Is the time for autonomous trucking here?

His statement comes in response to the findings of the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report, which hit the headlines back in October concluding that global temperatures could rise to 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels as soon as 2030. To give this figure some context, any small rise beyond that level would have critical consequences, severely increasing the risk of major natural disasters.

This hefty and hard-hitting body of research provided a major contribution to the Katowice Climate Change Conference in Poland this month, where international governments reviewed their positions on the Paris Agreement, a mission to keep the global temperature rise to under 1.5°C. Their responses will inevitably vary, but one thing is globally recognised – the transportation sector is the biggest source of carbon emissions, having overtaken the power generation sector back in 2017.

Of this sector, freight trucks currently account for less than 10 per cent of all traffic on the roads, but consume well over 25 per cent of all fuel. So it is no wonder that the race to successfully deliver a sustainable, emission-free, all-electric trucking infrastructure is fast becoming the most hotly-contested battleground of the industry.

While Tesla has just announced it has received another substantial customer order for its electric truck, the Tesla Semi, which is slated to go into production in 2019, Daimler is holding its corner with the flagship eCascadia. And, on a more compact level, the radical electric truck start-up Arrival is making waves with its UPS and Royal Mail collaborations in the UK and France. Other contenders include Mercedes, Scania, BMW and eForce, however, by far the most pioneering company to be imminently bringing a viable, cost-effective solution to European roads is Einride, with Falck in the driving seat. In metaphor only, however, as his trucks are not only all-electric, they are also driverless.

With the strap line, ‘intelligent movement’, the independent company is completing a new funding round and forging ahead with realising its mission to revolutionise freight transportation – first through its flagship truck model, the T-pod. Unveiled as a prototype back in 2016, the T-pod is a small, heavy-duty freight truck running solely on batteries. Having no driver’s cab allows for a smaller vehicle overall, while also resulting in increased loading capacity, greater flexibility, lower production costs, lower operating costs and optimised energy consumption. It is supervised remotely and can be controlled by a human operator, if required, from hundreds of miles away.

This revolution was followed this summer by the unveiling of the company’s second commercial model, the T-log, with the global reveal staged at FOS Future Lab at the Festival of Speed presented by Mastercard. This autonomous, all-electric logging truck is more powerful than the T-pod and incorporates additional off-road and rugged terrain navigation capabilities. The launch garnered a staggering level of worldwide media coverage and has received in excess of a billion online views, showing just how hungry a global audience is for embracing this kind of commercially-ready solution.

Keeping up the momentum, after months of full testing in private, this November saw Einride announce the world’s first commercial installation of the T-pod at a major DB Schenker warehousing facility in Jönköping, central Sweden. This first application of the truck sees it travelling continuously between a warehouse and a terminal within the site, and this partnership will also see further global pilots before wider deployment.

“We at Schenker are working at full speed on sustainable and innovative logistics. Autonomous driving will become increasingly important for this,” explains Jochen Thewes, CEO of DB Schenker. “Together with Einride, we want to bring the first autonomous, fully-electric truck onto public roads in the near future and thus set new standards for tomorrow’s logistics.”

As with all current electric truck developments, the main challenges are range and power. But for Einride, which can currently promise a competitive range of 120 miles on a single charge, there is another big hurdle – connectivity. Being autonomous vehicles, both the T-pod and T-log require a seamless, robust and super-fast data connection to ensure lighting-quick response times between the truck and the team back at base.

However, Einride has that element covered too, this November announcing it has partnered with Ericsson, to focus on connectivity for autonomous vehicles. The partnership begins with the installation of a 5G network (4G radio with 5G core) in collaboration with Telia, a leading telco in the Nordic-Baltic region, to support the DB Schenker pilot.

Falck continues: “5G provides the connectivity and reliability we need to safely introduce the T-pod onto public roads, in-turn paving the way for a 90 per cent reduction in CO₂ emissions.” He suggests that the all-electric, autonomous transport system that the T-pod and T-log are part of could rapidly replace more than 60 per cent of today’s transport with a cost-competitive and sustainable alternative.

The Einride vision sees full fleets of T-pods and T-logs eventually introduced to public roads – fully-integrated, not in separate dedicated lanes – coordinated by an intelligent routing system to optimise delivery time, battery life and energy consumption. Current Swedish legislation requires autonomous vehicle companies to obtain a specific permit for every route proposed. The regulations are new, but the team expects a permit for the Schenker installation soon and will then activate a first trial. Then Einride's next big goal is to implement a fully operational fleet of 200 T-pods to service the busy freight route between Gothenburg and Helsingborg by 2020, the planning for which is well underway.

Meanwhile, if you work in the freight transportation sector, or if you’re simply curious, have a play with Einride’s ‘emissions calculator’ and see how turning the industry electric could prevent millions of metric tons of CO2 being produced per year: https://www.einride.tech/emission-calculator