Waymo and Daimler has recently announced that they are forming a broad, global, strategic partnership to deploy fully driverless trucks. Daimler will integrate Waymo’s autonomous driving technology, widely considered to be among the best in the world, into its fleet of heavy-duty Freightliner Cascadia semi-trailer trucks.
Meanwhile, Daimler announced it was working on its own self-driving big rig in 2015 when it showed off a working prototype called the Freightliner Inspiration Truck. The company debut the truck on the Hoover Dam and offering test rides at Las Vegas Motor Speedway. At the 2019 Consumer Electronics Show, Daimler showed off a production version of that prototype truck.
A Daimler spokesperson offered more details about what the company’s partnership with Waymo will entail: Daimler Trucks is developing a customized Freightliner Cascadia truck chassis with redundant systems for Waymo, setting the industry standard in reliability and safety. This chassis will enable the integration of the Waymo Driver with its custom, scalable combination of hardware, software, and compute.
The companies say 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 become the global standard for defining self-driving.
Level 4, or L4, vehicles can operate without a human driver behind the wheel but only within a specific geographic location, on a certain type of roadway, or under specific conditions, like good weather.
