A Silicon Valley startup has completed what appears to be the first commercial freight cross-country trip by an autonomous truck, which finished a 2,800-mile-run from Tulare, California to Quakertown, Pennsylvania for Land O’Lakes in under three days.
The trip was smooth like butter, 40,000 pounds of it.
A safety driver was aboard the autonomous semi, ready to take the wheel if needed, along with a safety engineer who observed how things were going.
The truck, which traveled on interstates 15 and 70 right before Thanksgiving, had to take scheduled breaks but drove mostly autonomously.
There were zero “disengagements,” or times the self-driving system had to be suspended because of a problem, Kerrigan said.
Like other experts, he believes the trucking industry will be the first to adopt autonomous technology on a mass scale.
That includes San Francisco-based self-driving truck startup Embark Trucks, which last year completed a five-day, 2,400-mile cross-country trip. »
