Texas is becoming the Wild West of driverless truck testing, with numerous companies looking to fill the highways with unmanned 45,000-pound trucks near your comparatively tiny manned car. It means that one day if you're driving down the road, and make that "Pull the horn" motion to the truck driver, there may not be anyone there to honk. The trucks are just beginning to permeate the highways. Aurora Trucking hauls freight via carrier Hirschbach for Driscoll's (the berry company) in Laredo, as well as frac sand for Detmar Logistics in the Permian Basin. Kodiak AI, a rival, hauls for J.B. Hunt and Werner Enterprises from a Texas hub. And Houston-based Bot Auto partners with logistics providers like Ryan Transportation on overnight routes between Houston and the Dallas-Fort Worth metroplex. But why have all these robot trucks descended on Texas of all states? The answer is similar to the reasons that bring many humans here as well. "Texas moves more freight than any other state in the U.S.," Gerardo Interiano, SVP of Government Relations and Public Affairs at Aurora, told Chron. "It's also strategically located-Fort Worth to El Paso represents the middle leg of one of the busiest commercial routes for the trucking industry: Atlanta to Los Angeles." This is not to mention that the environment-both in terms of the weather and the regulatory one-is rather friendly to such companies. The autonomous Aurora trucks aren't exactly spitballing it. They use a combination of FirstLight lidar, radar, and cameras to create 3D, real-time maps of their surroundings, with the newer lidar sensors able to see twice as far as usual, more than 450 meters down the road. It's all integrated into an onboard computer with redundant backup systems that can apparently monitor itself for issues. So hopefully no blue screens of death