This fireside chat recap is from FreightWaves’ Autonomous & Electric Vehicles Summit on Wednesday.
KEYNOTE CHAT TOPIC: The road to autonomous commercialization
DETAILS: Navistar and TuSimple shortened the timeline to autonomous trucking commercialization a year ago when they announced a partnership to put a Level 4 high-autonomy Class 8 truck into production in 2024. The executives leading the effort discuss the challenges to meeting the goal, which both believe is realistic.
SPEAKERS:
Srinivas Gowda is vice president of autonomous driving at Navistar, responsible for managing the manufacturer’s relationship with autonomous technology partners, delivery of the technology and advancing the company’s overall autonomous strategy.
Mo Poorsartep is TuSimple’s chief engineer and director of product management, leading the design, development and launch of the startup’s L4 autonomous truck.
BIOS:
Gowda previously served in key strategic roles as head of safety at Nuro.AI and vice president of autonomous driving and ADAS for Karma Automotive.
Poorsartep has led development of multiple world-first ADAS and autonomous driving features with global manufacturers and spent nearly a decade researching topics related to connectivity and autonomy.
KEY QUOTES FROM GOWDA:
“The business aspects of the autonomous solution are still in their infancy. The market dynamics will drive this. I think you will be looking at a U.S. solution plus a Europe-specific solution. If and when the TRATON Group [of which Navistar is a member] looks at China, which is one of the big markets, we’ll be looking at that as a separate entity.”
“We are doing all we can from a product safety approach working with TuSimple. To that end, we are building trucks to suit the autonomous platform. Partnership is the new leadership. We are constantly exchanging ideas with TuSimple. We are also exchanging ideas within Navistar to understand what the best solution is.”
KEY QUOTES FROM POORSARTEP:
“The importance of this partnership is that we have opened our books to one another to be able to assess the risk or any of the impediments we may face along the way. And this goes across multiple aspects of getting us to 2024. A big part of it comes to the readiness of your supply chain. Are the suppliers ready with the tools and technologies that you need?”
“We are getting the product to market, getting it validated and then adding capabilities to that base foundation as the technology progresses.”