Latest news with #LiorRon
Forbes
02-05-2025
- Automotive
- Forbes
The Beginning Of The Self-Driving Freight Revolution
Aurora Technology announced it had successfully launched its commercial self-driving trucking ... More service On Thursday, Aurora Innovation, Inc. (NASDAQ: AUR) announced it had successfully launched its commercial self-driving trucking service on the Dallas/Houston lane. To date, the Aurora has completed over 1,200 miles without a driver. Aurora is the first company to operate a commercial self-driving service with heavy-duty trucks on public roads. Aurora's flagship product is called Aurora Driver. This is an SAE Level 4 self-driving system. SAE Levels of Driving Automation is the industry's taxonomy for driving automation. SAE Level 4 means that a driver is not required. Level 5, the highest level, means that autonomous driving can occur in all weather and driving conditions. In the second half of 2025, the company is focused on expanding its product capabilities to include validated night driving and rainy conditions. Achieving autonomous night driving will significantly improve the ROI of this solution. Traditional trucking is subject to hours of service rules. These rules limit drivers to at most 11 hours of driving at a time. Asset utilization is a core value proposition. Aurora also plans to expand its driverless service to include the El Paso to Phoenix lane by the end of 2025. Unlocking longer lanes across the Sun Belt will be critical for Aurora to increase truck utilization and thus it will be a key driver for the company's near-term top-line growth. Aurora's launch customers are Uber Freight and Hirschbach Motor Lines. Uber Freight is a leading provider of managed transportation services, while Hirschbach is a carrier focused on time- and temperature-sensitive freight deliveries. Both companies have had long-standing supervised commercial pilots with Aurora. 'When Uber Freight and Aurora came together more than four years ago, we set out to transform the future of logistics—and today, that future is here,' said Lior Ron, Founder and CEO of Uber Freight. "Moving autonomous commercial freight without anyone behind the wheel is a historic step forward in our mission to build a smarter and more efficient supply chain, and one we're proud to lead alongside Aurora.' 'Aurora's transparent, safety-focused approach to delivering autonomous technology has always given me confidence they're doing this the right way,' said Richard Stocking, CEO of Hirschbach Motor Lines. 'Transforming an old school industry like trucking is never easy, but we can't ignore the safety and efficiency benefits this technology can deliver. Autonomous trucks aren't just going to help grow our business – they're also going to give our drivers better lives by handling the lengthier and less desirable routes.' Prior to driverless operations, Aurora closed its safety case. The company assembled evidence showing its product is acceptably safe for public roads. 'Safety cases are an essential tool for any company deploying autonomous vehicle technology as they promote transparency and build trust with regulators and the public,' the company said. The company also released a Driverless Safety Report. This report includes details about the Aurora Driver's operating domain for initial operations, along with Aurora's approach to cybersecurity, remote assistance, and other safety-critical topics. The Aurora Driver is equipped with sensors that can see beyond the length of four football fields. In over four years of supervised pilot hauls, the Aurora Driver has delivered over 10,000 customer loads across three million autonomous miles. Its capabilities include predicting red light runners, avoiding collisions, and detecting pedestrians in the dark hundreds of meters away. Aurora's approach to AI blends learning models with guardrails to help ensure the rules of the road are followed, like yielding for emergency vehicles. Aurora's AI also played a critical role in enabling Aurora to close its driverless safety case. The AI was designed to enable the company to examine and validate the Aurora Driver's decision-making. Aurora's launch trucks have the Aurora Driver hardware kit and redundant systems. Those systems include braking, steering, power, sensing, controls, computing, cooling, and communication. Aurora validated and approved the truck platform for driverless operations on public roads. In September of last year, interviewed the CEO of Torc, a competitor to Aurora. Peter Schmidt told that Torc believes they will launch fully self-driving freight shipments in 2027. But Mr. Schmidt's larger point was that getting a handful of AV trucks on the road was not good enough. The real question was how soon you could release autonomous trucks at scale. The 2027 date Torc is shooting for is a date they believe they can also put trucks on the road at scale. To do this, the trucks don't just have to be safe and reliable; they must be cost-efficient and easy to buy and service at dealerships. Daimler Truck will provide the intellectual capital to do high-volume manufacturing and has a dealer network in place. Aurora also believes working with manufacturing partners is the only way to deploy self-driving trucks at scale. The company contends that they continue to progress with their partners on building a driverless platform that will support high-volume production. Continental Hardware is their strategic manufacturing partner for the Aurora Driver hardware kit. Continental ships these kits to Aurora's OEM partners – Volvo Trucks and PACCAR. Combined, Volvo Trucks and PACCAR garner roughly half the market share among U.S. Class 8 truck OEMs.
