Einride, EASE begin daily driverless freight runs in Ohio

The companies said the deployment began generating operational data on safety, reliability and efficiency last month. They plan to use miles driven, loads moved and uptime from daily service to set the next phase and to support scaling talks with ODOT, INDOT and prospective logistics partners. Tuesday’s announcement did not include any of those figures.

“Daily operations in Marysville give us the proof points we need to keep expanding autonomous freight across the corridor and beyond,” said Henrik Green, CTO at Einride.

Closed loop between two warehouses

The trucks shuttle between EASE’s two Marysville facilities.

“Really closed loop right now between our two warehouses, just running things back and forth so we can understand what does it take from a manpower standpoint on either side. You still have to have a human load and unload those things,” Failla said. “But what kind of obstacles does it see navigating around trucks, loading in, loading out, what time frames are best?”

EASE met Einride at a mobility conference in Ohio last year, Failla said. The company’s autonomy work with DriveOhio goes back about four years, and she said the motive was a seat in the regulatory conversation.

“There’s some level of autonomy coming into the freight industry. And what we don’t want is our lawmakers and legislators to decide what that looks like for us without someone who understands the operation at the table,” she said.

Built to the automotive standard

Coratola founded the Dublin, Ohio-based company in 2014 after a first logistics job exposed him to automotive shippers. EASE now hauls food and beverage, CPG, retail and healthcare freight, but its processes were built to what auto plants demand: no-fail freight, overcommunication and the same service at 3 a.m. on a Saturday as at 1 p.m. on a Tuesday, Coratola said in an interview with FreightWaves in August.

An assembly plant can have 1,400 to 2,000 suppliers coming together on a single sequence trailer, he said, and freight that shuts the plant down stops the line.

That supplier base is moving again. OEMs spent two years consolidating around EV production, Coratola said, in some cases going from 2,700 suppliers to about 1,200 and adding plants that can handle lithium. This year he sees production shifting back toward hybrid and internal combustion vehicles, and suppliers that sat dormant for two years are turning back on.

“It looks like their supply chains are reflected more of what people are buying rather than what they think they’re buying,” Coratola said.

Empty racks as the first job

Racks are where Coratola sees autonomy landing first in automotive. Parts arrive at the plant in them, and the empties have to leave. When a supplier runs late or the line falls behind, the empties back up and somebody has to send a driver.

“Rather than holding drivers or continuously having to spot drivers to come get racks, this type of technology would be able to deploy essentially an autonomous supply chain that helps that carousel — racks go back,” Coratola said.

“We’re not talking about sending racks from the Midwest all the way to Texas. We’re talking about getting them out of the plant to a pickup location closer where they can then go on an over-the-road truck,” he said.

The Marysville loop is that carousel at warehouse scale.

Unplanned rack moves are the loads that spike costs, Coratola said, because drivers aren’t always available and the freight gets spotted or expedited. Failla said a carousel could run any time of day, any day of the week, timed around traffic patterns to keep the trucks off congested roads.

Remote operators and the driver question

Remote operators watch the trucks at all times and can take over when one needs a human, Failla said, and EASE is not trying to take jobs from drivers.

“So with the aging population that just is a fact with our drivers, this is also giving them an opportunity to stay in the industry a little bit longer but get them out of that cab,” she said.

Coratola sees drivers and driverless trucks splitting the plant work by whether a load was planned.

“We can reserve the routes that are coming into the plant that are planned for the drivers, and the unplanned routes can be serviced by technologies like this that are running on carousel that might be, in a future state, hopefully less to operate,” Coratola said.