World premiere: Daimler’s autonomous truck driven on public roads

Oct. 1, 2015

Daimler Trucks is pushing autonomous driving for trucks further. Early Friday morning, the first worldwide autonomously driving series production truck, the Freightliner Inspiration Truck, will begin its maiden voyage on a European highway.

The maiden voyage of the truck’s trip will be live-streamed from the rest area on Denkendorf/Autobahn A8. You can watch the live stream, which takes place at 4 a.m. Eastern time, right here.

Winfried Kretschmann, Prime Minister of the Federal State of Baden-Württemberg, and Wolfgang Bernhard, member of the Board of Management of Daimler AG responsible for Daimler Trucks & Buses, are carrying out the tour.

Last month in Las Vegas, Freightliner introduced driver training and certification for its Inspiration Truck. Jim Martin, manager of Freightliner’s vehicle performance group and the trainer/tester for the event, explained the basics of the Highway Pilot (HWP) system and the skills “checklist” that is required for certification. The assessment process was developed for CDL holders by Freightliner and the Nevada Dept. of Transportation.

Going forward, the focus at Freightliner is “interactive safety,” which will pull together these technologies and coming vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) and vehicle-to-infrastructure (V2I) communication, along with “big data,” to create an even more interconnected transportation network.

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