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General Motors' subsidiary, BrightDrop, will offer self-driving electric commercial delivery vehicles in the future.

During a webcast presentation at the Evercore ISI 2ndAnnual Technology Conference on Thursday, BrightDrop CEO Travis Katz said the company is "actively" looking at how to apply autonomous driving technology to its commercial trucks.

But BrightDrop spokesman Daniel Roberts said Friday the company has no immediate plans to offer self-driving vehicles.

"We can say with certainty that autonomy is going to play a huge role in commercial delivery," Katz said. "There is no need to have humans driving vehicles in all of these routes. One of the benefits of being General Motors, is we have our sister company Cruise, which is one of the leaders, if not the leader, in autonomous systems."

Katz said BrightDrop's EVs can save a fleet $10,000 to $12,000 of cost per vehicle each year. Also, some say that eliminating the driver could result in greater cost savings.

"There really arent enough drivers to do the work and itsnot a super glamorous job," Katz said. "Its a hard job.

In June, the GM-owned Cruise became the first companytoruna commercial taxi service ofself-driving cars in a major city San Francisco, where it is based, Katz said

BrightDrop, which GM started in early 2021, offers two commercial electric delivery vehiclesthe Zevo 600, which resembles the big brown UPS-style truck, and a smaller EV410 midsize truck. They will be built at GM's CAMI Assembly plant in Ingersol, Canada, which opens in the fourth quarter. Katz said it expects to be making 50,000 trucks a year there starting in 2025 and bring in "a lot of revenue."

"Were lining up customers. Were hiring like crazy across all fronts, support, software development, engineering we see big growth ahead," Katz said. "We feel pretty good about the supply chain heading into next year. We have a lot of people managing this and weve worked through the hardest moments. Were not seeing anything on the horizon thats scaring us.

Katz said he did not have specific news to share yet on self-driving technology, but he said that Cruise has been testing autonomous delivery vehicles with Walmart. It has been using the Cruise Origin, which is the self-driving vehicle that Factory Zero in Detroit and Hamtramck will make.

There are a lot of challenges to still be solved, Katz said. The last 100 feet, you cant just have an autonomous vehicle pull up, you have to figure out how does the vehicle get to the end? We have e-carts and things like this and software to help design a solution.

But he said commercial self-driving vehicles will be "huge" and "were better positioned than anyone else in the industry to go after it.

Besides the delivery trucks, BrightDrop also offers technological solutions for the delivery industry such as a propulsion-assistedelectric pallet to move goods over short distances, includingfrom the delivery truck to a front door. It also offersmobile asset management for thepallet to allow forlocation monitoring, battery status and otherremote commands.

BrightDrop currently has FedEx, Merchants Fleet and Walmart as its biggest clients. Its biggest truck, the Zevo 600, made the Guinness World Records in April when driver Stephen Marlin achieved the recordfor the greatest distance traveled by an electric van on a single charge. He drove a Zevo 600 that's part of FedEx's fleet from New York City to Washington, D.C., a trip of nearly 260 miles.

Contact Jamie L. LaReau: jlareau@freepress.com. Follow her on Twitter@jlareauan. Read more onGeneral Motorsand sign up for ourautos newsletter.Become a subscriber.

Excerpt from:
GM's BrightDrop looks to self-driving delivery trucks in the future - Detroit Free Press