Autonomous trucks trained with artificial intelligence are on the road, hauling prepared meats, showing how far self-driving technology has advanced. The adoption shows that technology can compliment rather than disrupt truck drivers’ careers.
Wednesday,
Tyson Foods
(ticker: TSN) announced it is deploying vehicles in northwest Arkansas made by self-driving truck start-up Gatik.
Tyson is a meat giant. The company generates some $50 billion in sales annually with chicken, beef, and pork accounting for more than 80% of the total. It has a private fleet of trucks, and also uses trucking services from third-party providers.
The Gatik trucks will pull refrigerated trailers, operating in the so-called middle mile, short-haul routes from, say, a production plant to a distribution center.
“It’s taking care of two things at once,” explains Patrick Simmons, Tyson vice president of transportation. “The drivers don’t really like the short-haul stuff.” What’s more, drivers are limited to 11 hours of driving a day. The autonomous trucks will eventually operate 18 hours a day. There is a productivity gain in a less-desirable route.
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Gatik specializes in middle-mile autonomous trucking applications. Long-haul routes have more variability as well as more safety regulations to navigate. Last-mile routes between a retailer and a customer can be complicated. “The more route combinations within [an] area [data requirements] increase exponentially,” says Gautam Narang, CEO and co-founder of Gatik, of Mountain View, Calif.
Middle-mile routes tend to be shorter and highly repeatable, making them ideal for early autonomous applications. They also tend to not cross state lines, which simplifies the regulatory environment.
Gatik trucks can drive themselves, but they start with safety drivers. Then Gatik uses AI to train the tech. The trucks get better at driving a route the longer they are on it.
The company also has trucks deployed with
Walmart
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(WMT) and Canadian grocer Loblaw, among others. In some instances, the drivers have been pulled out. It can take 18 or 24 months to validate the technology with a customer, and remove a driver.
The vehicles Tyson will use are Gatik trucks. “Our business model is autonomous transportation as a service,” adds Narang. “We charge our customers a fixed fee per drop per year.”
Gatik is privately held, and doesn’t plan an initial public offering soon. Still, investors might be eating food hauled by a driverless Gatik truck, if they’re not on the roads in Arkansas seeing the technology in action.
Tyson stock is up 1.3% in premarket trading Wednesday.
S&P 500
and
Dow Jones Industrial Average
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futures are down 0.3% and 0.2%, respectively. Coming into Wednesday trading, Tyson stock is down about 29% over the past 12 months.
Write to Al Root at allen.root@dowjones.com
