Probably by now you should have heard of autonomous car projects by companies such as Google and Tesla. By autonomous I mean self-driving cars. Sometime last month we even wrote to you about the plans by Nissan to launch an autonomous chair system to spare the occupant the hassle of standing in line. The proPILOT chair literally queues on behalf of the occupant. Well now Uber is diversifying into the self-driving technology with the self-driving trucks.
Uber is achieving this through Otto, a company that makes self-driving tech for freight trucks that it acquired back in August. According to a blog post by the company, one of their self-driving cars was able to transport 51,744 cans of Beer through a distance of 120 miles. The company goes ahead to clarify that its kit that equips any commercial truck with the ability to drive itself on highways was able to control the truck’s acceleration, braking and steering through all the exits without any human intervention. Just as a precaution there was a human driver who monitored the entire operation from the comfort of a sleeper berth in the back of the vehicle.
Well this will come in handy especially for the long distance truck drivers. They can switch on the autonomous system when they need to catch some rest. This will speed up the delivery time for goods as the drivers have no reason to stop over at various towns for a rest. The self-driving trucks will simply proceed with the journey uninterrupted. But that will only be feasible once legislations are put in place to govern the autonomous car systems in the country. As for now Otto is still testing its self-driving trucks to see how they will perform in different weather conditions and more so when they navigate city traffic. For highways they are quite good to go judging from the outcome of this one commercial journey that they made.
