How Volvo became a trucking company, too

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Jason Cannon

Hey everybody! CCJ Editor Jason Cannon. Here behind me is a Volvo Val. But it's not just any Val. You can probably tell by some of the hardware that's affixed to the top of and along the side here. This is an autonomous val. This is part of Volvo Autonomous Solutions product suite. Volvo Autonomous Solutions is a unique business because it kind of puts Volvo in this space to where they're a trucking OEM, technology solutions provider and a trucking company, and we're going to talk a lot more about that.

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Jason Cannon

And here in just a few seconds and we're going to learn what Volvo Autonomous Solutions really is and what it can do to keep up with all the latest and driverless trucking and the old boring stuff where there's drivers in the truck. Check out CG digital and subscribe to our newsletter.

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Jason Cannon

We're joined here today with Sasuke, Lev and Kyle Zimmerman with Volvo Autonomous Solutions. And guys, to start this conversation off, what is Volvo Autonomous Solutions?

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Sasko Cuklev

Volvo Autonomous Solutions is a separate business area within the Volvo Group, with the responsibility to develop, commercialize and sell autonomous solutions globally. We were created in the beginning of 2020 to put even more focus on the area within the group, and you can see us as a autonomous transport solution provider to our customers out there. What we are offering our customer is an autonomous transport solution.

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Sasko Cuklev

So it's not only about the beautiful truck that you see here behind us. It's a it's a full solution. And we sometimes talk about it's a full ecosystem of services that we connect to the autonomous, the autonomous trucks, as you see behind me.

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Jason Cannon

Tell us a little bit about what this truck is doing now. We hear a lot. We see a lot where we're technology demonstrators. We're moving actual freight for customers, and we're in this testing phase. There's lots of solutions providers. But what are you guys doing right now? What is this truck right here capable of doing today?

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Sasko Cuklev

We are today in in commercial autonomous operation, still with a safety driver behind in the cab, ready to take over if that is needed. But the solution is extremely stable. So basically they they more monitor and observe. But we are in commercial operation in Texas in we have been that on two lanes. And this Monday we unveil that we are opening up a third lane.

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Sasko Cuklev

And that is those lanes are between Dallas and Houston, Fort Worth and El Paso, and now also Dallas up to to Oklahoma City. With that, we are also now moving freight across state borders, which is important. And the last implementation now of Toxie is also our first end to end case, where we are moving the freight autonomously from a customer depot into their their facility, which of course requires a higher, deeper integration with the customer.

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Sasko Cuklev

We need to have a higher operational precision and so on. So we do that in both the models, both the the terminal to terminal model, but also the end to end model. So the last thing now is to remove the safety driver.

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Jason Cannon

What's the safety driver doing. When is when is he driving. When is he not and when he's not. What is he doing?

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Sasko Cuklev

He is not driving. So basically we are at at the hub, whether it's a terminal or a customers hub. And there we engage the autonomy system and then he or she is more sitting there in case of something happened, ready to take over. And that is from a like a safety sort of measure. We have until we already to say that now we are fully, fully driverless.

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Sasko Cuklev

So we still have some verification validation still to do until we are ready to do that. We are talking about that. We are only like quarters away from being able to to be fully driverless and remove the safety driver. But we are not really ready yet. And that's why we have a person in the cab, but he or she are not.

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Sasko Cuklev

They're not driving anything, so it's fully autonomous.

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Jason Cannon

This is obviously going to it's growing. We're expanding lanes in Texas. What's what's driving that expansion? Is it is it demand from the customers? We have more freight. We want you guys to move it. Or is it you guys wanting to really stress the software, really stretch the legs and see how far we can push this thing?

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Sasko Cuklev

I would say the expansion is based on our customers, so we will expand based on where our customers want us to go. So we have a plan or different plan, different scenarios on where we should go. We are starting in Texas with with the center around Dallas. So we share Dallas, Houston, Dallas, El Paso, OKC. We are talking about Phoenix, Atlanta down to San Antonio.

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Sasko Cuklev

But that expansion will be very much based on where our customers want us to go.

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Jason Cannon

You had mentioned customer integration. Is it fair to call you guys a trucking company? I think.

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Kyle Zimmerman

So, somewhat to start with, but what we talked about with our customers is today we want to de-risk this, right. We want to take the capital investment as Volvo. We want to help refine and mature the technology, get it to that full maturation point where they've got lots of lanes that they can deploy the truck on. They've got a solution that they know now is it's robust, it's ready to go.

