By Jamie Barrie F or some of my friends and me, seeing a driverless transport truck full of beer on the side of the road is a dream, but now seeing one on the highway is a reality. Recently in a publicity stunt a tractor trailer full of Budweiser beer drove itself down Colorado’s I-25 without a driver behind the wheel of the 18-wheeler. Uber Technologies Inc. and Anheuser-Busch teamed up on the delivery, which both companies say is the first time an autonomous truck had been used to make a commer- cial shipment. Proof that Otto, the self-driving vehicle group that Uber acquired back in July of this year, could successfully put an autonomous commercial truck fleet into service. According to Lior Ron, President and Co-founder of Uber’s Otto unit, “We wanted to show that the basic building blocks of the technology are here; we have the capabil- ity of doing that on a highway,” Ron also went on to say, “We are still in the development stages, iterating on the hardware and software.” What does this mean for Anheuser-Busch, well company analysts say that it could save the company $50 million a year in the U.S. by deploying autonomous trucks across its distribution network, which will get the attention of executives in a hurry at Anheuser-Busch along with other companies looking to get on board with this technology with their commercial fleets. Ron has said that Uber has no plans to start manufacturing its own trucks, but looks to partner with truck and auto- makers, like it has done with Volvo on self-driving cars. Ron also went on to say that Uber is in discussions with a
few truck manufacturers, but that these discussions are in the very early phases and there are a lot of items to work out. Plus, the software still has a long way to go before being commercial viable.
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SPOTLIGHT ON BUSINESS • NOVEMBER 2016
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