Yahoo
29-04-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
Uber Freight CEO vows focus on growing opportunities for carriers
ATLANTA — In a freight market still finding its footing after years of disruption, Uber Freight's 2025 Carrier Summit offered optimism backed by action. CEO Lior Ron addressed a packed room with an update on the company's promises, showing how data, AI and partnerships are shaping how Uber Freight is positioning its carriers to thrive this year. 'At the end of the day,' Ron emphasized, 'it's about growth and giving [carriers] opportunities.' Toward that end, Uber Freight has seen growth across 3PL and 4PL divisions and announced a managed freight volume north of $20 billion. Even in a sluggish freight market, the company is providing more freight opportunities to carriers and using its scale to buffer against market headwinds. A cornerstone of that growth has been Uber Freight's relentless focus on data and technology. Ron outlined to FreightWaves how Uber Freight has slashed TMS integration times from nine months to just weeks, reducing friction for shippers and, by extension, providing easier access to freight for carriers. With platforms like Uber Freight Exchange now fully operational, carriers can access contract, spot and mini-bid freight opportunities in one Ron didn't stop at data. AI was a dominant theme throughout his opening remarks. Uber Freight's use of generative AI, particularly through large language models, has allowed for over 90% accurate natural language queries on TMS data for faster decision-making. Predictive analytics and automated recommendations have tightened bid cycles and created real-time network optimization, offering shippers daily opportunities to reduce costs and improve service, while offering connected carriers more loads faster. Ron stressed that both shippers and carriers now operate in a 'daily opportunity environment,' where fine-tuning operations even 1% every day could deliver outsize results. For carriers willing to invest in digital connectivity and strong service, the path to success is much clearer. Beyond core freight operations, Uber Freight showcased its commitment to multimodal logistics. Significant expansion has been made across LTL, reefer, cross-border and intermodal services. The company has seen 34% year-over-year growth in intermodal, 11% growth in full truckload and more than 50% growth in reefer loads. Ron also teased Uber Freight's increasing role in the last-mile delivery ecosystem, connecting truckload and middle-mile operations with Uber's network of 8 million drivers to power new package delivery highlight was Uber Freight's continued investment in sustainability and autonomy. While adoption of electric vehicles has slowed, Uber Freight remains committed, supporting early EV adopters with charging partnerships and optimized route planning. Meanwhile, autonomous trucking, including partnerships with companies like Aurora, Waabi, Torc Robotics and Volvo, is moving faster than many anticipated. Uber Freight expects the first commercial no-driver-in-cab operations to launch between Dallas and Houston as early as mid-2025, with a full production ramp-up targeted for 2027. But in addition to technology and innovation, Ron returned again and again to the importance of trust, relationship-building and collaboration. 'At the end of the day, these carriers are our most important partners,' he said. 'The economy runs on them.' Face-to-face meetings, he argued, are essential for building the strong human connections that underpin technological partnerships. Feedback from Uber Freight's carrier partners reinforced that message. Mark Watson, vice president of corporate accounts and transportation intermediaries at Estes Express Lines, thanked Uber Freight for helping drive innovation across the LTL space. Speaking to the historic fragmentation of LTL freight, Watson commended Uber Freight's push for standardization through electronic bills of lading and simple API integrations. 'We want to lead the space in using [eBOLs], so by working with folks like Uber Freight, we can get those direct APIs to use eBOLs, which creates this seamless user interface. We do a really good job of managing our accounts, [Uber Freight] does a really good job on their end, and the customer is really happy,' Watson told FreightWaves. Marty Freeman, CEO of Old Dominion Freight Line, echoed those sentiments in a video address, describing Uber Freight as a 'trusted partner' and highlighting how technology adoption between their teams has improved communications and Wall, national account executive at DB Schenker, shared his experiences as well, emphasizing how Uber Freight's investment in tools like the Uber Freight Spot Exchange and seamless support from the carrier management team had made a real impact. 'By combining our assets with their software technology, we're able to offer peace of mind to customers. With tools like Uber Freight Spot Exchange, we can flex and fill same-day needs beyond our contracted lanes. DB Schenker is excited for what's ahead and grateful for the partnership we've built with Uber Freight,' said Wall in a video presentation. The Carrier Summit made it abundantly clear that in an industry still grappling with economic uncertainty, digitization and a looming autonomous future, Uber Freight is zeroing in on opportunity, efficiency and collaboration. 'The marketplace is demanding safer, faster, more reliable execution. And we're building the technology and partnerships that make that a reality,' said Ron. Articles by Grace Sharkey Industry unites for Freight Fraud Symposium in Dallas C.H. Robinson delivers on AI, but investors still skeptical Landstar anticipates fraud-related earnings hit The post Uber Freight CEO vows focus on growing opportunities for carriers appeared first on FreightWaves.
