Einride’s drone truck has its first full-time job moving GE appliances around

The Swedish autonomous trucking company Einride is using its cab-less electric delivery vehicles in Selmer, Tennessee, to move items from GE Appliances’ manufacturing plant to a warehouse. This operation can run up to seven shuttles per day, Monday through Thursday, the press release states. In an email to The Verge, a PR representative for Einride, Matthew Klein, wrote that the distance for each trip is 0.3 miles (or 0.48km) and is all on private roads owned by GE.

Einride first ran controlled operations at GE’s Appliance Park headquarters in 2021. Later, the company moved on to a public road test with National Highway Traffic Safety Administration approval in 2022, the “first public road pilot in the US for a purpose built autonomous, electric truck without a driver on board.”

In a statement, GE Appliances’ senior director of central materials, Harry Chase, claims the truck increases safety by reducing traffic and eliminates some tasks since workers don’t have to hook and unhook trailers. These trucks are part of a larger project “to create an automated logistics flow,” with AI cameras that automatically trigger the doors at the dock as well as a Slip robot that autonomously loads and unloads the vehicle.

Since Einride’s truck does not use a human driver, its technology is considered Level 4 autonomous. In 2017, the company revealed its first T-Pod design that maximized interior space since there was no need for seats or a steering wheel. Einride then showed off a more powerful prototype called the T-Log in 2018, which led to the 2020 design, dubbed the Autonomous Electric Transport (AET).