problem emerged: that safety focus didn't excite investors. Venture capitalists, Seltz-Axmacher said, had trouble grasping why the company expended massive resources preparing, validating and vetting his system, then preparing a backup system, before the initial unmanned test run. That work essentially didn't matter when he went in search of more funding.

"There's not a lot of Silicon Valley companies that have shipped safety-critical products," he said. "They measured progress on interesting features. It's a very hard problem, and I don't know how to solve it, except to say it might be solved in a more mature industry."

When might a more mature industry be ready to safely deploy real-world products?

"This is what everyone talks about behind closed doors," he said. "I've been at the same conference the last couple of years. Two years ago, it was, 'These systems are coming in the next couple of years.' And at the last one, it's, 'These are 10 years away.' "