Einride’s Large Gen 2 truck, boasting autonomous capabilities and modern design, has been one of the more eye-opening logistics solutions to come to market in the last few years.
In a recent discussion, we engaged with Robert Ziegler, the general manager of Einride, delving into the company’s pursuits in autonomous transportation and its commitment to electrification.
Beyond its strides in autonomous transport, the Swedish company is notably proactive in this domain. Leveraging our conversation with Ziegler, a seasoned professional in the transport sector, we explored topics ranging from the evolution of transport to its transformation, and pondered on the timeline for the recovery of the transport market.
Last year you launched the Large Gen 2 autonomous vehicle. Could you tell us something about its characteristics and improvements in comparison to the previous generation truck?
We develop this vehicle to put it into operations with our customers. Our shippers have basically made experience for the last year and half with the generation 1 and we learned a lot from that.
The improvements are both in terms of better sensor suite on the vehicle, always also improving the software side, but we have also made changes to the size of the vehicle and its payload. That has been increased to 24 US pallets and we are also able to double stack the pallets on the vehicle and to take higher payloads.
What about the range of the vehicle?
The range is not so relevant for autonomous vehicles because we usually operate them at relatively short ranges. That is either inside very large industrial compounds, where we run within the fence, or we run between a factory and a distribution center that are not too far away.
In this case we run on public roads and we get permits for that. We need to work together with regulatory authorities to basically grow your permits over time with the data that we share with them and having safe operations for a certain period of time. So we start with relatively short ranges, of a couple of kilometers, and step by step we improve the capabilities.
So range is not really an issue at the moment. The capabilities that we are ramping up are things like speed, things like being able to operate in different environments and conditions – at night, when it’s raining or when it’s snowing and so on.
What countries are you operating those vehicles in? And particularly interesting issue is in what countries do you operate them on public roads?
We received an approval in the US, where we ran these vehicles in Tennessee for General Electric Appliances both inside their factory but also between the factory and the distribution center on a public road. We also have permits in Sweden to run for companies like SKF and Coca-Cola there and these are operational commercial relationships. We are performing operations which normally would have been done by a truck with a driver.
One of the biggest challenges facing the road freight sector is the lack of drivers. Could autonomous vehicles be a potential remedy for that problem? We are talking about a long-term solution of course, when do you think that could happen?
The way we think about the autonomous future is that it is digital, electric and autonomous.
Therefore the vehicle that we are developing is not for sale, it’s a vehicle we are operating. We are looking for partners to manufacture the vehicles in the future, we are not planning to be an OEM. From the ground up it’s electric and it doesn’t have a cabin. So the human intervention and supervision of the operation happens remotely.
That basically allows us to supervise multiple trucks remotely with just one driver. So depending on regulatory developments, but perhaps in the coming 2-3 years, we could see drivers operating multiple trucks at the same time and therefore reducing the problem of driver shortage.
But when do you think it will actually be possible for autonomous trucks to drive on longer regional distances, not to mention international routes like say Warsaw-Duisburg?
I think that could be a matter of a decade, maybe 5-8 years. We are obviously not going to start with the complicated things. In automation you always start with the simple things. Humans do not want to drive on a short 5 km route back and forth in the same location.
That is a thing that is easy to automate and we will start seeing this in the coming years. At the moment autonomous vehicles operate mainly in terminals, industrial roads and even some public ones, but it will still be some time before we see them in the inner cities or on highways. It is not so much a matter of technical development, because the vehicles are capable of running on these roads, it is the regulatory environment that needs time.
Therefore we start with simple applications. And that is our advantage of building a vehicle that we do not sell but operate. We can define what the environment is and we build a vehicle explicitly for that environment and get a permit specifically for that environment.
Einride is also very active in electrification of transport both in terms of developing a network of charging stations as well as creating a whole platform environment for electric logistics. Could you elaborate on those two issues?
We have close to 1000 vehicles that are under contract rolling those out this year and in the coming years. We see more and better electric vehicles coming from the main manufacturers like Daimler, DAF, Scania, but also BYD from China. We have large orders with these OEMs, they deliver us the vehicles and we build the whole ecosystem for our shippers.
