In 2022, Torc Robotics – a provider of autonomous trucks for the middle mile – and Daimler Truck, who is the majority owner of Torc, held an event for journalists and financial analysts at a Torc facility in Albuquerque. At the time, some of Torc’s competitors were claiming that they would have fully autonomous trucks on the road as soon as 2023. Not Torc, their then CEO said it would be 2027 by the earliest.
Now, some of those VC-funded firms, that arguably needed to make aggressive claims to keep the money flowing, are gone. Other firms are in trouble. TuSimple (TSPH.PK) recently reached a $189 million settlement surrounding a lawsuit that accused the self-driving truck company of defrauding shareholders by overstating its safety record and concealing insiders’ control of a Chinese trucking rival.
In 2027, Torc/Daimler executives told the participants at the Albuquerque event that they were a conservative, German-owned company and the last thing they wanted to do was overpromise. Now, the CEO of Torc, Peter Schmidt, told me that the 2027 launch date looks valid. Mr. Schmidt said “What’s good enough for a car on a highway isn’t good enough for a truck.” There have been advances in many areas. “You have sensors with enough range.” This is important because a truck traveling at 70 miles per hour takes longer to stop. According to the Keating Firm, a law firm that specializes in vehicle accidents, “at a bare minimum, it takes 40% percent longer for a tractor-trailer to come to a complete stop when compared to the average car.”
Autonomous trucks also need an incredible amount of computing power, and that needs to be affordable. And there have been dramatic breakthroughs with AI algorithms used for navigation and safety. The CEO says, “You have the building blocks” to release a product at the right price point, which is safe enough to reduce liability risks greatly. “That just wasn’t the case five years ago.”
However, Mr. Schmidt’s larger point was that getting a handful of AV trucks on the road was not good enough. The real question was how soon you could release autonomous trucks at scale. The 2027 date Torc is shooting for is a date they can believe they can also put trucks on the road at scale. To do this, the trucks don’t just have to be safe and reliable; they must be cost-efficient and easy to buy and service at dealerships. Daimler Truck will provide the intellectual capital to do high-volume manufacturing and has a dealer network in place.
Source: www.forbes.com