This driverless electric pod is the delivery guy of the future
Inside a new type of truck, there are no seats and no windows. The vehicle which founders call a “T-pod” is the first truck to be designed to never have a human inside. The driverless design makes it possible, the startup says, to run fully on electric power in a way that can compete with diesel semis on the road today.
Without windows or a separate cab, the truck looks essentially like an aerodynamic white box with wheels. Since a truck hauling 20 tons of freight needs a lot of energy to move, it has to stop fairly frequently to charge; the T-pod can make it 124 miles before it has to plug in again. For other electric semis, charging time is a bigger deterrent, because it’s also wasting a driver’s time.
“If you have to stand still maybe one-third of the time to actually charge, that makes the business case for having a truck driver in a battery-powered truck not that good (…) But if you remove them and create a system where the truck driver drives it remotely and controls a fleet, you overcome that problem” — Robert Falck, CEO of Einride, the Sweden-based startup making the T-pod.
While the pods are on a highway, self-driving technology handles the vehicle, but the remote operator can intervene if needed, with one operator monitoring an entire fleet. When the pod reaches a city and moves onto smaller roads, each vehicle is assigned its own remote operator, who controls it for the rest of the journey.
Without a cab for a driver, the vehicle is cheaper to build than it otherwise would have been, and it can also be smaller. Like other electric vehicles, it will be nearly silent, and like other self-driving vehicles, it’s expected to be safer than human-driven trucks. It also won’t pollute.
“The system as a whole will reduce CO2 pollution to almost zero,” Falck says. “We have a really big mission here,” says Falck. “What’s driving the company is the belief that we can make a difference . . . [Society isn’t] reliant on oil, we’re reliant on the system that we have today, and Einride is solving that.”
