Einride Presents New Electric Driverless Truck Pod

The Swedish start-up Einride, which develops electrically powered and driverless trucks, today presented its next generation of the so-called Pod. Robert Falck, co-founder and CEO of Einride, gave a short history of the young start-up and its motivation.

The entrepreneur concentrates on three main areas:

Freight Operating System
Electric Fleet System
Autonomous Mobility System

The difference to other manufacturers of autonomous trucks is that Einride does not only want to produce the truck itself, but the whole system that can autonomously operate an electric logistics fleet. The business model is also different in that the trucks are not sold but operated in a fleet by Einride, autonomous electric logistics as a service, so to speak.

To date, Einride’s Pod has been used in two scenarios, which the company has named AET 1 and AET 2. AET 1 is in a confined area such as an industrial site on private roads, where the speed of the Pod is up to just over 30 km/h. AET 2 is on short sections of road, for example between warehouses on a larger private industrial site at similar speeds.

For use on public roads – known as AET 3 and AET 4 – new requirements for the Pod are now given. For AET 3 in rural areas the vehicle has to reach 45 km/h, for AET4 on freeways it has to reach 85 km/h. Depending on the area of use there are different monthly price models that customers can choose. They start at $18,000 per month for AET 1 and go up to $22,500 per month for AET 4.

One of the goals is to reduce the number of traffic fatalities in logistics to zero, but also to be carbon neutral. New and better jobs should also be created. The job of a truck driver today is very arduous, dangerous and not family-friendly. With the new applications of the Einride Pod, which under certain conditions require remote operation, truck drivers can work in a much more regulated and safe way and be at home with their families after work.