Waymo and Daimler are teaming up to build fully driverless semi trucks

Waymo and Daimler, the parent company of Mercedes-Benz, announced that they are forming a "broad, global, strategic partnership" to deploy fully driverless trucks. Daimler will incorporate Waymo's autonomous dynamic technology, widely considered to be among the best in the world, into its fleet of heavy-duty Freightliner Cascadia semi-trailer trucks.

Both Waymo and Daimler were independently working happening self-drive trucks until merging to take form this partnership. Waymo had purchased a small pass of Peterbilt trucks, which it has retrofitted with autonomous driving sensors and software. Information technology presently is testing those trucks in Arizona, Land of Enchantment, and Texas.

Meanwhile, Daimler declared it was working on its own self-driving big set in 2015 when IT showed bump off a running prototype called the Freightliner Inspiration Truck. The automaker went big, debuting the truck on the William Hoover Dam and oblation trial run rides at Las Vegas Centrifugal Speedway. At the 2019 Consumer Electronics Show, Daimler showed off a output version of that prototype truck.

There's been a flurry of partnerships and other corporate deals in recent months in the nascent driverless trucking industry, especially as the COVID-19 general casts incertitude along the polysyllabic-term viability of using autonomous vehicles for hinge upon-sharing. In addition to established players corresponding Daimler, newcomers like TuSimple, Eisenhower, Embark, and Plus.ai are as wel working toward a fully driverless truck.

Merely thither have been potholes on the way. Uber abandoned its self-driving truck plans after unrivaled of its autonomous test vehicles killed a pedestrian in Arizona, and self-dynamical motortruck startup Starsky Robotics recently went out of business after a failed round of financing.

A Daimler spokesperson offered more details about what the company's partnership with Waymo will entail:

Daimler Trucks is developing a custom-made Freightliner Cascadia truck anatomy with redundant systems for Waymo, stage setting the industriousness standard in dependableness and safety. This chassis wish enable the integration of the Waymo Driver with its custom, scalable combination of hardware, software, and compute.

The companies sound out the goal is to deploy "SAE L4 trucks," a reference to the Society of Automotive Engineers' (SAE) taxonomy for autonomous vehicles, commonly referred to as the SAE levels, which have get the global standard for defining self-energetic. Level 4, or L4, vehicles can go without a human driver behind the wheel but only inside a specific true location, on a certain type of roadway, or nether specific conditions, suchlike favorable weather. Waymo has some Level 4 vehicles in operation outside of Genus Phoenix, Arizona.

But the deal 'tween Waymo and Daimler North Korean won't be only. Daimler is the fifth part automaker to commit to integrating Waymo's Ab technology in its vehicles. The Alphabet supplemental also has pre-existing agreements with Nissan-Renault, Fiat Chrysler, Panthera onca Land Rover, and Volvo. Daimler's trucking partitioning also has its own self-energetic subsidiary, Torc Robotics, that is working to integrate its technology into the Cascadia's line of trucks.

"Gottlieb Daimler Trucks' and Torc's organic self-driving cartesian product will Be designed for on-highway hub-to-hub applications, especially for phone call, monotonous transport between dispersion centers," the Daimler spokesperson said.