Changing Lanes

At the self-driving freight startup Starsky Robotics, truckers work alongside the coders who are trying to eliminate their jobs.

- Max Chafkin and Josh Eidelson

Just before Stefan Seltz-Axmacher offers a job to an engineer at Starsky Robotics Inc., a driverless trucking startup in San Francisco, he gives them the talk.

This is a company that employs truck drivers, is how the talk begins. The coders are sometimes taken aback—this differs from the usual change-the-world spiel deployed in hiring meetings. Truckers have very different ideas and different experiences from people like you, Seltz-Axmacher continues. Statistically speaking, many of them are Trump voters. They will say things that you may find startling. Not in a malicious way, but because people from, say, rural West Virginia talk differently than people from San Francisco. Can you handle that?

“Not everybody can,” Seltz-Axmacher says over beers in Fort Lauderdale, where Starsky does some of its testing. “And that’s OK.”