Global Autonomous Trucking Industry 2021
By: Plus Team
Tags: Self Driving, Artificial Intelligence, Trucking, Autonomous Vehicles, Automated Truck

Amir: Can you tell us a little about how the R&D process and the commercialization efforts are playing out outside the U.S. and how they’re different from what we see here?

David: The trucking industry in many countries is generally confronted by similar concerns of driver shortage, fuel cost volatility, and road safety. And there’s an increasing expectation of faster deliveries given the rise of e-commerce. The benefits offered by automated trucks such as increased safety, greater fuel efficiency are universally needed. This is why the U.S., China, and Europe are some of the largest markets where autonomous trucks will and can bring benefits.

The technical challenges across these areas are quite similar. That’s why we’re able to leverage the same technology across different regions including the U.S., China and Europe. What’s different is the deployment and execution, the behavior of the road users, the regulatory environment, and the public openness to autonomy. Plus is working closely with leading partners in local regions to deploy our automated trucking system.

Amir: What technology have you developed and what state is it at, and where is it deployed? Where are you testing these features?

David: We are a Level 4 autonomous technology developer. We’re envisioning that by 2023/2024, Level 4 autonomous trucks will be deployed. The larger question is how do we get these driverless trucks deployed and what is the deployment strategy.

At Plus we are taking a two-step approach. The first step is to deploy our fully functional and safe driving system with a driver in the truck. We are starting to mass-produce these systems next year. After a few years, we can show our autonomous system is safe without the monitoring of a human driver. That’s when we take the driver out. We believe this is the better and safer approach because you need to build up billions of real-world miles to statistically prove it’s safe before you completely remove the human driver or monitor (for those doing tele-operations) from the truck.

We believe it is important for our industry to act conservatively and safely, and only implement technology that is truly proven. Therefore, with the current driving system, we are requiring drivers to stay attentive at all times in order to disengage the system as needed. This way, as shared with us by our customers, the fleets are able to immediately enjoy the benefits of safety, fuel efficiency, and reduced driver fatigue today while waiting for full autonomy to be ready.

We’ve outlined some of our thoughts around this approach in our recently released Safety Report.

Amir: What’s the number of prototypes you have?

Plus Automated Trucks

David: We have been running dozens of prototypes this year. The mass production of automated trucks powered by the self-driving technology of Plus will begin next year. That means thousands of trucks integrated with Plus’ driving system will hit the road and collect billions of real-world miles in the next few years.

Amir: What do you see as the bottlenecks; is it primarily software?

David: Autonomous driving is a very complex system engineering problem, so for everything from hardware to sensors to the vehicle platform, we’re counting on our ecosystem partners to make their contributions to make autonomous driving work while we focus on software and integration.

Amir: What’s your go-to-market? Are you selling to FAW? Are you selling to fleets who buy it from FAW?

David: Our go-to-market strategy differs depending on the market. Our end customer is the same; it’s the fleets who use the trucks for autonomous transport of goods. In China, for example, Plus is partnering with an OEM which is FAW (China’s largest heavy-duty truck maker). We are supplying our technology to be integrated into FAW trucks. These are then sold to fleets.

In the U.S., we currently have a dual strategy. We sell directly to fleets. We’re also working with OEMs to integrate our technology into pre-fabricated trucks.

Amir: Is there any value other than show to put the safety engineer in the passenger seat rather than behind the wheel?

David: The goal is the same — we want to eventually completely remove the driver. But autonomous driving is really a long-tailed problem. A very large number of miles is needed to gather those unforeseen, unknown cases. We’ll need several billions of miles to have the statistical proof that the machine is safer than a human driver. The diversity of scenarios is also very important. We need to address different road conditions, traffic patterns, weather conditions. That’s why we need to conduct tests under different conditions, different countries, etc. The ability to gather a large number of miles and a large number of test cases is core to solving the problem.

Amir: What is the biggest advancement in autonomous vehicles you’ve seen in the past year in both hardware and software?

David: It’s commercialization and scale. Prior to this year, everyone’s talking about demos. Now it’s about large-scale production and commercialization.

Amir: Do you feel you have to crawl before you can run, or should you tackle the hardest problem first?

David: There’s some merit to Elon Musk’s deployment strategy, to get your technology out there at the widest possible scale. That’s the best way to make sure the technology becomes mature and that’s the best way to gather data for the corner cases because autonomous driving at the end of the day is a long-tailed problem. If there’s a way to combine what Waymo is doing, which is a very complete tech stack, with the way that Tesla is deploying their technology, I think that’s the best of both worlds. That’s exactly what Plus is doing.

Amir: How do you differentiate from the other self-driving long haul truck developers?

David: It’s our commercialization and deployment strategy. We’ll have tens of thousands of trucks on the road in two years with our technology fully deployed and I don’t think anyone else in the industry is thinking about it in that way.

Amri: Why do we need to statistically prove that self-driving cars are much safer than typical human drivers?

David: Consumers and regulators expect machines to be ten times safer. If you’re not 10x safer, then you’re not going to be on the road.

Amir: What is the view of Waymo in trucking?

David: There’s been a general industry consensus over the last year that trucking will be one of the first, if not the first, segment that will commercialize self-driving technology, so it’s natural to see Waymo move into autonomous trucking. This will only accelerate the adoption of autonomy in trucking.

Amir: What’s your financial arrangement with FAW?

David: We have a joint venture in China with FAW to work on autonomous trucks. We are the second-largest shareholder of that joint venture, and the joint venture is the only party that’s responsible for FAW’s autonomous strategy.

Amir: Do you see any advancement in AI and deep learning as a major roadblock to fully autonomous? (e.g. Event-based AI processing or top-down processing) Or what are your thoughts on supervised vs unsupervised learning?

David: I wouldn’t say advancement in AI is a major roadblock. It’s an enabler for autonomy. People’s expectations in deep learning, whether supervised or unsupervised, might have been too high a few years ago. The general autonomous driving problem is that it’s a long-tailed, data problem. The key to tackling that problem is to get the data. If we have all the data, then I think the fully autonomous driving problem can be solved.

The cost of gathering billions of miles of data on all corner cases is very high. We did some calculations — it’s about $2.00 per mile. So if you need tens of billions of miles to get all the corner cases, that’s $20 billion just to get all the data. It is about how you gather that data, how you process that data, that’s the fundamental problem we’re trying to tackle.

The full video from the event can be found here on The Information’s website (subscription is required).