Uber's Self-Driving Truck Delivers 50,000 Beers

[Narrator] No, this isn't a runaway truck.

And no, it's not an outtake from the action movie Speed.

This is a conventional 18-wheeler that drives itself

thanks to a $30,000 retrofit.

San Fransisco startup, OTTO which Uber bought this summer,

made history with this truck.

It completed the world's first truck autonomous delivery

carrying 50,000 cans of Budweiser from a brewery

in Fort Collins, Colorado to

Colorado Springs 120 miles away.

The human drove the truck onto the highway,

flipped on self-driving mode,

and spent the next two hours of interstate

chilling in the back seat.

Autonomous cars may get all the buzz

but teaching trucks to drive themselves could deliver

major economic and safety benefits.

With 3 million drivers in the U.S., trucks carry

70% of American freight.

But there still aren't nearly enough human drivers

to do the job, most new drivers quit within a year

and because you people can't stop buying stuff online,

demand is only going to go up and that shortage

will just get worse.

And roughly 400,000 trucks crash every year

killing about 4,000 people and

costing the economy billions of dollars.

Human error is nearly always to blame.

OTTO says the solution is a robot that doesn't get tired,

angry, drunk or distracted

So we were able perceive everything,

we're able to act faster,

and as a result we are able make this truck driver

monitoring system and the act of driving much safer.

To take a conventional truck and

turn it into a self-driving big rig,

OTTO's got to add four key ingredients.

One is up top, that's a forward facing camera.

This is one of three LIDAR detection systems

that see the world with lasers, much the way RADAR works.

Speaking of RADAR you've got one of those too,

this guy right here looks hundreds of yards out ahead.

The fourth key ingredient to making this truck drive itself

is giving it really good understanding of the world

and that means detailed maps.

And once it's got that, it can combine it

with the information from the camera,

the LIDARs and the RADAR that give it a

real-time perception of the world.

All of that together makes it capable of understanding

what's going on around it, and how to act accordingly.

Later that morning, I climbed into the truck

for a ride down Interstate 25, to see how it works.

You guys ready?

[Narrator] And it performed flawlessly.

OTTO's not the only player here.

Diamler and Volvo are testing their own autonomous semis.

And the folks who need trucks to move their stuff

are already interested.

And if you look at transportation, we think

the self-driving technology is going to improve safety,

reduce emissions, and improve operational efficiencies

of our shipments.

But before OTTO can cash in on the

benefits of robo-trucking, it has to make sure it's system

will handle anything that can happen on the highway:

construction, bad weather, cars spinning out.

And over the next couple of years, we'll continue

to develop the technology so it's actually ready

to encounter every condition in the world.

[Narrator] Ultimately, the answer will be to remove

the human from the cab altogether.

And that means losing jobs.

The driver will remain a necessary part of this system

at least for the foreseeable future, but with all that

extra time to relax on the road, maybe they can knock out

a novel or two, or at least catch up on some sleep.