Las Vegas — Today at CES Daimler Trucks executives announced the company will invest around $570 million to bring highly automated trucks (SAE level 4) to the road within a decade.
Highly automated driving refers to automated travel in defined areas and between defined hubs without any expectation of the system that a user will respond to a request to intervene.
Level 5 means that no human driver is necessary, which means that at level 4, the German manufacturer is within striking distance of full automation.
Daimler also introduced the first SAE Level 2 automated truck in series production in North America with the latest enhancements to Freightliner's new Cascadia.
Level 2 means the truck is capable of both steering and acceleration/deceleration control. Those technologies were featured by Daimler at the Las Vegas Motor Speedway today.
Daimler CEO Martin Daum. (Photo: Linda Baker / FreightWaves)
Daimler will put a level four truck on the road in the U.S. this year, Daimler Trucks CEO Martin Daum said during a speech this morning at the Keep Memory Alive Center. He declined to say where.
In another update, Daum said the company would no longer focus on platooning technology. It worked in the lab, he said. "But there were too few moments on public roads and we tested it for thousands of miles. Not too often we not were able to get those [fuel]savings. Whenever the platoon got split used more fuel, he said.
In commercial trucking, he said, level 4 is the natural next step after level 2, increasing both efficiency and productivity, he said.
This is the first year Daimler Trucks has visited CES. The presence of a commercial trucking company at the world's biggest consumer electronics shows shows how much technology has flattened the worlds of consumer and business tech.
"Why are we here?" asked Daum. "Because our trucks are all about technologies."
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