FreightWaves Today | September 14

Julie (0:13)

We've had some insightful interviews recently on automation with key industry leaders and we put together some great voices in this special edition of FreightWaves Today. The future is coming. Take a look.

Craig (0:23)

Welcome to FreightWaves Today. How are you, sir?

So you are the first cabless autonomous semi truck. What does this mean? I've seen the videos of these futuristic, I think in China, they're more common, of actually feels like a little, and I'm going to use this term and I mean this kindly, dystopian world of not having a cab. It's what it feels like to an old school trucker. What is this? Ayo, what is exactly is this?

Ayal (0:55)

Yeah, and you're right, they're actually already in China. They're already deploying these what we call skateboards or platforms for moving freight. It's not a dystopian future, it's advancement of technology is the way I see it, and it's just another tool in a toolkit.

It's not changing the way trucks work, or displacing trucks, or anything like that. It's just one more way to move freight, especially if you have a generally short move that you need to do. These skateboard concepts are really great.

Craig (1:27)

We've seen them. I don't know if we've got any B-roll on this, but the idea that you don't need basically a cab, it's basically the chassis itself is powered.

It strikes me that that is probably where this ends up in the future because it is far more capital efficient. Once you eliminate the need for a truck driver to be in the cab, why would you even have a cab?

Ayal (1:51)

Yeah, and I think that's where Humble Robotics got it started. We were asking ourselves, based on where technology is and where it's going, what does a truck look like, and where does commercial trucking go in the far future, and can we bring that in sooner?

The trucks that we are on the road were never designed to be autonomous. They were designed for a human driver to sit in the cab and drive and be safe and pilot that vehicle.

The question we're asking ourselves is, where does that all go? And eventually, it goes to these purpose-built vehicles, the vehicles designed with autonomy in mind, not just bolting on sensors to the top of the vehicle like you see with some of the autonomous truck providers out there. And so that's where Humboldt sits. We're trying to look at that future and bring that in closer and see what we can do to design that vehicle for autonomy from the jump.

Craig (2:39)

So one of the things, I was having this conversation with somebody who's been in the industry for decades, and we were talking about the fact that the concept of drop trailers is something that the industry is really the larger carriers that built their entire business model on having drop trailers. But in an autonomous world, particularly when you have these skateboard concepts for autonomous, you don't need drop trailers. All of a sudden, you're going to drop these skateboards off and the containers can get loaded and offloaded that way. Where does this end up?

Ayal (3:10)

Yeah, so this is a great question because if you think about a skateboard that is just sitting at a customer site, for example, waiting for a dock to open, the dwell time and dwell cost there is actually very low.

The benefit of drop trailers starts to go away in an autonomous future. You could just have what our vision is, a vehicle that shows up at a dock, loads, and drives to destination, unloads, and it just does that back and forth all day on demand, on call. It's a different model for freight for how it'll progress in time, it's where it goes in an autonomous future. Drop trailers work really well where you have a driver, you're trying to optimize your time, you're trying to make sure that a driver's stuck waiting for a dock door to open, anything like that. But if you're able to manage the vehicle and call it on demand, and deliver it to the destination, it changes the model entirely. That's what we believe.

Craig (4:04)

Ayal, I've been told that at scale, the price point for these skateboard concepts, I'd love to get your talk about it. It's around $100,000 is probably where they end up in the market. Do you have any concepts on what you expect the technology, what you guys expect the market price to be?

Ayal (4:21)

Yeah. It can get even lower than that at scale. If you think about what a platform looks like, it is very, there's not much there. There's a way to power the axles and there's a battery pack. There's the autonomous technology.