A.P. Moller – Maersk (Maersk) and Kodiak Robotics, Inc., have launched the first commercial autonomous trucking lane between Houston and Oklahoma City. The freight lane marks an expansion of the collaboration between Kodiak and Maersk, which began with their first autonomous freight deliveries together in November 2022 as part of Maersk’s Global Innovation Center Program. Since August, Kodiak has been delivering eight loads per week for Maersk customers with a safety driver behind the wheel.
“Teaming with Kodiak enables Maersk to stay at the forefront of innovative solutions. Autonomous trucks will play an instrumental role in digitizing the supply chain. We expect self-driving trucks to ultimately become a competitive advantage for Maersk as we execute our strategy to provide customers with a sustainable, end-to-end logistics solution across air, land, and sea,” said Erez Agmoni, Maersk’s global head of innovation – logistics & services.
Kodiak and Maersk are completing four round trips per week on a 24-hour-a-day, four-day-a-week basis between a Houston facility, where consumer products are loaded onto 53-foot trailers, to a distribution centre in Oklahoma City. Operational learnings gained from the activity are captured and documented as part of the Kodiak Partner Deployment Program. It is designed to help companies learn how Kodiak’s self-driving trucks can become integral to their overall logistics strategy and offerings.
“Since our founding, we have focused on developing an autonomous product that is easy for global innovation leaders to integrate into their networks, and Maersk is a perfect fit. Hauling commercial freight allows us to integrate Kodiak’s autonomous trucking solution into Maersk’s operations. As the first autonomous trucking company to establish this new commercial lane between Houston and Oklahoma City, we are demonstrating our team’s ability to introduce new lanes and bring new efficiencies to the entire logistics industry,” said Don Burnette, Founder and CEO of Kodiak.
Autonomous trucking solutions can potentially address long-term challenges faced by the trucking industry. According to the American Trucking Association, the trucking industry faces a shortage of roughly 78,000 drivers. The ATA estimates that, based on current driver demographic trends and projected freight demand growth, the shortage could swell to more than 160,000 over the next decade.
Safety continues to be a perennial challenge for the trucking industry as well. U.S. National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) research also estimates that 94% of crashes occur due to human error. For Kodiak, safety and performance are foundational to its autonomous trucking solution. Each vehicle is equipped with 18 different sensors, including cameras, radar, and lidar, that provide the platform with a 360-degree view of the truck. Every tenth of a second, the truck evaluates the performance of more than 1,000 safety-critical processes and components in the self-driving stack and the underlying truck platform. The trucks learn in parallel, with system upgrades shared with the entire fleet simultaneously, and are not subject to environmental distractions.
Maersk and Kodiak will continue to explore future avenues for collaboration across Maersk’s growing North American logistics network.
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