This Autonomous Truck Has Just Complete The First Ever Cross-Country Journey

According to The Mercury News, Plus.ai, a startup in Silicon Valley, has just finished a trip from California to Pennsylvania, shipping 18143 kg of butter while covering a distance of 4,500 km. What is special about this truck is that it mostly drove itself with little human interference.

The truck is mostly autonomous as there was an engineer observing the whole operation and a safety driver ready to take over in case of an emergency.

According to Shawn Kerrigan, the co-founder of Plus.ai, their goal with this test trip is to show the maturity, safety, and reliability of their system. During the trip, there was no disengagement, off-schedule stops, or issues with the autonomous system.

Other companies working in the self-driving field have also conducted tests with autonomous trucks, but so far, none of them have ever attempted a cross-country trip such as this.

In the U.S, the demand for butter skyrockets every year when Thanksgiving approaches. And as stated by Yone Dewberry, chief supply officer of Land O’Lakes butter, his companies and others like it would appreciate a solution to meet the huge demand around this time of the year, all while saving cost and fuel.

During its journey lasting three days, the truck had to withstand snow and rain, as well as finding its way through the Rockies roads.

With this successful trip, the future seems to be so bright for autonomous vehicles. Kerrigan thinks that in the next few years, we would have regular cross-country trips made by self-driving trucks.

According to Wedbush Securities’s Dan Ives, in 2020 and 2021, we will see some other tests of autonomous vehicles of the same, or bigger scale. He also predicted that the first rollout would take place in 2020.