The autonomous technology is still many years away from wide deployments, but first deal of AB Volvo around commercial autonomous truck is highlighting how the Swedish truckmaker is bundling services to generate revenues from that technology.
Auto industry has been considering the driverless transportation as a transformative opportunity to generate revenues with the Boston Consulting Group expecting connected high-tech vehicles as a medium of generating about $150 billion of new profits for the transportation industry by 2035.
But in presence of regulatory, infrastructure and technological hurdles that are blocking the way of fully autonomous vehicles, the journey of these vehicles to deploy on public roads is proving to be long and costly.
Meanwhile, to overcome those hurdles, the world’s second biggest truckmaker has decided pilot launch of its driverless trucks for customers by deploying them on controlled route often on enclosed sites of the customers to perform specific, limited and repetitive jobs.
Autonomous technology has a lot of uncertainties and for the reason company believes that partnering with the customers for commercial launch of that technology is the right way to develop it with real implementations and learning from that process, Sasko Cuklev, Volvo Trucks’ autonomous solutions director, told Reuters in an interview.
The Swedish truck maker, in last month, unveiled its first commercial launch of autonomous transport package to be started this winter. The package will involve seven trucks which will transport limestone from a mine to a nearby port for Broennoey Kalk AS of Norway.
Volvo is in early stages of implementation of autonomous solutions and that is why it is going through a learning phase and is open to different setups. But there are more and more discussions and questions about the solutions and services that are coming into play with implementation of the autonomous technology, Cuklev said.