MARYSVILLE, Ohio - Two electric trucks with no cab, no steering wheel and no one aboard are now hauling freight every day between a pair of EASE Logistics warehouses in central Ohio, the logistics company and the Swedish autonomous trucking company Einride said on Tuesday.
The two SAE Level 4 trucks run scheduled routes across EASE property and local public roads in Marysville, northwest of Columbus, carrying freight between the company's facilities. A remote operator monitors each truck off site and can step in if needed, the companies said. Henrik Green, Einride's chief technology officer, told The Columbus Dispatch that Einride employees watch the vehicles from a control center in Austin, Texas.
The route is short. Abbi Failla, EASE's chief administrative officer, said on WOSU Public Media in September that the trucks travel about a quarter mile from one dock door to the other, on a road in Marysville's Innovation Park that serves the warehouses there, and that Einride spent months mapping it. She said a local operator in the Marysville office can reach a truck in person if needed, while a remote operator in Texas watches several trucks at once.
EASE put the trucks into service in late August, FreightWaves reported, and the deployment began producing data on safety, reliability and efficiency last month. The companies said they would use figures from daily service, including miles driven, loads moved and uptime, to plan the next phase and in talks with the Ohio and Indiana transportation departments and prospective logistics partners about scaling up. 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," Mr. Green said in the announcement.
For now the work is a closed loop. "You still have to have a human load and unload those things," Ms. Failla told FreightWaves, adding that the companies were studying what obstacles the trucks meet around other trucks and loading docks and which times of day work best. Peter Coratola Jr., EASE's founder and chief executive, told The Dispatch that the trucks take over short, repetitive trips that would otherwise fall to a company driver, freeing drivers for longer runs.
The deployment is EASE's third with DriveOhio under the Truck Automation Corridor Project, an $8.8 million effort that the Ohio Department of Transportation, DriveOhio and the Indiana Department of Transportation began in 2021 to study truck automation on major routes in both states. The first two deployments tested platooning, with drivers in both trucks, in southeastern Ohio and on Interstate 70 between Columbus and Indianapolis, Ms. Failla said. The project is scheduled to end in January 2027, according to The Dispatch.
The trucks cost almost double the price of a conventional electric truck, The Dispatch reported. Mr. Green told the paper that Einride has a "low double digit" number of autonomous trucks operating worldwide and that its growth is limited by the road permits it can obtain, with routes expanding from short and slow toward longer distances and higher speeds as authorities approve them.
Einride put a cab-less truck into daily service for Lidl on a public road in Germany last month under a permit from the country's Federal Motor Transport Authority. In the United States, Kodiak AI said on Tuesday that it remained on track to start unsupervised long-haul driverless service before the end of the year.
