Autonomous truck firm to move freight for Union Pacific

From Trains:

Autonomous-truck technology firm TuSimple will begin moving freight for Union Pacific between Phoenix and Tucson, Ariz., on a fully automated route developed by TuSimple.

Union Pacific’s wholly owned subsidiary, Loup Logistics, will coordinate movement between rail and truck when the program starts this spring.

“Partnering with TuSimple allows us to extend our operations beyond our rail hubs and serve our customers faster and more efficiently,” Kenny Rocker, Union Pacific executive vice president, marketing and sales, said in a press release. “This groundbreaking autonomous driving technology and our partnership provide us a significant opportunity to scale the technology in our network, proactively reducing global supply chain congestion.”

TuSimple says it has now made seven fully autonomous runs on public roads, totally 550 miles, without a human in the vehicle, and under a variety of driving conditions, and says it aims to achieve commercial viability with no-driver, paid freight operations by the end of 2023.

“Our repeatable and scalable ‘Driver Out’ operations marks a significant inflection point in our company’s history. We are the world’s first to complete all of the features of AV trucking technology,” TuSimple CEO Cheng Lu said. “We are proud of our on-time delivery of this historic milestone and are excited to shift our full focus to commercializing our ground-breaking technology on an accelerated timeline.”

Union Pacific invested in TuSimple in December 2020, with CEO Lance Fritz saying last year that the railroad did so to keep tabs on the technology and to test the use of autonomous trucks for intermodal drayage [see “Union Pacific says autonomous trains are the answer …,” Trains News Wire, May 5, 2021].