Driverless trucks will help revamp the logistics and industrial sector in China, the China Daily reports. Plus, a leading company in driverless truck technology, launched China’s first commercial freight pilot project recently in cooperation with SF Express. As part of the ongoing pilot, Plus is running its supervised autonomous trucks on two long-haul routes – from Wuhan to Wuxi, a round-trip of 1,448 kilometers – and from Changshu to Wuhan, a round-trip of 1,609 km. “The logistics industry around the world is undergoing a sea change driven by the explosive growth of e-commerce and demand for faster deliveries. Unmanned driving technology aims to address the critical business issues fleets are facing today – keeping drivers happy and productive, reducing operating costs, and meeting sustainability goals,” said Shawn Kerrigan, COO and Co-founder of Plus. He noted that the company developed PlusDrive, which is designed to keep a professional truck operator in the vehicle to supervise the autonomous driving system, which allows SF Express to optimize the efficiency of its current fleet and not to wait for years for full driverless trucks to be ready.
Uisee, another leading autonomous driving firm, told China Daily it has achieved a year-on-year sales growth of 150% last year despite the Covid-19 pandemic. By cooperating with industry leaders such as Changan Minsheng Logistics, FAW Logistics, BASF and Dongfeng Motor, the company has been developing Level-4 autonomous driving logistics. At the beginning of this year, the company has raised over CNY1 billion in its latest round of fundraising. It was also the first time that the National Manufacturing Transformation and Upgrade Fund, a CNY50.1 billion state-owned fund to promote the country’s manufacturing industry, has invested in a autonomous-driving company. Global consulting firm Bain & Co said China has become the world’s largest road transportation market, with a fleet of more than 5 million heavy trucks and over 14 million light and medium trucks. He Xiaofei, Founder and CEO of Fabu, who was also a former Vice President and a top autonomous-driving expert of Chinese ride-hailing firm Didi Chuxing, left Didi and founded the company in 2017 and has raised an undisclosed sum from Sinovation Ventures, a Beijing-based leading early-stage venture capital firm.
“Compared with driverless passenger vehicles, commercial vehicles including unmanned trucks follow a fixed route, for example from one warehouse to another, and run in a relatively simple way,” He said, adding it is also one of the reasons why autonomous trucks are likely to be commercialized faster than passenger vehicles. 5G is expected to inject new impetus into the commercialization of driverless trucking in the country. “5G plays an irreplaceable role in unmanned mining transportation,” said Zheng Di, Vice President of Beijing Tage iDriver Technology Co, a provider of unmanned mining transportation solutions. “Without 5G, transportation can only be regarded as automatic but not intelligent. Only with the high bandwidth and low latency of 5G can we collect massive amounts of data in real time and continue to do intelligent learning to finally save energy,” Alex Zhang, Partner at investment firm FountainVest, said, as reported by the China Daily.
