The partnership with Waymo is expanded In October 2020, Waymo announced that the autonomous driving technology giant made a partnership with Daimler Truck AG. Autonomous trucking is poised to improve […]
In October 2020, Waymo announced that the autonomous driving technology giant made a partnership with Daimler Truck AG.
Autonomous trucking is poised to improve road safety and offer greater efficiency across the logistics industry. As we configure the Waymo Driver to operate Class 8 trucks and unlock these benefits, we’re pleased to share that Waymo has entered a broad, global, strategic partnership with Daimler Trucks, the global market leader in large commercial vehicles.
Our initial effort will combine The World’s Most Experienced Driver ™ with Daimler’s Freightliner Cascadia to enable fully autonomous driving. These fully autonomous trucks, equipped with the Waymo Driver, will be available to U.S. customers in the coming years, and we’ll explore expansion into other geographies and brands in the near future. We look forward to working with Daimler to achieve our common goal of improving road safety and efficiency for fleet customers.
John Krafcik, Chief Executive Officer, Waymo: “We have the highest regard for Daimler’s engineering skills and broad global truck product portfolio, and so we look forward to scaling the Waymo Driver, together with our new partner, to improve road safety and logistics efficiency on the worlds’ roadways.”
Martin Daum, Chairman of the Board of Management of Daimler Truck AG and Member of the Board of Management of Daimler AG: “As leader of our industry, Daimler Trucks is the pioneer of automated trucking. In recent years, we have achieved significant progress on our global roadmap to bringing series-produced highly automated trucks to the road. With our strategic partnership with Waymo as the leader in autonomous driving, we are taking another important step towards that goal. This partnership complements Daimler Trucks’ dual strategy approach, of working with two strong partners to deliver autonomous L4 solutions that are seamlessly integrated with our best-in class trucks, to our customers.”
Roger Nielsen, Member of the Board of Management of Daimler Truck AG, President and CEO of Daimler Trucks North America: “The combination of increased road freight volumes and the need and vision of fleet operators for highly automated trucks, is what fuels our relentless pursuit of innovation. We are pushing engineering solutions that strive above all to increase safety and help our customers improve business efficiencies. Based on our collaboration with Waymo, we will be in the unique position to be able to provide our fleet customers with a choice among the best solutions for their individual requirements.”
Based on Crunchbase, Waymo is described as follows.
Waymo stands for a new way forward in mobility. it is a self-driving technology company with a mission to make it safe and easy for people and things to move around.
Waymo improves transportation by building software and sensor technology developed in Google’s labs since 2009. In October 2015, they achieved the world’s first fully self-drivingtrip on public roads, in a car without a steering wheel or pedals. They refine Waymo technology through one billion miles of simulation testing each year, and the cars have self-driven over two million miles on public roads across four U.S. cities.
It was founded in 2009 and is located in Mountain View, California.
According to its homepage, company profile of Daimler Truck AG is described in the following way.
Daimler Trucks & Buses is one of the world’s largest commercial vehicle manufacturers, with more than 35 primary locations around the world and around 100,000 employees. The company brings seven vehicle brands under one roof:
Commercial vehicles – no economy in the world can function without them
Mercedes-Benz (light, medium and heavy trucks as well as city, intercity and touring coaches) and Setra (intercity, long-distance and premium coaches) are our traditional European brands; our U.S. brands Freightliner Trucks (trucks in weight classes 5 to 8 for a wide range of commercial vehicle applications), Western Star (heavy trucks for specialized and long-haul transports) and Thomas Built Buses (light- to medium-duty buses); and our Asian brands BharatBenz, based in Chennai, India (trucks in the weight classes 9 to 55 t and medium- and heavy-duty buses) and FUSO, headquartered in Japan (trucks and buses for Asia, Middle East, Africa, Europe and Latin America).
The art of engineering: the most beautiful form of art for us at Daimler Trucks
Gottlieb Daimler and Carl Benz laid the foundation for the modern transport industry more than 120 years ago. Over the past decades, Daimler’s truck and bus divisions have consistently set standards for the entire transportation industry – in terms of safety, fuel efficiency and driver and passenger comfort. Now it’s time for the next evolutionary step: emission-free, automated and connected driving. Daimler Trucks & Buses is working to bring these important technologies to high-volume series production, across brands, divisions and regions. In this way the company intends to take a major step closer to realizing its vision of CO₂-neutral transport and accident-free and contribute to the sustainability of global goods and passenger transport.
Autonomous driving technology is still developing and one of the big challenges is how to detect other objects, living creatures and other conditions outside vehicles. Trucks running on the highways are good examples to testify the autonomous driving technology and gather its data. This is because there are fewer obstacles including traffic lights and people on the highways than on the city roads, and because vehicles do not change directions or lanes more than on other than the highways. In addition to this, the shortage of drivers in the logistic industry is a big problem for us. Drivers become older and younger generations do not want to be drivers, even worse they do not have a driver license. On the other hand, e-commerce is getting popular around the globe due to the pandemic. As a result, the demand of drivers is still high.
In summary, autonomous driving trucks are really important in many perspectives so that the partnership between Waymo and Daimler Truck gains momentum.
