Major unlock for scaled AV trucks!

To scale autonomous trucking, you need reliable software AND sensible unit economics. Today, we’re excited to announce our use of @Lenovo’s L4 Autonomous Driving Domain Controller AD1 (built on @NVIDIA Hyperion) as our production compute platform for Class 8 driverless trucks. This changes the game for driverless freight making total hardware BOM (compute + sensors) targeted at $50,000/truck 3x-8x lower than industry benchmarks. Real scale requires production economics. Excited to build the future of freight with NVIDIA and Lenovo. bot.auto/media/bot-auto-sele…

Bot Auto wholeheartedly supports and applauds the @FMCSA and Administrator Barrs for granting a 5-year exemption for cab-mounted warning beacons. This regulatory move allows us to keep operating safely, serve our customers, and innovate for the next generation of trucking.

Excited for @KayleeNixWX to take the stage at Urban Autonomy Summit next week!

Two weeks ago, our team participated in a simulated traffic stop with a K9 unit of the Texas Department of Public Safety. This mission-critical training was designed to teach our autonomy system how to act when pulled over for secondary screening at a routine CMV checkpoint, but also to teach Texas State Troopers how to better interact around an autonomous truck. Like @teeter_bart says, safe operations as an autonomous company come from "constant communication and constant education, so no one is caught unprepared." Inspections are a normal part of operating as a motor carrier, but things get complicated when 4-legged officers hit the scene. This training is just one piece of our promise to put safety first by nurturing our relationship with first responders, and we will never stop working to be the safest trucking company on the road.

Trucking is an industry limited by human capacity. Autonomy removes that limit, allowing for uncapped growth when deployed correctly. Bot Auto's President & COO Brett Suma writes about how that translates to infrastructure in this new article.

Well done Bart!

From our President, Brett Suma: As autonomous trucking scales, tractor count will be an important measure of progress. But the more important question is: how fully utilized are those tractors? Autonomous tractors are high-value, capital-intensive assets. Simply putting more of them into service doesn’t create a successful transportation network if they aren’t generating productive miles. That’s where the go-to-market model matters. Under Driver-as-a-Service, monetization has several dependencies. The technology determines where the truck can operate. A traditional fleet — already optimized around human drivers — has to adopt and integrate it. And ultimately, the shipper still decides which freight can move autonomously. Those layers can create a significant utilization challenge. Scaling autonomous tractors faster than the freight available to utilize them risks creating a large pool of expensive, underused assets. At Bot Auto , we start with the network. The Capacity Grid Powered by Bot is built by partnering directly with shippers — the people who control the freight. We understand their networks, address their operational and safety concerns, identify where autonomous transportation creates value, and build the Capacity Grid around real freight demand. Then we deploy and operate the autonomous capacity directly for them through Transportation as a Service (TaaS). That creates an important distinction: We’re not trying to scale tractors first and solve utilization second. We’re scaling the network, the freight and the autonomous capacity together. Tractor count will matter. But ultimately, capital efficiency comes from utilization — and utilization starts with the shipper.

Diesel prices have reached record levels in the last month and mall carriers across the board are saying “what cost is too much for us to keep hauling?” Bot Auto is a small carrier, but we also have a superpower in our trucks that allows for strategic navigation of diesel prices: autonomy-boosted fuel efficiency. Our VP of Commercial Opperations David Stemm wrote about how our team thinks about making it in this diesel market here: bot.auto/blog/navigating-die…