No Driver? No Problem. Building Autonomous EV Systems
Electric Vehicles
Speaker 1: Seeing a driverless electric truck navigate a maze of fine China is great, but building the infrastructure for autonomous electric trucks to start being more widely used requires something more. That more is exactly what a company called ENR is focused on. In addition to developing its own vehicles, the company is also creating the support system for autonomous electric shipping. We spoke to the company's c e o to learn all about it. Let's check it out. [00:00:30] En Ride is a Swedish transportation company, which already has its cableless electric autonomous vehicles operating on public roads, including some in the us and it claims to be the first company to have achieved that milestone.
Speaker 2: Most people are focusing on building the best electric truck or the best autonomous technology for us. It's what we can do with those technologies. We work with autonomous, uh, sub providers. We work with, uh, battery manufacturers, but what we do is to design and develop the entire transport system.
Speaker 1: En ride [00:01:00] breaks down its transportation projects into systems called grids. Each grid comprises all the hardware, software drivers and charging infrastructure required to make transportation run smoothly. En ride's latest autonomous vehicle is their Gen two, which utilizes LIDAR cameras and satellites to navigate. They're already driving in enclosed areas on preset routes with the potential to include public roads in their route in the future. The Gen two also noticeably, doesn't have any [00:01:30] cab for a driver to sit in. Instead, en Ride has created a remote operator station where someone could potentially supervise multiple autonomous vehicles at a time. If a truck needs support, it will notify the operator who has the ability to provide instructions that the truck will execute. However, autonomous vehicles may not be right for every situation.
Speaker 2: We don't apply autonomous everywhere. We do manual electric and as well as autonomous electric as part of our solutions.
Speaker 1: One thing all electric vehicles need, [00:02:00] whether autonomous or not, is charging, and that's where the en Ride station comes in. The company announced last November that it's building a charging station in California, which will become the heart of its grid in the Port of Los Angeles and en ride's first charging station in the us. It's planned to open sometime this year.
Speaker 2: We have been scaling commercial applications in our transport capacity game since 2020. We are starting to get fairly big applications now, so [00:02:30] we are applying hundreds of vehicles in, uh, this year. Overall, it's a scaling game from here.
Speaker 1: N Ride's website claims an average reduction of 95% CO2 equivalent when switching from diesel. CO2 equivalent is basically just a metric that includes other greenhouse gases such as methane by converting their warming potential into the equivalent amount of carbon dioxide. Enri hopes that by combining the economic benefits of autonomous driving with electric trucking, it can make a compelling business case for companies [00:03:00] to want to move their logistics to n rides, grids.
Speaker 2: Autonomous, electric and digital is the future, and I mean, 30 40% of the global transport industry should be, uh, deployed with that technology, driven by the business case. So think we're at the core. What we have here is the business case for the future.
Speaker 1: As always, thanks so much for watching. I'm your host, Jesse Orl. See you next time with the fan.
