Isuzu trucks powered by Gatik’s ADS will hit the roads later this year.
Gatik
Gatik and Isuzu North America Corporation have launched a collaboration to develop fully automated medium-duty trucks. The first vehicles will be deployed in commercial operations this year in the U.S. and Canada.
Gatik, founded in 2017, focuses on short-haul, B2B logistics for Fortune 500 retailers such as Walmart
WMT
Isuzu has long been a manufacturer of medium duty trucks. Their cab forward trucks are a familiar sight on U.S. and Canadian streets and highways.
Gatik is seeking to fill a key niche in the supply chain. As they put it, “Rapidly increasing e-commerce sales and a well-documented driver shortage have caused businesses to struggle to meet the expectations of on-demand goods movement.” Gatik and Isuzu say, “This effort will… address these critical industry pain points, ensuring retailers can maintain capacity, lower operating costs, and keep delivery times short.”
What’s Special About This Truck?
Gatik’s Automated Driving System (ADS) will be integrated into Isuzu medium-duty N-Series trucks to produce SAE Level 4 delivery vehicles with redundant systems. “Redundant” is the key word here, as I’ll discuss below. As defined by SAE J3016, a Level 4 vehicle is fully responsible for driving; there is no dependence on a human role of any sort in the moment-to-moment operation.
Calling the Isuzu N-Series trucks “an ideal fit for our solution,” Gatik’s CEO and Co-Founder Gautam Narang said, “By bringing these two teams together, we can create segment-changing technology while positioning Gatik to safely commercialize autonomous delivery technology at scale… [to] bring a long-term, sustainable solution to the supply chain.” He added, “We have been working with Isuzu since 2019. We will be integrating our system onto Class 3 through 6 trucks, as our customers want flexibility regarding the carrying capacity of the trucks.”
It’s not often that the idea of redundancy gets people excited. If you’re redundant in a corporate merger, that means you just lost your job. If text in your document is redundant, you’re a bad writer. In essence, redundant means “too much.” The main definition in the online Merriam-Webster dictionary defines redundant as “exceeding what is necessary or normal.” It would seem that fans of redundancy are a bit excessive…
Yet a parallel definition for redundancy is “serving as a duplicate for preventing failure of an entire system (such as a spacecraft) upon failure of a single component.” This engineering-focused definition is what the Gatik-Isuzu collaboration is all about. If you’re an AV nerd, you know that functional safety essentially requires a no-human-in-the-loop self-driving vehicle to have backup systems for all key components. It is possible for a startup to do this via retrofits, but to scale up redundant componentry must be “deep-integrated” by vehicle manufacturers.
In the initial stage of developing driverless trucks, ADS developers have been testing on public roads with a trained safety driver as a backup, an approach which “checks the box” for redundancy but is only valid for the pre-commercial activity. Much of the news in recent months has focused on factory built Level 4 ready trucking platforms for Class 8 trucks, the big long-haulers. TuSimple has partnered with Navistar, Waymo has partnered with Daimler, while PACCAR
PCAR
This announcement signals the first effort to implement OEM-grade redundancy for a medium duty truck. Narang says that during their development process using medium-duty Ford trucks, they learned a lot about the needs for a fully driverless truck. “The Isuzu platform will have orthogonal actuation systems with redundancies in steering, braking, engine control, wiring harnesses, compute, electrical power — all mission critical stuff.” Crash-imminent braking with a backup perception system will also be built in as an additional safety layer.
A Regulatory Sweet Spot
Gatik has a key advantage over the long-haul ADS trucking developers because the large body of Federal trucking regulations don’t apply to medium duty trucks. The Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration has jurisdiction over all classes of trucks, but only drivers operating Class 7 and 8 trucks are required to have a state-issued Commercial Driver’s License; driver aspects of Federal regulations apply specifically to CDL holders. There’s more to it than that (for instance, aspects relating to Interstate Commerce could apply), but in many ways Class 1-6 trucks follow the same regulations as passenger cars. Isuzu’s regular trucks fully comply with these Federal Motor Vehicle Safety Standards and the modifications to enable the Level 4 Gatik ADS will not be an issue regulatorily.
Federal regulations are silent on automated vehicles. For the initial driverless deployment in Arkansas, Gatik and Walmart worked together with state officials and the legislature to get affirmative legislation passed. Although ADS developers have carried the weight with ADS-related trucking regulation thus far, the end users are going to play a much stronger role going forward. In Gatik’s case, this applies to the states where Walmart plans to deploy, and the same for the Canadian provinces where Loblaw aims to deploy. As shown below, nineteen states now explicitly allow driverless vehicle operations. Since there are no applicable Federal regulations, one could argue that driverless is also permitted in states which are “silent.”
Nineteen states are “AV ready.”
Gatik
Keeping It Simple To Deploy Fast
“We were never about ‘tech’ for its own sake. We identified the easiest path that made economic and business sense,” said Narang. “Our box trucks will run on both highways and streets, hyper-tuned for specific and repeated routes. We will handle traffic lights and respond appropriately to bikes and pedestrians. Gatik vehicles will only operate in the rightmost lane and only make right turns. Initial driverless operations will only be on existing routes where we have very high confidence. The high customer interest we’ve seen is confirmation of the business case.” The company says that, from an operational perspective, this approach has helped them bring a product to market faster and validate its business case quickly.
Fully driverless goods movement may well start with Gatik’s medium duty trucks. Long-haul automated trucking startups have indicated that initial driverless operations could start this year as well, but on a small scale. If the expected return-on-investment is demonstrated, and if the AD systems are running robustly and functioning well in traffic, the medium duty driverless sector could scale very quickly given Gatik’s partnerships with major national retailers.
