Self-driving truck goes on beer run
SAN FRANCISCO — The futurists of Silicon Valley may not have seen this one coming: The first commercial delivery made by a self-driving truck was 2,000 cases of Budweiser beer.
On Tuesday, Otto, the Uber-owned self-driving vehicle operation, announced the completion of its first commercial delivery, having delivered its beer load from Fort Collins, Colo., to Colorado Springs, a roughly 120mile trip on Interstate 25.
In recent years, Uber has predicted a future in which you can ride in a selfdriving car that will take you where you want to go, no driver necessary. But the idea that commercial trucking could be done by robot is relatively new — and a potentially controversial one, given the possibility that robots could one day replace human drivers.
“We think this technology is inching closer to commercial availability,” Lior Ron, co-founder of Otto, said in an interview.
In August, Uber acquired Otto, a San Francisco startup run by a number of veterans of Google’s long-running autonomous vehicle research.
Though largely symbolic, the beer delivery marks the first commercial partnership for Otto, which was founded less than a year ago. Terms of the deal between Otto and Anheuser-Busch InBev, which owns the Budweiser brand, were not disclosed.
“We’ve tested with trailers, of course, but there’s nothing like actually doing the real thing, end to end,” Ron said.
The delivery was indicative of Uber’s larger ambitions to become an enormous transportation network, one in which the company is responsible for moving anything, like people, hot meals or cases of beer, around the globe. Travis Kalanick, Uber’s CEO, has said he envisions a future in which transportation will occur using both manned and unmanned vehicles.
Otto is a particularly large bet for Uber, which paid nearly $700 million for the startup a few months after the company started publicly discussing its selfdriving-truck ambitions.