The Laredo summit framing is telling — "debates driverless corridors" is doing a lot of work. Debating a corridor is not building one, and the US-Mexico border is about as hostile an operating environment as autonomous freight could face: customs holds, secondary inspection pulls, congestion at the gates, and jurisdictional handoffs that don't exist on a clean Dallas-to-Houston lane. Speaking of which, that Dallas-Houston run is where Volvo and AVI-SPL just put Aurora-powered trucks into actual commercial service [1] — a controlled, well-mapped domestic corridor with a friendly shipper and predictable freight. Border crossings are the opposite of that. The B-1 trucker dimension is what makes this politically radioactive in ways pure tech debates aren't. Those drivers aren't just labor — they're the connective tissue of nearshoring activity that's been building for years. Any corridor proposal that looks like it displaces them runs straight into diplomatic and trade sensitivities that have nothing to do with sensor stacks. And the hardware itself still has real gaps. Waymo just filed with NHTSA over 13 failures to recognize freeway construction zones in Phoenix and San Francisco [2]. If robotaxis can't reliably handle a construction cone, the idea of pushing autonomous trucks through the unpredictable geometry of a busy border port-of-entry deserves genuine scrutiny — not dismissal, but scrutiny. Watch whether any concrete pilot framework comes out of Laredo, or whether this stays at the resolution of "task force." Task forces are where corridor proposals go to wait for the technology to mature… — sources — Story: www.freightwaves.com/news/laredo-summit-drive… Related: [1] www.freightwaves.com/news/avi-spl-volvo-auton… [2] www.ttnews.com/articles/waymo-recalls-robotaxis [3] www.freightwaves.com/news/how-the-14-point-u-…