James Morris
The Shanghai unit of autonomous driving technology provider TuSimple has become the first company to obtain a license to road-test self-driving trucks. TuSimple raised USD 23 million of investment from Sina.com, Nvidia and Zhiping Capital in its series B fundraising last August.
TuSimple currently provides Level 4, or the second-highest, self-driving truck solutions based on computer vision, algorithms, mapping and artificial intelligence (AI) to bring about greater road safety, lower logistics costs and cleaner air.
The company also received a license to road-test its technology from the California Department of Motor Vehicles in June last year. TuSimple is currently working on building a global platform for Level 4 autonomous driving with U.S. chipmaker Nvidia. The company marked 100 days of safe operations of its autonomous driving trucks in July this year. The trucks had transported 5,000 fully-loaded containers.
A number of companies have obtained licenses to road-test their autonomous driving technology as China makes its push towards autonomous driving. Earlier, Momenta had also obtained a license to road-test its autonomous passenger car technology while SAIC motor, Nio and BMW have gotten smart connected car licenses.
In addition, the country has also put up a number of roads to support the road-testing of autonomous driving technology. Shanghai currently has 31.6 km of public roads available for road-tests. Beijing also plans to open up the Yanchong Expressway which connects the capital to Hebei for road-tests. Beijing aims to build an Internet of Vehicles 5G network covering its most important areas by 2020 to support Level 4 autonomous driving.
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