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Uber's robo-truck makes first delivery of ... Budweiser in Colorado

Sour taste ahead for professional drivers

A truck using Uber’s latest automated driving system has made its first commercial delivery after shipping 45,000 cans of beer Bud on public freeways with no one at the wheel.

The truckload of fizzy brew was shipped from an Anheuser-Busch warehouse in Fort Collins, Colorado, to a distributor in Colorado Springs about 140 miles away. For 120 miles of that, the truck driver sat in the back seat and let Otto, the self-driving system Uber bought earlier this year, do the work.

"We wanted to show that the basic building blocks of the technology are here; we have the capability of doing that on a highway," said Lior Ron, cofounder of Uber's Otto unit, told Bloomberg. "We are still in the development stages, iterating on the hardware and software."

Basic building blocks indeed. The truck relied on its human operator to get through traffic, pedestrians and roadkill, then onto the freeway. Once there, the software handled the much-easier task of freeway driving for the rest of the route.

While Uber might be billing this as an historic moment, it’s more of a publicity stunt. The truck was accompanied on the road by a police cruiser just in case (which is hardly Smokey and the Bandit), required a special deal from legislators, and the entire trip was mapped out carefully by Otto for two weeks before the convoy rolled.

autotruck

No driver required (Credit: Aether Films)

Nevertheless, it does show the direction Uber is taking its self-driving car research. Rather than go fully autonomous, Uber will hire human drivers to do the difficult driving, refuelling and loading, and rely on software for the more simple stuff.

"The focus has really been and will be for the future on the highway. Over 95 percent of the hours driven are on the highway," Ron said. "Even in the future as we start doing more, we still think a driver is needed in terms of supervising the vehicle."

In the longer term however, Uber is desperate to take the human factor out of its business plan. The company is hemorrhaging money at the moment but would be a cash cow if it wasn’t for those pesky humans and their annoying need for things like food and shelter.

Anheuser-Busch is also keen to see the start of self-driving trucks. The company estimates it could save $50m a year by shifting from human to robot-powered delivery of its piss-poor excuse of a beer. ®

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