Uber’s Self-Driving Trucks Hit the Highway, but Not Local Roads

SAN FRANCISCO — More than a year after Uber’s self-driving trucks made their first commercial delivery — 2,000 cases of Budweiser beer on a 120-mile hop in Colorado — the company says it has taken its robot big rigs to the highways of Arizona.

Uber said on Tuesday that its self-driving trucks had been carrying cargo on highways in Arizona for commercial freight customers over the past few months. The trucks operate with a licensed truck driver at the wheel, ready to take over in the case of an emergency. But Uber said the eventual goal was to eliminate human drivers inside the cab.

In a video, Uber laid out its vision for the future of trucking — tapping autonomous systems to navigate long highway hauls and relying on human drivers to handle shorter drives, like the final few miles to a customer’s loading dock.

The ride-hailing service is one of the first companies to begin commercializing self-driving trucks, integrating — albeit slowly — the technology into its shipment-booking service, Uber Freight.

At the heart of Uber’s vision are transfer hubs where trucks can pick up and drop off trailers. At those locations, autonomous trucks would grab trailers for long-haul drives, while human drivers would grab ones earmarked for closer delivery — with Uber’s network meshing the supply and demand of both behind the scenes.

Uber’s self-driving truck emerged from its 2016 acquisition of Otto, an autonomous trucking start-up founded by a former Google engineer. The acquisition was at the heart of an intellectual property lawsuit against Uber that was brought by Waymo, the self-driving car unit from Google’s parent company, Alphabet. The two sides settled the case last month.