Raise your hand if you knew.
To the surprise of all, Thursday saw UPS announcing that they’ve been transferring mail and packages between hubs with TuSimple‘s self-driving trucks. Moreover, that their venture capital arm now has a minority investment in the truck company. As a matter of fact, they’ve been using said trucks to move cargo between Phoenix and Tucson since May.
UPS isn’t the only one to dabble with self-driving trucks. The USPS is partnering with TuSimple for a two week pilot program using the trucks on an 1,000 mile trip between Phoenix and Dallas.
TuSimple states that the tech drops the cost of shipping between these sorts of locations by a hefty 30%. The tech, consisting of 9 cameras and 2 LIDAR sensors, currently works in Navistar vehicles.
The announcement states that UPS has been working with the company to reach level 4 autonomous driving. At that level, they wouldn’t need anyone behind the wheel; the truck would mostly take care of itself. That said, for now, all of these trucks still have an engineer and driver on board, just in case.
Also, probably obligatory because I’m a huge jerk:
Source: Gizmodo
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