Insights · October 27th, 2016
Otto is an Uber-owned start-up materials delivery company, focused on developing self driving vehicles for industry. As you may have seen, they just did a test delivery in Colorado, a 120-mile beer run for Budweiser. Budweiser delivers 1.2 million truck loads of beer per year. If Bud can cut the cost of that, it makes sense. You will see here that the Otto concept is an add-on package to existing trucks, with the idea that a driver is in the truck to navigate the local streets, while the truck self-drives on the express ways. The driver can leave the cab, and rest, even sleep. What this potentially means is that a truck could work 24-hours a day, with fewer needs for driver sleep stops. Eventually trucks could drive themselves without humans from city to city, where they meet a local driver at a designated spot. Applied across the trucking industry, the number of long-haul trucks could be reduced substantially.
