UBER self-driving truck makes history... 120-mile beer run...
Self-Driving Truck’s First Mission: A Beer Run
By MIKE ISAAC OCT. 25, 2016
SAN FRANCISCO — The futurists of Silicon Valley may not
have seen this one coming: The first commercial delivery made by a self-driving
truck was 2,000 cases of Budweiser beer.
On Tuesday, Otto, the Uber-owned self-driving vehicle
operation, announced the completion of its first commercial delivery, having
delivered its beer load from Fort Collins, Colo., to Colorado Springs, a
roughly 120-mile trip on Interstate 25.
In recent years, Uber has predicted a future in which you
can ride in a self-driving car that will take you where you want to go, no
driver necessary. But the idea that commercial trucking could be done by robot
is a relatively new idea — and a potentially controversial one, given the
possibility that robots could one day replace human drivers.
“We think this technology is inching closer to commercial
availability,” Lior Ron, co-founder of Otto, said in an interview.
In August, Uber acquired Otto, a San Francisco start-up
run by a number of veterans of Google’s long-running autonomous vehicle
research.
Though largely symbolic, the beer delivery marks the
first commercial partnership for Otto, which was founded less than a year ago.
Terms of the deal between Otto and Anheuser-Busch InBev, which owns the
Budweiser brand, were not disclosed.
“We’ve tested with trailers, of course, but there’s
nothing like actually doing the real thing, end to end,” Mr. Ron said.
The delivery was indicative of Uber’s larger ambitions to
become an enormous transportation network, one in which the company is
responsible for moving anything, like people, hot meals or cases of beer,
around the globe, at all hours and as efficiently as possible. Travis Kalanick,
Uber’s chief executive, has said he envisions a future in which transportation
will occur in different ways, using both manned and unmanned vehicles.
Otto is a particularly large bet for Uber, which paid
nearly $700 million for the start-up only a few months after the company
started publicly discussing its self-driving-truck ambitions.
Since backing down from its money-burning effort to
dominate the Chinese ride-hailing market in August, Uber has invested more time
and resources to focus on breaking into the trucking market. Annual trucking
industry revenue topped $720 billion in 2015, according to American Trucking
Association estimates.
A good part of that total came from top brands that rely
heavily on the trucking industry to transport their goods. Anheuser-Busch, for
example, delivers more than a million truckloads of beer domestically every
year.
“We view self-driving trucks as the future, and we want
to be a part of that,” said James Sembrot, senior director of logistics
strategy at Anheuser-Busch. Though the delivery went smoothly, the two
companies did not indicate whether there would be any further deals.
For this initial delivery, Otto’s truck departed
Anheuser-Busch’s facility in Loveland, Colo., in the early morning before
reaching the interstate in Fort Collins. The truck drove through Denver —
alongside regular passenger car traffic — and navigated to its destination in
Colorado Springs without incident.
Otto said a trained driver was in the cabin of the truck
at all times to monitor the vehicle’s progress and take over if necessary. At
no point was the driver required to intervene, the company said.
Future expansion of the pilot program will allow Otto to
test for more types of road and weather conditions, a major factor in
autonomous vehicle route plotting.
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