For instance, we work for Lidl or AB InBev, where we transport their goods to supermarkets or between the plants and the distribution centers. We build the whole ecosystem that includes the charging, the digital infrastructure needed to operate electric freight (software with the telematics), we provide the vehicles, the drivers. Basically it’s a feel good service where the shipper doesn’t have to worry how that transformation works.
What about developing those charging stations. What countries are you developing them in?
We have expanded last year outside of the Nordics, into the US, Germany, the Benelux and recently, just a few weeks ago, to the United Kingdom.
Those are the countries where we are starting to build our own charging infrastructure. In doing that we are focusing on areas where we have a strong concentration of shippers that are working with us. In Sweden it is around the west coast, in Germany primarily in the Rhein-Ruhr area and in the UK it will be in the Midlands.
So the typical logistics centers of these countries, where you have the high density, high volume and high frequency of transport and therefore it makes sense to invest in charging infrastructure.
Are your charging stations developed in your customers’ premises or perhaps also next to public roads and could be accessible to other users?
Both. It starts inside the terminal of our clients, but we very quickly run out of space there. We are in progress of building out Einride charging stations that will be publicly available.
Do you have plans to enter new markets with the chain of charging stations this year?
Yes, definitely. I can’t comment on that though. You will be the first to know.
Are you in any talks with Polish customers or plan to expand the charging network into Poland? Or other Central European countries?
We are getting a lot of interest from Poland from our shippers that have large operations in the country, but nothing concrete at the moment. As for charging stations, for us the two elements must come together. We build the full ecosystem, we are not interested in doing them alone. We bring digitalisation, we bring charging, we provide the electric vehicles, the driver or the autonomous ones – we provide the total package.
In Poland and in many Central European countries there is still some doubts with regards to electrification of transport. Many see it as feasible in last mile deliveries or regional transport, but carriers can’t see it in the long-distance routes anytime soon.
When we look at this issue with our shippers, meaning we analyze their data, we find that they can electrify 40-45 percent of their current transport with the existing technologies. I am talking mainly about Western European customers, but also some coming from the eastern part of the continent.
The ability is there. The thing that makes electrification difficult for countries like Poland is the differential between the electricity price per kilometer and diesel per kilometer. It is still cheaper but the differential is fairly small – in Scandinavia, for instance, it is 80 percent, because electricity is very cheap. In Poland we have cheap diesel but relatively expensive electricity. So the differential is very small and therefore the total cost of ownership of a very expensive electric vehicle is high.
So there needs to be some sort of state subsidies or state support for electric vehicle owners?
Yes, and that could be in the form of both carrots and sticks. What Germany does right now is increasing the road toll, which is not applicable to electric vehicles, that is an example of a stick. At the same time they are introducing very attractive cash subsidies to cover the difference in Capex cost between diesel and electric vehicles, they cover basically 80% of the price, which is very attractive and gives Germany a jump start in rolling out electrification of transport.
But still when it comes to introducing electric vehicles in international transport isn’t their range still a problem? There aren’t many electric trucks that have ranges exceeding 300 km.
Yes, but it is going to develop very fast. It won’t take very long before we have 1000 km range electric trucks. They are already in planning among many OEMs. Another thing, no driver ever drives 1000 km without taking a break, so they have to rest, so it is about how to integrate the charging in the process in such a way that it extends the range of the vehicle.
The last few quarters have been difficult for the road freight segment. Volumes have sunk, rates have gone down, costs are obviously still very high. How would you comment on the current situation in road freight transport? When could you see the turnaround in the situation?
I think we still will have a difficult year this year. Based on the sentiment we are getting from our shippers, we are expecting a pick up early next year. But what’s more important is that there is a huge transformation taking place in transport becoming more local, more regional rather than being long distance and international. A lot of freight is leaving the road and leaving onto rail and the sea and that is a big transformation that carriers need to be aware of.
Obviously the whole topic of sustainability and becoming independent of fossil fuels – not just only for the reasons of sustainability, but also for cost reasons because the electric power is simply cheaper per kilometer than diesel is today. And so this is where the future of transportation is and both carriers and shippers need to go through this transformation.