VAS and DHL Supply Chain, with a safety driver in the truck, will haul freight on two lanes on the Texas route, the two companies announced Wednesday. DHL (No. 35) becomes the second CCJ Top 250 carrier to join the program.
The road to driverless trucking has been and continues to be a long one and one not for the faint of heart or in a hurry to revolutionize transportation.
“It’s not as simple as many thought in the beginning: Just give us your truck, we will up fit it and it will drive," said Sasko Cuklev, head of on road solutions for Volvo Autonomous Solutions (VAS).
VAS's approach to autonomous trucking on the highway started in an unconventional place: off-highway. The company focused on mining and quarry work in Europe, moving limestone in Norway for 18 months. Two shifts of eight trucks move limestone three miles through long stretches of dark tunnels and in “very rough weather conditions," Cuklev noted. "It’s not the easiest case we’ve taken on.”
[Related: Check out Volvo's 'superhuman' autonomous VNL]
All that dirty and tough work put VAS in position to conquer what Cuklev called "the holy grail of autonomy:" hub-to-hub operation.
Uber Freight and VAS two years ago announced a multi-phase commercial and technology partnership to deploy Volvo’s autonomous transport solution on the Uber Freight network. Atlanta, Georgia-based truckload carrier Ascend (CCJ Top 250, No. 162) last February partnered with VAS to begin testing autonomous, long distance linehaul options within its network, becoming the first asset-based truckload carrier to reserve capacity for VAS’s hub-to-hub autonomous transportation offering, transporting customer loads to VAS hubs in Dallas and Houston, Texas.
VAS has been operating on two routes in Texas: one between Dallas and Houston and one from Fort Worth to El Paso.
Volvo this year launched its revamped VNL, a truck the company says will serve as the launchpad for not only new emissions solutions like battery electric and hydrogen, but also autonomous technologies. VAS has already built 25 “first batch” trucks with autonomous hardware from Aurora, and four Aurora terminals are ready for launch in Dallas/Fort Worth and El Paso.
VAS staff will manage daily customer interactions and transport operations from there, while Aurora or a third-party will run operations at the terminal.
VAS is also connecting dealer locations close to these terminals to the autonomous freight network to ensure uptime. One Bruckner and two Vanguard locations are connected in Texas with five additional sites in the pipeline, Cuklev said.
New partnership with DHL
VAS and DHL Supply Chain, with a safety driver in the truck, will haul freight on VAS's two Texas lanes, the companies announced Wednesday – routes of roughly 250 and 600 miles, respectively. DHL (No. 35) becomes the second CCJ Top 250 carrier to join the program.
"This is real freight that we're already running today," said Jason Gillespie, DHL senior director of continuous improvement, "which impacts my customer and my customer's customer."
With so much at stake on both ends of the supply chain, Gillespie said it was critical to find a partner that could reliably deliver solutions and innovation ... and freight, the first load of which was delivered last week.
"It was a quick and natural fit between (Volvo and DHL) cultures and ideas; both going in with a very safety culture," Gillespie said. "(VAS was) the first ones to propose the ground-up redundancy of the vehicle and how they were going to address all the concerns we had to make sure we had complete confidence in the overall solution. I can't make this more complicated on my current operations, and the Volvo ecosystem makes things simpler."
The driverless tech stack, the Aurora Driver, is equipped with powerful sensors, including high-resolution cameras, imaging radar, and proprietary long-range lidar that allow for safe autonomous operations at highway speeds. Cuklev noted the company is ready to remove the driver today from an architecture standpoint, but the technology needs to mature, and neither VAS nor DHL is in a hurry to drop its human safety net.
DHL Supply Chain in 2021 joined Embark Trucks' Partner Development Program with plans to deploy autonomous trucks within its operations upon commercial launch of the Embark Driver software in 2024. Embark, however, shut down last year before ever making it to market.
Not mentioning Embark specifically, Cuklev noted that the most successful business case for autonomous trucking seems to come from OEM integration, like the approach Aurora and Volvo Trucks have taken, versus a third-party upfit or vendor-based strategy, adding the partnership has allowed both VAS and Aurora to "learn about the operation (of the trucks) and decide who is responsible for what."
That same approach now includes DHL for "when we run the autonomous middle-mile piece, this is how we can see if the setup is really working, or do we need to tweak something," Cuklev said.
Gillespie is hopeful the safe and reliable deployment of autonomous tech will help supplement the human truck drivers of the future and take over the longest, most mundane and least desirable part of the trip: the middle mile.
"In the long run, as we want to scale, if the driver intake side of the labor force doesn't go up 20% to 30%, we're not going to be able to keep up," he said. "The most ideal freight is getting them home every night. The first and last mile [as a job] isn't going anywhere for a human driver."
