Perhaps the era of autonomous trucking is not as close as many think
Supply Chain Digest Says...
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In the US, in February of 2022 TuSimple announced its driverless truck technology had made seven totally autonomous trips between Phoenix and Tucson in recent weeks
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That is certainly one of the conclusions from the news this week that perceived self-driving truck leader TuSimple is closing its US operations.
The story is a bit complicated. San Diego based TuSimple, founded in 2015, has faced some scrutiny over the past year relative to safety concerns and potential transfer of intellectual property with a Chinese company.
As its winds down US operations, the company now says in a regulatory submission that it is moving its business to China.
According to the Wall Street Journal, TuSimple has been shrinking its US staff since late last year. This week, the company said it has laid off about 150 employees or 75% of its US staff. That brings its global workforce down to about 700 full-time employees - half of what it had in the summer of 2022.
Most of those remaining employees are in China.
Publicly traded TuSimple, which did an IPO in 2021, has reportedly been seeking a buyer for many months. It has stopped pilot activities of its technology, which can be added to existing trucks to make them autonomous.
When the company launched, it said a reliable autonomous solution at scale would help shippers guarantee freight capacity and focus their driver supply to customer-facing first- and last-mile operations, not long distance line haul moves.
In 2022, the company lost a partnership with Navistar to co-develop autonomous trucks.
With concerns about its Chinese relationships, TuSimple earlier said it planned to sell its China division, but later reverse course and announced further expansion into Asia.
In June, the company became the first to operate a fully autonomous semi-truck on open public roads in China, according to the Wall Street Journal.
In the US, in February of 2022 TuSimple announced its driverless truck technology had made seven totally autonomous trips between Phoenix and Tucson in recent weeks. It added that these trips were taken under various road conditions, including dense early-evening traffic and back-to-back runs on the same night.
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 The tests also did not use teleoperation or traffic intervention along the way. The bigger news was that based on the success of these tests, rail carrier Union Pacific said it would use TuSimple equipped trucks to move freight between Tucson and Phoenix starting later in 2022, the company's first customer for autonomous trucking services.
It is not clear what happed what happened to that initiative, which gave hope to many driverless trucks were close to reality.
But with TuSimple’s news, it appears the technology and the market are simply not advancing fast enough.
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