Waymo is expanding its partnership with UPS to include autonomous Class 8 trucks.
Waymo and UPS have been working together for nearly two years and have been exclusively using Waymo’s fleet of self-driving Chrysler Pacifica minivans. It will now build on the learnings from the past two years, as well as previous Class 8 trial runs with J.B. Hunt, to conduct autonomous trial runs with its Waymo Via Class 8 trucks equipped with the fifth-generation Waymo Driver.
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The trial runs will be conducted over the next several weeks at a nine-acre hub. The autonomous trucks will also deliver for UPS’s North American Air Freight unit between facilities in Dallas-Fort Worth and Houston.
“We hope to gather early learnings about how autonomous driving technology can help enhance safety and efficiency, evaluate the performance of the autonomous system and successful delivery of freight, and understand how to refine our autonomous operations in this use case for eventual scaling,” Waymo said in a blog post.
Waymo has been working on autonomous trucks alongside its autonomous minivans since 2017. For example, it is working with Daimler on a fully autonomous, Level 4 system for trucks and also has a fleet of Peterbilt trucks testing in Arizona, California, and Texas that have been equipped with autonomous driving sensors and software.
While the trucks are autonomous, a commercially licensed driver and a Waymo software engineer sit in each truck to monitor the driving.
