SAN DIEGO — Autonomous-truck technology firm TuSimple will begin moving freight for Union Pacific between Phoenix and Tucson, Ariz., on a fully automated route developed by TuSimple.
Union Pacific’s wholly owned subsidiary, Loup Logistics, will coordinate movement between rail and truck when the program starts this spring.
“Partnering with TuSimple allows us to extend our operations beyond our rail hubs and serve our customers faster and more efficiently,” Kenny Rocker, Union Pacific executive vice president, marketing and sales, said in a press release. “This groundbreaking autonomous driving technology and our partnership provide us a significant opportunity to scale the technology in our network, proactively reducing global supply chain congestion.”
TuSimple says it has now made seven fully autonomous runs on public roads, totally 550 miles, without a human in the vehicle, and under a variety of driving conditions, and says it aims to achieve commercial viability with no-driver, paid freight operations by the end of 2023.
“Our repeatable and scalable ‘Driver Out’ operations marks a significant inflection point in our company’s history. We are the world’s first to complete all of the features of AV trucking technology,” TuSimple CEO Cheng Lu said. “We are proud of our on-time delivery of this historic milestone and are excited to shift our full focus to commercializing our ground-breaking technology on an accelerated timeline.”
Union Pacific invested in TuSimple in December 2020, with CEO Lance Fritz saying last year that the railroad did so to keep tabs on the technology and to test the use of autonomous trucks for intermodal drayage [see “Union Pacific says autonomous trains are the answer …,” Trains News Wire, May 5, 2021].
Late to the partyline here, but I wonder why these trucks have rearview mirrors and sleepers?
Because they are regular tractors which have been retrofit with tech, and still have safety drivers in the cab.
We need to send Cheng Lu back to the s**thole country he came from.
I have no desire to share the road with driverless trucks. No way this will be safe. Hopefully it won’t take hundreds of accidents, injuries and deaths before its outlawed.
Just what we need, more trucks on I-10 between Phoenix and Tucson.
What is the deterrent to cargo theft enroute? Or the software gets hacked and route changed to a wide spot in the road where a human driver hauls away those MTV’s.
Inevitable accidents, subsequent lawsuits with massive injury payouts and the inability to secure insurance coverage for autonomous rigs will put the brakes on this initiative for the foreseeable future.
I don’t know about you but. I don’t want an 80,000 lbs truck rolling down the highway behind me with no driver and happen to have a computer glitch!
I don’t relish that situation either, Mr. Fegely. But you can take this to the bank: Congresscritters and local pols won’t raise any such issues. The regulatory bodies won’t do a thing. And if there is a massive pileup on an interstate with multiple fatalities and life-threatening injuries, all we’ll hear from the above is the same “We offer our thoughts and prayers to the families and loved ones of the victims” crap that we get from those people after a good guy with a gun all of a sudden turns bad. TuSimple isn’t going to be content to staying in the Southwestern states for long. And UP might not stay in the freight rail business for long unless they are let to move to autonomous trains. But UP will still have to pay property taxes on its ROWs and bear the costs of designing, building, operating, and maintaining its ROWs. Just think, TuSimple has zero or close to zero labor costs and no costs whatsoever for that DBOM for the ROW’s that are the linchpin of their business model. Watch for UP to be the first Class one to migrate from freight rail to TuSimple freight. And EVP Kenny Rocker will be rocking in his desk chair as he signs all those permanent layoff notices to the contract employees system-wide.
What ya wanna bet that TuSimple at this very moment is tinkering around inside a UP locomotive cab?
Let’s see when the plan will be the same for trains.
Program the computer with train length, tonnage, slow orders and let it go.
Mechanical dept in trucks to respond to broken knuckles. Guess one of them will have to be engineer qualified to put the train back together or they will have their remote control devices.
+
Drivers mean more jobs, my opinion
As the saying goes (and keeps getting proven accurate time and time again), “If you’ve got it a truck brought it”. Or perhaps “J-I-T really stands for “Just-in-Truck”.
TuSimple is a bad name for a company that is trying to do something that is not inherently simple at all. Given how badly Tesla is doing trying the same sort of thing, I’d be extra careful traveling that route. All because no one thought it would be a good idea to maintain a rail line between the two main cities in AZ. Forsight? Yeah, we’ve heard of it (but not recently)…