Thomas Wasson
5 min read
Autonomous truck technology maker Aurora has expanded its pilot program with Werner, according to a recent Q1 shareholder letter. The new Fort Worth-to-Phoenix lane will augment Aurora’s existing Fort Worth-to-El Paso lane, which is expected to begin in the second half of the year. The new pilot lane is over 1,000 miles, with Aurora’s self-driving trucks having the potential to cut single driver transit time in half. The Fort Worth-to-Phoenix lane, according to Aurora’s Q1 business review report, requires more than 15 hours of continuous driving, something a human driver cannot do without exceeding the 11 hours of available drive time.
Chad Dittberner, senior vice president, van and expedited division at Werner, said in the letter, “At Werner, autonomous trucking is an integral part of our vision for the future, complementing planned growth in our fleet. Working with Aurora, we now have another capability to safely and reliably transport freight along some of the most vital lanes in our network.”
At the moment, the self-driving trucks are operating in daytime with clear weather conditions, but according to Aurora’s product road map, beginning in Q3, they will also incorporate nighttime as well as rain and heavy wind into driverless conditions testing. For Werner the push toward autonomous routes is viewed as a force multiplier and not driver replacement due to the limits of time. Daragh P. Mahon, executive vice president and chief information officer, said in an Aurora article, “Drivers are a community that has supported this industry for a long, long time, and will continue to support it well into the future. We don’t think of autonomy as replacing drivers. Rather, it augments the driver community and the fleet.”
For large, asset-based truckload carriers like Werner, a continued challenge is how to increase revenue miles generated when a human driver can drive each day a maximum of 11 hours in a 24-hour day. Some have used two drivers for team-expedited, increasing possible utilization to 22 hours, but for autonomous trucks, which lack hours-of-service limits, there’s an opportunity to dramatically increase asset utilization and thus revenue miles driven.
On Thursday, freight audit and payment provider Cass Information Systems released its April Cass Freight Index, which saw for the first time in over 28 months a positive year-over-year uptick in its Freight Expenditures Index. The expenditures component, measuring the total amount spent on freight, rose 3.3% m/m in August, with a positive y/y increase of 1.3% compared to March’s y/y decline of 2%.
