“While autonomous is not going to solve all segments of U.S. Scale is another important facet of this model.

As time goes on, I think you’ll see a natural move away from the testing lanes as actual commercially viable.” Ability to Scale Means On-Demand Freight Capacity But from a regulatory perspective, you have to do testing somewhere. “Right now, I think there’s a lot of testing going on in lanes that aren’t necessarily best for economic deployment. “What we do at Loadsmith is obsessively focus on the most dense lanes in the United States from a freight perspective, and continue to build density either through freight or trucking capacity, so that we're running as many trucks as we can repetitively in between two origin and destination points,” Suma explains. That's why the Loadsmith Freight Network is designed for deployment of autonomous trucks, which will be a subset of lanes that are heavily dense and where the economics of the lane work for this model. There needs to be a high volume of freight traffic in a lane to make the math work.

Not all lanes are economically viable for autonomous truck operations, Suma says. When looking at the commercial viability of autonomous trucking technology, where they are deployed is going to be critical. And this model will allow shippers to leverage autonomous trucks for the long-haul lanes that are less desirable to many drivers. The Kodiak-equipped trucks on the Loadsmith Freight Network will transport goods autonomously on the interstate portions of highway routes, aka the 'middle mile.' Human-driven trucks, booked on Loadsmith’s platform, will handle the local pickups and deliveries on either end.īy pairing autonomous long-haul trucks with local drivers that will rendezvous at hubs along and within the LFN, Loadsmith and Kodiak say they’ll enable shippers to move freight more efficiently, reliably, and safely. Most discussions about the commercialization of autonomous trucks revolve around a “hub-to-hub” model, and that's how Suma envisions it, as well. In fact, Suma says, what he’s really doing at Loadsmith is building the first-ever freight transportation company built specifically for self-driving trucks.

Loadsmith recently announced plans to equip 800 trucks with Kodiak’s self-driving technology, the Kodiak Driver. The next step? Deploying autonomous trucks in the middle mile of that freight network, starting in 2025. The Loadsmith Freight Network allows small and mid-size carriers to scale their customer reach without making a significant capital investment, enabling them to take on high-volume lanes they otherwise would not be able to tap into. He’s been working on building those smart networks to optimize his current third-party logistics business - or as he describes it, a Capacity-as-a-Service logistics platform for shippers and carriers.

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