The United States Postal Service (USPS) has teamed up with TuSimple, a global self-driving truck company, to test out autonomous vehicle technology in two southern US states.
The California-based company has been contracted to perform five round trips, for a two-week pilot, hauling the US postal utility's trailers more than 1,000 miles between its distribution centres in Phoenix, Arizona and Dallas, Texas. The truck will have a safety engineer and driver on board for the duration of the pilot to monitor vehicle performance and to ensure public safety.
USPS is exploring the feasibility of utilizing autonomous delivery vehicle technology to reduce fuel costs, increase safe truck operation and improve its fleet utilization rate through longer hours of operation, TuSimple said in a statement.
Fortune quoted a USPS press release in which it said: “This pilot (with TuSimple) is just one of many ways the Postal Service is innovating and investing in its future.” The press release cited the possibility of using “a future class of vehicles” to improve service, reduce emissions and save money.
During the pilot scheme, TuSimple will run a series of its self-driving trucks for 22 hours each, which includes overnight driving, along the I-10, I-20 and I-30 corridors to make the trip through Arizona, New Mexico and Texas.
The freight that flows along I-10 corridor accounts for 60% of the total economic activity in the US. TuSimple expects this to be a central route for the company because there is already strong demand from other customers for runs between Arizona and Texas.
“It is exciting to think that before many people will ride in a robo-taxi, their mail and packages may be carried in a self-driving truck,” said Dr. Xiaodi Hou, TuSimple's founder, president and chief technology officer.
“Performing for the USPS on this pilot in this particular commercial corridor gives us specific use cases to help us validate our system, and expedite the technological development and commercialization progress.”
Long-haul routes with short turnaround times, such as this 22 hour journey, are well suited for self-driving trucks because they are normally accomplished with driving teams of two, TuSimple noted in its statement.
But it went on to underline that driving teams are challenging to recruit due to overnight driving requirements, the need to share close quarters with another person and a significant truck driver shortage.
Business magazine, Fortune, said that the USPS spends more than $4 billion per year on highway trucking services through outside contractors, costs that have been rising due to a national shortage of drivers. The American Trucking Association estimates that the driver shortage could reach 175,000 by 2024.
According to another media report, TuSimple has been steadily expanding its testing of self-driving vehicles over the past year, in particular in Arizona, where it had 11 trucks on the road as of January. The start-up has carried cargo for 12 different companies on its tests to date and the USPS deal will mark the company’s first time it has carried out trials in Texas, the report said.
Founded in 2015, TuSimple has raised $178 million to date to fund its development with US tech firmNvidia and Chinese counterpart, Sina, as its most notable backers.
Meanwhile, in a separate development, the US Supreme Court has rejected an application from UPS that aimed to force the USPS to raise its prices for delivering packages.
Bloomberg reported that justices left intact an appeals court decision upholding the government's method for determining how much the USPS can charge for parcels. It added that the rebuff was a victory for Amazon which relies on the USPS for deliveries and backed it in the court case.
UPS claimed that the USPS has an unfair advantage because the pricing method doesn’t track the true cost of delivering packages. “Postal pricing has departed from Congress’s requirement that the Postal Service compete on a level playing field with private companies for package delivery,” it argued in its appeal.
Bloomberg added that UPS may ultimately get some satisfaction albeit via a different path. A task force appointed by President Donald Trump is recommending the USPS raise package prices. Trump created the panel after repeatedly criticizing Amazon and its founder, Jeff Bezos.
