Uber Self-Driving Freight. Yes, Self-Driving Semi-Trucks.

Uber's self-driving trucks have started hauling freight

Uber's fleet of self-driving trucks has begun hauling commercial loads, the company announced on Tuesday. The trucks will operate first in Arizona, a state with famously permissive laws for self-driving technology. The trucks won't be fully driverless-they'll still have human safety drivers behind the wheel.

 From article, (Uber's fleet of self-driving trucks has begun hauling commercial loads, the company announced on Tuesday. The trucks will operate first in Arizona, a state with famously permissive laws for self-driving technology.

The trucks won't be fully driverless—they'll still have human safety drivers behind the wheel. Still, the announcement represents an important step toward the use of fully autonomous trucks in the trucking business.

Uber's driverless trucks will operate as part of Uber Freight, a freight-hauling app and network that Uber launched last year. Just as the regular Uber app lets passengers book a ride with a few clicks, Uber Freight is an app that connects shippers with truckers who can haul their loads.

On Tuesday, Uber released a video to illustrate how this three-stage delivery process, called the "transfer hub model," will work. First, a human driver picks up a trailer full of cargo and drives it to a nearby rendezvous point. In the example shown in an Uber video, a driver drove about 300 miles from Los Angeles to Topock, at the western edge of Arizona.

The driver then meets up with a self-driving truck at a transfer hub in Topock and they trade loads. The self-driving truck gets the conventional driver's load to take it further east, while the conventional driver takes the load that the self-driving truck brought from the west.

The self-driving truck then handles the middle section of the trip. Uber is initially restricting autonomous truck trips to Arizona for legal reasons, so it has been hauling loads between Topock at the western edge of the state to Sanders, Arizona in the east—a distance of around 300 miles. But Uber's goal is for driverless trucks to haul loads much longer distances on trips spanning multiple states.

Finally, the load will be transferred back to another human driver, who will carry it to its final destination and deal with the complexities of handing the trailer off at its destination.

Uber hopes to orchestrate these handoffs so that each truck hands off a trailer to the other one, allowing everyone to make money on both legs of their trips.)

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