This fireside chat recap is from FreightWaves’ second Autonomous and Electric Vehicles Summit, which took place Wednesday.
FIRESIDE CHAT TOPIC: Paving the way for autonomous trucking.
DETAILS: FreightWaves’ Kaylee Nix and Uber Freight’s Olivia Hu discuss the necessity of a deep digital network and strong industry partnerships to create a successful rollout of autonomous vehicle technology.
SPEAKER: Hu is the senior business development manager at Uber Freight.
BIO: Hu manages OEM, AV and EV partnerships on the business development team at Uber Freight. She is passionate about the role of technology in defining the future of supply chains and transportation. Prior to joining Uber Freight, Hu led business development at a self-driving car startup.
KEY QUOTES FROM HU:
“Right now is this prime time for [autonomous vehicles] to start commercializing, and trucking is the second piece of it.”
“With regards to autonomous trucking, it’s really a shipper-agnostic industry. All shippers, I believe, should have access to autonomous trucking and that’s what we enable. It doesn’t matter what your size is. It’s more a matter of ‘what are your needs?’”
“We can leverage this hybrid model of autonomous, and then when autonomous is not available, manual drivers. We can leverage those two and combine them together to create a very powerful network.”
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