Shift Magazine - December 2021 - 18

Continued from page 17
Across the industry, he has watched
such obligations and deployment timelines
go unfulfilled. Especially in the area
of robotaxis, where the premise remains
simple but the reality of carrying passengers
to any conceivable number of destinations
has been technically vexing.
He saw a much stronger business case
developing in the truck realm. Now, so do
many competitors.
HEIGHTENED INTEREST
The trucking industry is the $800 billion
underpinning of the U.S. economy, according
to the American Trucking Associations,
something the nation is recognizing during
the pandemic, as the previously underappreciated
role human-driven trucks play
becomes more apparent amid port backups
and supply chain logjams.
Buoyed by the promise of alleviating a
national driver shortage and the promise
of operational cost savings in a low-margin
business, more than a dozen companies
are now developing automated-driving
technology for trucks.
Such trucks, hauling freight from one
loading dock to another, could reduce the
cost of trucking from $1.65 per mile to
$1.30 per mile by the mid-2020s, according
to a July study from financial data firm
PitchBook. The study further projected
the global market for autonomous trucking
would rise from $528 million in 2023
to $166.8 billion by 2025.
" There's a lot of hype around moving
people around and disrupting the Ubers
and Lyfts of the world, but I think the
market for moving goods ... you're going
to see much faster adoption of that, " said
Asad Hussain, senior mobility analyst at
PitchBook. " We're going to be touched
by that, frankly, a lot quicker than we are
going to be ferried around ourselves by
autonomous technology. "
In August, self-driving truck startup
Gatik, which focuses on shorter, off-highway
routes, removed the safety driver
from two trucks operating on public roads
in Bentonville, Ark., while commercially
hauling goods for Walmart. Another
well-funded player, TuSimple, intends to
18 shift * december 2021
proceed with a " driver out " pilot project
between Phoenix and Tucson in 2022.
Embark Trucks has targeted 2024 for
operations without safety drivers.
Fleming believes Torc will commercially
deploy " within this decade. " Which is not
to say he believes the competition will be
far ahead.
" I believe Torc will be the first company
- and these are key words - to build a
profitable and scalable product, " he said.
" And I know that's kind of bold to make
that statement. "
Accomplishing that requires constraining
the scope of both the technical
challenge and business ambition. He's
not pursuing robotaxis like competitors
Waymo and Aurora, which are working in
both the truck and taxi realms. He doesn't
envision Torc trucks on the road beyond
the States like Plus and TuSimple, which
are eyeing operations in both the U.S. and
China. Even commercial operations in just
the American Southwest would be sufficient
for a while.
But in 2017, as his desire to target the
commercial truck market grew, Fleming
quickly came to believe one crucial roadblock
existed. Torc could not get there alone.
COLLABORATION
At least in theory, the robotaxi business
should be easy. Consumers hail a ride
via an app. They go from point A to point
B. Trucking, on the other hand, is more
complicated.
" About the only thing most carriers have
in common is you see them driving down
the highway, " Culhane said. " Freight is a
massively fragmented industry. The way
they do business, the types of stuff they
carry, the way they route their networks.
Everything is variable. "
Fleming and Culhane began searching
for a partner with that foundational knowledge
in place. In March 2019, Daimler
Trucks became a majority shareholder
in Torc. Much like General Motors and
Cruise, Torc operates independently from
the German automaker. But its future is
tied to access to Daimler's customers.
Daimler and Torc are engaging with
fleet executives to understand how their
mechanics can be trained and certified
to calibrate sensors. They're recognizing
what data can be extracted to perform
predictive maintenance, and considering
how to best design hardware so it can
be repaired faster at dealerships. Perhaps
most importantly, Daimler and Torc are
working together to reinvent the Cascadia
chassis from the ground up.
" Trying to do a retrofit solution, you're
not going to get that level of chassis control
you need, " Culhane said. " So the OEM
partnership is very critical in this space. "
Working together, they can better
answer two crucial questions: How can
they build trucks and hardware that last for
more than a million miles on the road, and
how can they best equip trucks to handle
20 to 23 hours of nonstop driving?
The latter ranks as a particularly ambitious
target, but one that's plausible because of
Daimler Trucks' concurrent work in hydrogen
fuel cells. Daimler has been bullish on
fuel cells for powering freight movement,
rather than battery-electric vehicles that
require frequent charging.
But the benefits of such long routes
potentially cascade atop each other.
Consumers get goods faster. Trucks
can ply their
routes through the night,
thus reducing congestion during the day.
Nocturnal travel could allow for slower
speeds, which offer fuel savings on top
of the 10 to 13 percent fuel-consumption
reductions many estimate self-driving
trucks will achieve.
Tests are underway. It might be a long
time before a self-driving system can be
married with hydrogen fuel cell technology
to unlock such lengthy routes. Regulations
that limit hours of service would need to
be revamped. Infrastructure needs to be
built. The technical challenges of autonomy
itself make for an arduous journey to
the self-driving future.
Torc, in business for 15 years, is ready
for the long haul.
" This is not an overnight thing, " Culhane
said. " It's a lot of hard work that takes this
from a great demo to an actual product,
and from that, to scalability and sustainability.
You have to be able to stay on that
road for a long time. " n
Shift Magazine - December 2021

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