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Anheuser-Busch and San Francisco-based Otto have completed the world's first commercial shipment by self-driving truck, sending a beer-filled tractor-trailer on a journey of more than 120 miles along Interstate 25 in Colorado.
The trailer, loaded with 50,000 cans of Budweiser beer, began the self-driving trip early last Thursday morning at a weigh station in Fort Collins, Colorado, and ran from Fort Collins through Denver and on to Colorado Springs.
Here's how Wired, whose report features a cool three-minute video, describes the start of the trip:
The drive was as mundane as the beer in the trailer. At 12:30 a.m., after leaving the brewery in Fort Collins and merging onto Interstate 25, an Otto driver punched a switch labeled “engage,” and, once sure autonomous mode had, in fact, engaged, climbed out of his seat. He buckled the safety belt behind him, to keep the warning chime from driving him crazy as the truck trundled 120 miles south to Colorado Springs.
Uber purchased Otto, which has developed a system that makes standard semis capable of operating autonomously, for $680 million in August.