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Otto Self-Driving Truck Ships Budweiser Beer Cans in First Autonomous Delivery

It was long said that the first vehicles to begin using autonomous driving should be the semi trucks. With the biggest part of their journeys taking place on highways, trucks offer the perfect platform for real-world implementation of self-driving technology.
Otto autonomous truck 6 photos
Photo: YouTube screenshot
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Otto saw that early on so instead of taking a passenger car and using it as a prototype for the technologies developed by the company, it chose a truck instead. Otto was put together by a team of former Google, Apple, and Tesla employees, some of which had previous experience in dealing with driverless vehicles. A consortium of Silicon Valley's brightest minds bent on producing the world's first autonomous truck - no wonder the company caught the attention of Uber who went and bought it earlier this year.

Well, the team is facing some stern competition from Mercedes-Benz, but after the recent beer shipment its truck made, it is at least on level ground with the German manufacturer. But instead of simply taking the truck out on the highway and having it drive around aimlessly, Otto decided to make a story out of it.

So they talked to Budweiser, "an iconic American brand that is passionate about their products" who they felt was a perfect fit. But however tempting it might have been, the driver still could not touch any of the beer cans in the back since the software only dealt with the highway part of the journey, with the driver taking over from there.

The video shows the driver leaving his seat and going to the back of the cabin to enjoy a read and relax. That was probably a little too much, but seeing the truck cruising down the road with nobody in the driver's seat sure does a good job of conveying the message.

The route started near Fort Collins on the I-25 and took the truck past Denver all the way to Colorado Springs. There were 120 miles of highway in total, and the Otto truck drove all of them on its own, without input from the human driver.

Otto co-founder Anthony Levandowski also provided one of the best and also poetic descriptions of what autonomous driving is all about: "It's like a train on software rails." The company expects to have this technology operational in Uber's UberFreight service as early as next year, but don't expect to see any vacant driver's seats anytime soon, though.

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About the author: Vlad Mitrache
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"Boy meets car, boy loves car, boy gets journalism degree and starts job writing and editing at a car magazine" - 5/5. (Vlad Mitrache if he was a movie)
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