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Kyle Zimmerman

They know it's backed by the Volvo Dealer Group. They're ready to put it in the operations the way that they see fit. Then we adapt to those business plans. But as any new technology right. There's some growing pains. There's some things with it. We're comfortable with it. We manage the relationship with the autonomous driver partner. We manage a lot of those early logistics and situations, and then we allow our customers to learn and grow and see how it will fit best in their operations.

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Kyle Zimmerman

So it's really a great way for them to get in early with the comfort of having a partner who's got their best interest in mind.

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Sasko Cuklev

Yeah. And then and then we are not tied to a specific business model. So we we are implementing several different where transportation service is one. But we are also right now in implementation with one of the customers where it's more of a you can see it as an installation where they operate it. So it doesn't have to be us operating.

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Sasko Cuklev

So we are extremely humble on that. But we believe that the model that Kyle talked about is is the best from a customer perspective to start.

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Jason Cannon

All right. So Volvo is somewhat of a of a trucking company. But we've got fleets all over the United States with hundreds and hundreds of years of experience. So how do you guys take care of your customers? How do you implement those types of systems? Because this is a relatively new business for Volvo.

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Kyle Zimmerman

Yeah. Well, I give Saskia a lot of credit on this one. Right. When he was assembling his team at Vas, he looked at that exact thing, right. We knew that starting transported as a service, right? That we needed to put trucking industry people on our team. Right. So we have decades. I'm talking for decades, three decades, you know, with each person we're talking about here, but leading our operations team, decades of actually working for trucking companies, dedicated carriage, all the things that go into that.

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Kyle Zimmerman

Right. We've got safety professionals have over 30 years with some of the largest fleets in the country, right, you know, that have built safety programs that have done these things. Right. So when we bring a customer in, it's not just me talking to them about technology, right? I actually then talk to them with an operations person who speaks that language.

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Kyle Zimmerman

I talk to them with a safety person who speaks that language, because everybody's got questions when they're going to work with this new technology, right? They've got questions. How does it fit our safety plan? Right. We've got the expert there to talk about that. How is it going to integrate with our operations team? We have the expert for that.

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Kyle Zimmerman

So when we talk about tailoring a solution and really helping our customers get in and learn and understand how autonomous is going to work for them, that's the Vas advantage for us.

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Sasko Cuklev

So it's extremely customer centric. So we we really want to put the customers in the center and, and be like their natural speaking partner in, in the transformation that they are in as well. I mean, they need to understand what an autonomous solution will mean for them. And we want to offer that, that they can lean towards us and have us as the as the natural speaking partner.

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Sasko Cuklev

And in order to do that, we we have to know trucking and we do that.

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Jason Cannon

Carl, I know you've been in this truck while it was rolling down the road. What's that feel like? You're kind of watching this thing. Kind of trust in the system, right? It's just this invisible person doing its thing. What does that feel like? And if you had to score it as a driver, how would you score it?

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Kyle Zimmerman

I mean, you have a CDL, I have a CDL. We know what it's like to be behind the wheel. Right? It's a lot of your viewers are familiar with Smith System driving. Right. It's a Smith system driver on steroids. It literally is going to do the safest thing possible all the time, right? This is a driver who is committed to getting the job done safely.

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Kyle Zimmerman

That's first objective efficiently. So you see it when it's going down the road. It's not going to be that side by side. Truck drag race at 65 and 66 miles an hour with the truck next to it. Our truck is going to let that truck go on and we're going to go back to our speed. It's got that view around it.

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Kyle Zimmerman

It's a comfort, Jason. It's in the dead center of the lane. It's moving to accommodate things. You see when you're watching on the screens that we have in the truck, it may pick up a pedestrian that's ten, 11 seconds down the road beyond what you or I could see. Right. And it's going to make a lane change to accommodate for that.

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Kyle Zimmerman

It's going to make the safest move possible. So you really get a sense of comfort and safety that, you know, I don't get normally as a passenger riding with somebody. Right. But it's so predictable and stable and comfortable. It makes a believer out of you if you've done it or if you've written in a truck. Right. You know the dangers.

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Kyle Zimmerman

This truck is just so many thoughts ahead of where you can be by what it can see, what it can perceive, it's computational ability. You feel like you're in great hands without any hands.

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Jason Cannon

Well, it makes those decisions based on the data that it collects from all the, the, the things that we can see on the exterior of the truck. So, guys, if you don't mind, give us a little walk through, like all the things that we can see, what does it do and what kind of information is it gathering.

