Swedish autonomous transportation company Einride is using its cabless electric delivery vehicles in Selmer, Tennessee, to move items from GE Appliances’ manufacturing plant to a warehouse. This operation can run up to seven ferries per day, Monday through Thursday, the press release says. In an email to The edgeAn Einride public relations representative, Matthew Klein, wrote that the distance of each trip is 0.3 miles (or 0.48 km) and all on private roads owned by GE.
Einride first ran controlled operations at GE’s Appliance Park headquarters in 2021. The company later moved to a test on a public road with approval from the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration in 2022, the “first pilot in a public road in the US for a purpose-built autonomous electric vehicle.” truck without a driver on board.”
In a statement, GE Appliances senior director of core materials Harry Chase says the truck increases safety by reducing traffic and eliminating some tasks since workers don’t have to hitch and unhitch trailers. These trucks are part of a larger project “to create an automated logistics flow”, with artificial intelligence cameras that automatically activate doors at the dock, as well as a Slip robot that loads and unloads the vehicle autonomously.
Since Einride’s truck does not use a human driver, its technology is considered Level 4 autonomous. In 2017, the company revealed its first T-Pod design that maximized interior space as there was no need for seats or a steering wheel. Einride then showed off a more powerful prototype called T-Log in 2018, which led to the 2020 design, called Autonomous Electric Transport (AET).
