Automotive News Europe — 2025-01-09
Automotive Industry
Volvo Group is building a technology ecosystem that will rely on zero-emission vehicles to fight climate change and on autonomous trucks to increase the efficiency of goods delivery.
Pollution from supply and distribution chains accounts for almost 87% of emissions produced by big companies, which demonstrates how technology improvements in freight and logistics can help fight climate change, Martin Lundstedt, Volvo Group CEO, said at a keynote address at the CES technology conference in Las Vegas on 8 January 2025.
Volvo Group, which is separate from Volvo Cars, has a lineup of electric trucks already in production and expects “most vehicles” will have either battery-electric or hydrogen fuel cell electric powertrains by 2040, said Lars Stenqvist, Volvo Group’s chief technology officer. The Swedish company also is investing in combustion engines that can use hydrogen and renewable fuels.
The company owns the Mack and Volvo truck brands in the US.
Autonomous trucking key for transportation efficiency
Autonomous driving also will play a part in increasing transportation efficiency, Volvo executives said during the wide-ranging presentation.
“Autonomous transport is about transforming how goods move across vast distances with greater efficiency and safety,” Stenqvist said.
About 70% of goods — by value — move via truck in the US, according to the federal government.
Volvo estimates that creating a southern tier of freight routes from Southern California to Florida would create an annual $42 bn market for autonomous trucking. It is working with Aurora Innovation to test autonomous freight hauling in Texas, using safety drivers for now but with plans to pull the humans from the cabs this year.
To that end, the company has developed the VNL Autonomous, a long-haul truck packed with redundant systems as safety precautions, Stenqvist said.
It has “six key redundancy systems: dual braking, steering, communication, computing power, energy storage and motion control. We have even duplicated critical lights and hazard signals,” Stenqvist said.
Many of those redundancies have been developed alongside Aurora.
Such collaborations are essential and represent seven years of work that has led to commercialization in the near term, said Aurora co-founder Sterling Anderson.
“If you’re a customer, you’re not going to buy from a pip-squeak customer like Aurora,” he said. “You’re going to buy from an OEM that stands behind its product and has for 100 years.”
Aurora expects to grow autonomous trucking slowly
Aurora intends to begin autonomous freight service along the Interstate 45 corridor between Dallas and Houston by the end of April. The company has about 30 trucks in its Texas fleet, Anderson said. Aurora plans to take a steady path toward scaling its self-driving truck service.
“Our expectation is we’ll continue to grow slowly, and gradually we’ll expand across a couple of additional routes,” he said. But “ultimately, we expect this will be a very large-scale opportunity.”
Along those lines, Nvidia announced earlier at CES that Aurora and its manufacturing partner Continental will deploy Nvidia computing and artificial intelligence. They announced a long-term strategic partnership to deploy driverless truck systems at scale with Nvidia’s technology. Continental, which showcased Volvo’s truck at its CES display, will start to produce the system in 2027, they said.