Dive Brief:
- An Einride autonomous truck is delivering finished goods to a GE Appliances warehouse in Selmer, Tennessee, as part of a three-year contract that began last October.
- The electric truck, which has no cab, is about 20 feet long inside, and in the Selmer route, a Slip Robotics bot autonomously loads and unloads the freight and parks itself in the truck.
- “We're always looking for how we can do things in a smaller footprint for the same cost or lower cost and get out of 53 footers,” Harry Chase, senior director of central materials with GE Appliances, told Trucking Dive in a video interview earlier this month.
Dive Insight:
GE Appliances did autonomous pilots with Einride in Selmer and Louisville, Kentucky, evaluating performance at its 750-acre Appliance Park.
The company aims to test an autonomous Einride truck again at Appliance Park, its headquarters, where over 600 trailers move inbound and outbound every day.
The autonomous truck can go up to 60 mph, but in Selmer, GE Appliances keeps the vehicle at about 6 mph for now. In a few months, the company plans to bring it up to 10 mph, with the potential for faster speeds in the future.
“We're always looking for those repetitive routes that we can go ahead and maybe use drivers for those long hauls, where they're more critical for us,” Chase said.
Einride, based in Sweden, is also looking at expansion. While most of its work in the U.S. involves its electric vehicles, the company is aiming to quadruple its autonomous volumes in customer settings across the globe, Einride General Manager of North America Niklas Reinedahl told Trucking Dive.
The vehicles rely on the oversight of a remote human operator with a CDL who can take control of the vehicle remotely when needed. The company envisions one individual overseeing 10 vehicles as the technology scales, Reinedahl said.
“We want to be able to provide what the workplace of the future will look like for the existing workforce,” he said.
