Former employees of Google, Apple, Tesla, Cruise Automation, and others — 40 people in total — have formed a new San Francisco-based company called Otto with the goal of turning commercial trucks into self-driving freight haulers. Prominent staffers include former Google Maps lead Lior Ron and Anthony Levandowski of Google’s self-driving car team.
Self-driving trucks are probably easier to turn into a commercial reality than their family car equivalent. That’s mainly because they tend stick to motorways for most of their journeys, which are easier to drive on than complex city streets. The company has already fitted out three brand-new Volvo big rigs with a variety of sensors, including Lidar, radar and plain-old cameras. Harris reports that they’ve already been tested on the roads of Nevada without a driver behind the wheel.
Otto claims that the self-driving kit it’s making is designed to be fitted to new trucks, not old ones, and promises that it will be affordable. Even so, it’ll have some competition: while most media coverage centres on self-driving cars, there’s plenty of work being done by big-name vehicle-makers on self-driving trucks, and a convoy of the things already drove across Europe earlier this year.
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