ms) Alex Rodrigues, 23, and Brandon Moak, 24, founded Embark, the company has raised a total of $117 million, including the latest round. It operates 13 18-wheelers and has 70 employees.
Compared to navigating through dense urban areas, designing software, sensors and hardware for trucks to drive themselves on highways is generally easier, owing to the absence of traffic lights, complex turns, complicated intersections, pedestrians, bicycles, e-scooters and other challenges.
“These are facilities meant specifically to transfer loads from a manual local truck onto a driverless truck,” CEO Rodrigues says. “The driverless truck starts inside the facility, drives itself along surface streets then, onto the highway, then drives all the way to the next hub, drops the freight, turns around and comes back.”
By adding the transfer hubs, “customers will still have local drivers handling the pick-up of trailers but will be able to access the benefits of self-driving trucks without needing to change anything about the way they do business.”
What about the people that will be displaced? Any plan of innovation where people are displaced should include alternative solutions of employment as part of the business model. People should not just be discarded.
Sweet. They can’t be any worse than the drivers in my city.
Very interesting, hopefully it will help to reduce car accidents over the next years, specially in highways
Massive. I think a lot of people underestimate the impact self driving will have on the shipping industry, self driving in this specific space will have such far reaching impact