The US Postal Service recently awarded TuSimple self-driving trucks the contract to haul mail and packages from the USPS trailers to different areas in the US.
The autonomous trucks are on a two-week pilot with the firm’s vehicles making five round trips, according to Freightwaves. The trips will cover around 1,000 miles between the postal service distribution centers in Dallas, Texas and Phoenix, Arizona. During the pilot run, each self-driving truck will run for 22 hours, which includes overnight driving along highways.
During the two-week pilot run, an engineer will be on the passenger seat, and a safety driving will sit behind the wheel get involved if necessary.
TuSimple recently raised around $178 million through private financing. This includes financing coming from Chinese online media Sina Corporation and from the popular chipmaker, Nvidia Corporation.