Barely a day passes these days without us becoming aware of more advancements in the field of driverless vehicles, and it appears as though every significant producer is close to refining their own model that can drive without the help from a human.
A Sweden-based company, Einride, has revealed a prototype driverless vehicle that is addressing self-driving innovation from a completely different angle, and they might well be onto something.
The automobile we are talking about is a windowless, driverless electric truck named the T-Pod, and not a passenger car. While most of the focus for driverless automobiles has been on passenger cars so we check out a newspaper or consume breakfast en route to the office while the vehicle looks after the driving duties, it’s really the commercial automobiles that do the really long miles of ordinary driving.
Driverless vehicles might quickly be seen as something of a novelty, however autonomous trucks really could completely revolutionize the entire logistics market. T-Pod is a prototype from Swedish company Einride that’s basically a giant box on wheels, which is about 23 feet long and is capable of carrying 15 basic pallets.
Its electric motors are controlled by a 200-kWh battery that indicates the T-Pod presently has only a 124-mile range on a complete charge. There are no windows to watch in or from, and there isn’t really even a place for a driver to sit, which could lead others to think this is something for a long way into the future.
Most of self-driving vehicle technology is currently based on a premise of there constantly being a choice for a human to take control of the automobile if essential, however the T-Pod addresses that in a totally different way. The T-Pod is developed to be able to drive autonomously on highways, however when it comes to metropolitan environments such as city streets a human then takes control, however in this case, the driving responsibilities are carried out remotely.
Einride is now dealing with the charging facilities needed for the T-Pod, and ambitiously anticipates to have a finished truck available for customers later this year. By 2020, Einride plans to have some 200 units of the T-Pod operating on a path between Gothenburg and Helsingborg in Sweden, walking around 2 million pallets of cargo annually.
