Waymo Via (Google’s self-driving trucking division) expands UPS partnership to scale autonomous freight efforts
Alphabet’s self-driving arm’s delivery unit, Waymo Via, is expanding its existing collaboration with UPS to transport freight via autonomous Class 8 trucks. The six-week pilot began last week and will run until the end of the year in Texas, between Houston and Dallas-Fort Worth, to assist the holiday season.
Waymo isn’t saying how many trucks it’ll employ in the pilot, but it did say “several trucks” from its test fleet of Peterbilts with its fifth-generation Driver will be carrying products for UPS’s North American Air Freight (NAAF) subsidiary. Two autonomous specialists will be onboard the trucks, one with a commercial driver’s license and the other a software technician, who will monitor the activities of the driver when in autonomous mode. The trucks will only be self-driving on highways, and will revert to manual mode on city streets.
Waymo began delivering smaller goods for UPS in its self-driving Chrysler Pacifica minivans in Phoenix, Arizona, in January 2020. The initial experiment, which ended earlier this year, was intended to generate a long-term plan for how the companies may collaborate, and this latest extension fulfills that purpose.
According to a Waymo spokeswoman, the initial UPS pilot “provided amazing learnings for us on things like summoning the car, loading/unloading boxes, and more.” “While this trucking pilot will not be tied to or have any local delivery components, we will be building on our first learnings and working with the UPS team for these trial runs.”
Waymo might represent a challenge to companies like TuSimple, which has been cooperating with UPS and its NAAF branch since 2019. TuSimple announced during its Q3 earnings call that it is expanding its autonomous freight network from Arizona to the east coast ahead of schedule to reach NAAF terminals in Orlando and Charlotte. TuSimple claims to have hauled freight for NAAF for over 160,000 km.
Waymo stated in a blog post announcing the cooperation, “These Class 8 trial runs will draw on all of the learnings and success we’ve had testing with UPS over the years, as well as our earlier Class 8 trial runs with other carriers across diverse verticals, like J.B. Hunt.”
Waymo and J.B. Hunt established a freight carrying cooperation in June along Houston-Fort Worth’s major Interstate 45. In a move to ramp up autonomous trucking operations in Texas, Arizona, and California, the firm stated it will create a dedicated trucking center in Dallas and partner with Ryder for fleet management services a few months later. The Ryder partnership has already started in a temporary Dallas facility, but Waymo says the hub won’t open until the first half of next year.