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Kyle Zimmerman

Yeah.

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Sasko Cuklev

So so first of all, it looks like your regular truck like the standard Val, but it is not. It is based on the same platform, but the truck itself is designed and developed from scratch for autonomy. So all the wiring, the harnessing for, for the different driver parts are included from, from start. We have redundancies on the safety critical system.

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Sasko Cuklev

So here we are talking about six systems. It's braking, it's steering, it's power and energy. It's compute, vehicle motion management, communication. Even on the lights we have redundancies, meaning that we have two ways of breaking, two ways of steering and so on. In case of the primary system will fail, we have a secondary system that can kick in and take the truck to at least a safe stop or deliver the goods to to where it needs to go.

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Sasko Cuklev

So that is on the truck side. A lot of effort put into that. Then on top of that we we have the the driver hardware, if you say so. So in this case it's the sensors that you see. It's you have them here in the front. You have it on the side, you have it at the top. And here we're working with a couple of different sensors.

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Sasko Cuklev

So it's lighters, it's cameras. It's it's radars. And they are complementing each other. So you can see that more as the, as the eyes of the, of the solution. Of course, a lot of compute in the truck, which you can say is the brain of the, of the solution. So extremely simplified based on where the truck is, what it sees it take decision on what to do, sends that to the truck.

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Sasko Cuklev

And then the truck acts. What is also important where I think we took a stance a couple of years ago to not take an existing truck of today and in a way, bolt on these autonomous hardware on an existing truck. We said we want to build the right track from the start. So this is a built in truck and not a bolted on truck.

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Sasko Cuklev

So basically everything you see here, including the autonomous driving hardware, will be built and manufactured in our manufacturing facility in new River Valley in Virginia. And I think that is very important to so that we can really get like an OEM grade safety and and production quality stamp on it. And that is also the fastest way to scale because we want to scale this.

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Sasko Cuklev

These will come out from our main line in Europe Valley. That is in a nutshell what you see here.

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Jason Cannon

So how much of what Volvo autonomous solution does is a validation test for these platforms on Volvo's trucks, because you guys are basically building your own case studies for your technologies in your assets, right?

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Sasko Cuklev

So of course, a lot of verification validation is done. And it's not about only about us from, from Volvo then to, to validate and verify the truck. And in this case Aurora, our driver partner to validate and verify the driver. It is when you combine them and integrate them. So that's why we really believe in a in a deep integration.

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Sasko Cuklev

So this has been a joint program that we have been running together to develop a joint product. And that then of course we put a lot of effort together with our 80 partner to to verify and validate that. And now we are starting to get into the the last stages of that to, to really tick off the last pieces in order to be to be ready and remove the safety drive.

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Kyle Zimmerman

So what.

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Jason Cannon

Are those last few pieces if you if you're looking at your bucket list of things that you have to accomplish, what's those last couple of things we need to check off.

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Sasko Cuklev

The product. Of course we need to do the loss verification validation. We need to sign off the safety case, make sure that we have ticked off all of that. We need to make sure then from a, from a manufacturing perspective, that we are capable of producing these in our manufacturing facility so that we have prepared. But then also we are making sure that the full ecosystem is in place.

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Sasko Cuklev

So and that's why we work so tightly together with our customers like to get all the operational procedures in place. We have to have the the uptime network in place. I mean, we talk so much about with an autonomous solution, you will be able to to run the truck around the clock and increase the utilization from whatever we have today, 34% into like the 90%.

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Sasko Cuklev

But in order to do that, you need to have the truck available. So what we have done is to set up an extensive service network along the routes that we are operating together with our two dealers in Texas, Bruckner's and Vanguard, so that we can have that high availability infrastructure. All of that we are we are preparing. So the full ecosystem also have to be in place.

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Sasko Cuklev

So this is not only about like a technology exercise, it is about putting this solution into real commercial trucking sort of system and operation.

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Jason Cannon

Well, as Kyle mentioned earlier, he and I both have CDL, so if you guys are taking volunteers for safety demo drivers, you know I'm here and at your disposal at any time.

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Sasko Cuklev

You're always welcome down to Texas. And first of all, to experience it maybe will not put you as a safety driver, but let's let's come down and experience this.

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Jason Cannon

You got to start somewhere, right? Yeah. Thanks for joining us today and learning a little bit more about what Volvo Autonomous Solutions does and more about driverless trucking for more videos about driverless trucking and what they are capable of doing, check out the video that's on screen right now.