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Torc Robotics aims to operate its autonomous trucks in multiple locations with various versions of equipment, a company executive told Trucking Dive in an interview.
Walter Grigg, the company’s head of partnerships, sat down with Trucking Dive during the Manifest Vegas 2024 conference in early February. During the conversation, Grigg highlighted a refined test track, explained why testing has increased in New Mexico, and shared tips on how to understand the ever-evolving autonomous truck space.
Read the questions and answers below to learn more about the Daimler-owned autonomous truck company’s strategy and operations.
Editor’s note: This interview has been edited for clarity and brevity.
TRUCKING DIVE: How’s it going? Can you reveal who you are currently working with and who is testing your technology?
WALTER GRIGG: We have a publicly announced couple: Schneider is an incredible and close partner. CR England? and then we’re working with a lot of others that aren’t in the public stage yet. But most people in the industry looking at this technology are already involved.
We also have a large advisory board — made up of the majority of the big players in the industry — that guides us on how they see this technology applied from their perspective. We also give them feedback on how we’re doing so you have that exchange.
What states are you currently testing in?
Torc is based in Blacksburg, Virginia, so we use small sections of I-81 for some advanced development, but primarily our largest road test facility is in Albuquerque, New Mexico, and we utilize the I-40 corridor.
Albuquerque is an incredible training environment. You’ve got the big I—the I-40, I-25 interchange—as well as mountainous environments around Albuquerque. You have heavy traffic in the city. You have long straight runs. So we usually run between points west of Albuquerque and points east.
Is there a particular trade lane you operate in?
It was more about developing the product on a larger scale. We’re just now transitioning to a more refined, on your terms, trading lane for our minimum viable product, and that’s not ready for an announcement yet. But it will be soon.
Okay. Well, we’ll be eagerly awaiting that announcement when it comes.
It’s helpful to have a development schedule, right? What timeline are you looking for — I don’t want to say completely driverless because people keep confusing what that means —
There’s a lot packed into it, right?
So Martin Daum, the CEO of Daimler Truck—of which we are a subsidiary—in the last few days of the capital, announced the 2027 goal of achieving commercial scale.
I got it. And you said you’re currently testing a minimum viable product. Can you give me an idea of what it looks like?
Yes. For a product to be minimally viable, it must be intrinsically safe. If it’s not safe, it’s not a product and there’s no reason it should be on the road.
It must be economically viable: It must solve a problem that needs to be solved for the industry, in a specific lane of operation. And it must be commercially scalable: We must be able to maintain and maintain it.
Interesting. When you look at industry partnerships, sometimes technology companies tend to focus on one type of customer or one industry. What type of ideal partner do you tend to seek?
It’s a spectrum.
We are developing the solution to be able to effectively cover Class 8, while targeting vans/coolers early on. So looking at any of the potential customers in that type of equipment type or asset class, and that would have sustainable load on those MVP lanes. Then moving on to what we call “phase one strips”, which talks about expansion.
So that’s exactly what we’re looking for early on, but that doesn’t limit us. We have a lot of interest and a lot of discussion going on in other sub-segments of the industry. But we’re mainly targeting Class 8, on the road, and what we call hub-to-hub in the truckload space.
That reminded me: you mentioned earlier that there is an ideal testing environment, and Albuquerque provides that. What makes it an ideal testing environment?
I don’t want to try to capitalize on the fact that we’ve found the best place and no one else has. It becomes an ideal environment because we are able to maximize learning opportunities in a positive asset utilization manner.
We can get tons of information on things like surface streets because Albuquerque has many different varieties of that. We have the ability to have a myriad of combined on and off lane changes. We have heavy traffic in the inner city. Very close to the city, we actually have a significant hill climb, a significant grade, and therefore we also have degradation. So we can climb and descend a bit over the hills. We can run east you know, all the way to Texas – a straight and narrow path, right? And that has its own environment. You could head west on I-40, find yourself all the way to the Continental Divide.
There are all kinds of things that go there. It is ideal in that we are able to maximize the utility of our physical assets and our engineering assets and resources in a very small space. So basically, we can learn quickly.
What’s the biggest thing you’re testing for right now? Or the biggest problem you’re trying to solve?
The original use case, as we said, is this hub-to-hub, over the road. Maximize time and distance on interstate driving. So that’s where the early utility of this technology will be: In this educational environment. But ultimately we need to handle all the logical scenarios that can happen within this environment.
Well, here we are in February. By the end of 2024, what do you hope to have achieved?
We have very important internal timelines and goals. So, significant improvements.
We are currently working on the final availability of vehicles with early production intent. So by the end of the year, I think you’ll see us operating in different locations. And you’ll see different versions of equipment all working towards commercializing the product.
There are certainly situations in the AV landscape that others have pointed out as places to start testing or operating. Do you have such a list?
I can tell you who was very helpful, where we tested. There are a few factors that ultimately lead to where the Class 8’s off-road range will be commercialized.
The first, in fact, is the design environment. The field of operational planning, as the industry refers to it, talks about things like weather, roads, structures or geometries and so on.
At the same time, you look at which states are either allowed or very attractive. And what we found is that New Mexico, Texas, Arizona, they were all extremely helpful. In fact, we have our test headquarters down the road there in Albuquerque, New Mexico. The state was extremely helpful, very welcoming. They clearly promote innovation. No question.
Texas, very similar. They invite. They incentivize innovation that is done safely and responsibly. In Arizona, we actually did some testing early on in the state. It’s all very attractive to innovation, all very attractive to technology, as long as it’s done in a safe, responsible way.
I always like to end with this: Is there anything else you want to say to a trucking executive who might be reading your comments?
I absolutely want you to rule out that our safety compliance and compliance is dead-on.
If we don’t test in a safe way and protect the public around us, we’re done. There are no more tests. And we respect that. We see testing on public roads as an honest privilege and we respect that. And so we have protocols, procedures, training and the people in the vehicles, multiple levels of oversight, to make sure that happens.
The other is advice to many executives in the transportation industry: Start to understand who the players are. Just start getting the names of the people out there as the industry evolves. It’s who, it’s where, it’s when and it’s how, right?
We saw last year that there were entrances and exits. It’s an early technology in the grand scheme of things, so don’t get too carried away with each name. You just understand who the big players are, where the deep partnerships are — for example, our deep partnership with Daimler, the market share leader in Class 8 on the road.
So understand these levels and then watch the industry as it evolves.