Yahoo
10-04-2025
- Automotive
- Yahoo
How Uber Freight is leveraging AI to make truck routes more efficient
Trucking industry leaders want to minimize empty-trailer trips to improve costs and efficiency. Uber Freight is using AI on its platform to provide trucking companies with more optimized routes. This article is part of "How AI Is Changing Everything: Supply Chain," a series on innovations in logistics. Moving air has become a nuisance for the trucking industry in recent years. A recent industry report estimated that at any given moment, roughly 35% of all trucks on US freeways were empty of goods. For example, a truck driver might secure a load to haul from Long Beach, California, to Chicago, but once they drop off the load, they'll head home with a trailer full of, well, nothing but air. This problem isn't just about inefficiency but also cost. Wasted time and fuel mean extra expenses for shippers, which eventually leads to higher prices for consumers. The issue is also related to sustainability: Additional carbon emissions and inevitable road congestion undoubtedly affect our environment. Uber Freight — a business unit of Uber Technologies — has set out to solve this problem and do it almost exclusively with artificial intelligence. It works a lot like the Uber app does on a smartphone. With the Uber app, riders are the users and request transport from all available drivers. With Uber Freight, truckers and trucking companies are the users and they can use it to line up different loads so their trucks aren't running empty for more than a few hundred miles a day. This way, instead of going from Long Beach to Chicago and back, a truck might bring new loads from Chicago to New Orleans, New Orleans to Houston, and Houston to Phoenix before heading home. The technology behind this platform uses AI to optimize shipping routes, Uber Freight CEO Lior Ron told Business Insider. He said that this technology could cut a truck's empty rate to as low as 10%. "The ultimate goal is to make every mile of a trip a paid mile and make it worth everybody's while that these guys are out there making deliveries," Ron said. "We can't achieve that yet, but we sure can come a lot closer." Since the trucking-specific Uber Freight platform launched in 2023, it has used machine learning to pioneer an algorithm that ensures carriers receive up-front guaranteed pricing for trucking and freight. This algorithm has been used by thousands of companies, including 200 of the Fortune 500s, Ron said. He added that the system had moved more than $20 billion in freight. "By looking at hundreds of parameters, we've been able to make the model accurate enough that it has removed all the friction and back-and-forths of trying to estimate the price of trucking," Ron said. Those parameters include weather and traffic conditions and road closures. Uber Freight is also using machine learning to address vehicle routing, a complex issue that involves determining the most efficient route for a vehicle to deliver goods to a set of locations. Here, the issue is not so much avoiding traffic as routing trucks so that their trailers are full more often than not. By algorithmically designing the optimal route for the truck driver, the company has been able to reduce empty miles by between 10% and 15%, Ron said. This benefits vendors, trucking companies, drivers, and consumers since lower transport costs typically translate to lower product costs. Freddie Jimenez, the owner of F&J Logistics Inc. in Kansas City, Missouri, said that Uber Freight makes it easier for him to plan his day, find loads that fit his schedule, and keep his wheels moving. "As a driver, the most important thing is staying on the move. I am not wasting hours waiting or worrying about where the next load is coming from," Jimenez told BI. Uber Freight's technology is part of a broader push among logistics companies to use AI to gain a competitive advantage, said Jose Reyes, a senior director and analyst for Gartner's supply chain division. "AI systems can analyze weather, traffic, and road conditions to suggest optimal routes in real-time," Reyes told BI in an email. "This is a tremendous benefit in not only efficiency but with driver safety, load planning, and dispatching. This application of AI can significantly reduce manual work." Chris Caplice, the executive director of the MIT Center for Transportation and Logistics, hosted a webinar on AI in logistics with Ron late last year. There, Caplice said Uber Freight's technology is an example of innovations in the trucking industry. "By being trained continuously, the models will learn better routing policies automatically; if a policy shifts, for example, the model will pick up on it, eliminating the need for specialty algorithms," Caplice said during the event. He added: "AI models generalize well to solve previously unseen problems such as vehicle capacities." Uber Freight is also deploying agentic AI to improve efficiency. This flavor of AI hinges on the ability to use human language to mimic human interactions. Uber Freight deploys the technology in a customer support center and uses it as the first line of defense against complaints. Ron said that by dispatching canned messages to certain inquiries, the company expected to reduce its waiting time to 30 seconds from five minutes. These shortened wait times can help with efficiency by minimizing the time drivers spend dealing with customer service for simple tasks, like receiving a link on their smartphone or a document. Read the original article on Business Insider
