Warehouse and distribution big Prologis sees autonomous trucking as the way forward for logistics.

The San Francisco-based firm is within the early levels of organizing its enterprise to serve shippers and motor carriers that plan so as to add electrical and autonomous massive rigs to their fleets, stated Henrik Holland, world head of mobility at Prologis.

Holland outlined the corporate’s plans whereas discussing new enterprise fashions on the Automotive Information Congress in Los Angeles final week.

Prologis has a partnership with Alphabet’s self-driving know-how subsidiary Waymo to construct highway-adjacent hubs for autonomous trucking. The primary hub opened exterior Dallas in July 2022.

Prologis and Waymo spent $10 million to construct their nine-acre autonomous truck hub in Lancaster, Texas. The power has 100 workers, 10 truck upkeep bays, six EV charging stations, and diesel fueling operations. Waymo operates 20 autonomous vans out of the power, though they’re operating with security drivers within the cab.

Ultimately, Waymo will pull the human drivers for a lot of the route. On this state of affairs, human drivers would transport freight by means of visitors to the hubs. It might be transferred to an autonomous truck that will bounce on the freeway and journey a whole lot of miles to a different hub. There, a human would take over and transport the freight to its ultimate vacation spot.

Different firms are wanting on the identical enterprise mannequin.

Embark, one of many first self-driving truck software program firms, is working with actual property firms to construct a nationwide hub community for autonomous trucking.

“I feel plenty of people have realized that logistics, trucking and easy use-cases are most likely the ways in which we lastly pierce by means of to commercialization in a significant method,” stated Sam Abidi, Embark’s chief industrial officer.

Though self-driving passenger automobiles had been the preliminary focus of the automotive trade, automating heavy-duty vans will show to be a neater endeavor, stated Suman Narayanan, director of engineering for Daimler Truck North America’s autonomous know-how division.

Whereas nonetheless complicated, he stated, the freeway surroundings is extra manageable for autonomous autos to navigate. On a freeway, autos transfer in the identical course at comparable speeds, and there is not often cross visitors, pedestrians and different random obstacles.

When vans are transferring freight, it is totally on steady infrastructure, in comparison with the roads of cities, cities and different areas the place the infrastructure shouldn’t be as managed as it’s on U.S. interstate highways, Narayanan famous.

“It’s lengthy routes, and the mission is deliberate earlier than a truck leaves with its load,” Narayanan added. “So there are some parts of trucking which can be extraordinarily conducive to automating whereas nonetheless reaching the uncompromised security and the need to have the very best effectivity.”