Peterbilt 579 Incident

Reference: Aurora Operations, Inc. NHTSA-Provided Report # 30530-6818-1 This incident occurred near Ranger, TX on [XXX] approximately 9:56 am CT on November [XXX], 2023. The Aurora vehicle was operating in autonomy at the time. Conditions were overcast, with light rain. As the Aurora vehicle was driving in its lane at 67 mph, a Ford pick-up truck overtaking the Aurora vehicle in the rightmost lane at approximately 80 mph appears to have hydroplaned, lost control, and hit the passenger-side rear portion of the trailer. Before the collision, the Aurora Driver detected the pick-up truck's encroachment into the Aurora vehicle's lane and initiated a nudge to the left to provide space. This was insufficient to completely avoid the collision, and the pickup truck made contact with the passenger side rear of the trailer. The Aurora Driver detected the collision and made the decision to initiate an incident response, but before it could execute that response, the Vehicle Operator took over control of the system and proceeded in manual. The Vehicle Operator received the notification that a collision had been detected and was initiating an incident response. The Vehicle Operator did not visually observe the collision and therefore assumed the reaction of the Aurora Driver to be a software anomaly worth escalated attention, rather than the correct detection of a collision and thus reported the incident through our escalated annotation protocol, rather than through our incident response protocols. We identified the incident at approximately 8:45 am CT on December [XXX], 2023 through a review of our data logs. At this time, we are not aware of any injuries and, from camera footage, the pick-up truck also appears to have left the scene of the incident. There is also no indication of any cargo or major trailer damage.