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Last week was a big week for Wicked fans, crypto showdowns between city mayors, and...autonomous trucking?
Let’s drive into the latter.
Bye-bye, driver: On Wednesday, TuSimple, the San Diego–based self-driving truck startup, announced its plans to proceed with removing safety drivers from trucks on certain routes. It plans to test the program—which would involve no humans inside the vehicles, TechCrunch reported—before year-end, on 80-mile stints on Arizona public road.
- Keep in mind that most of TuSimple’s competition is only testing “driver-out” programs in controlled environments (Kodiak Robotics, Einride) or in the planning stages (Embark).
Hello, Driver: On Thursday, Aurora, the AV-tech startup founded by Google alumni, became the first autonomous vehicle company to go public via SPAC. This comes a week after releasing its AV tech platform, the “Aurora Driver,” in beta mode for the first time. (It’ll pull FedEx commercial loads in Texas.)
- Aurora has been open about its future lack of profitability: It expects to lose money until 2027 as it scales, The Verge reported.
Driver ➡️ passenger: Today, Gatik, the middle-mile autonomous trucking company, announced its first fleet of “fully autonomous” trucks, which will move customer orders between a Walmart facility and neighborhood market in Arkansas.
Gatik’s definition of “fully autonomous” means driving on public roads with no safety driver behind the wheel—however, it’s important to note there is a human safety passenger with some control capabilities and the ability to stop the vehicle. There will also be a safety escort vehicle following each truck.
- “In December of last year, Gatik and Walmart together won the regulatory approval to actually take the driver out,” Gautam Narang, Gatik’s CEO and cofounder, told us. “If you look at the time to unmanned for this first market, it took us about 24 months….That time to unmanned is going to reduce over time.”
Big picture: In the autonomous trucking industry, everyone’s racing to roll out a newly minted “industry first”—for instance, to remove the safety driver under certain conditions, or to remove all humans from the vehicle.
But in the long-term, the companies that come out on top and make it through market consolidation may not be the ones who did something first; they’ll be the ones who did it big. And that means scaling up to handle top-dollar partnerships with big-box retailers and shipping giants.