At 6 a.m. local time on January 12, a large white truck pulled into the Hyundai Mobis plant in Georgia as dawn broke over the facility. The 35-ton vehicle smoothly navigated to a warehouse and unloaded automotive semi-finished products. Just three days earlier, this truck had departed from the Port of Long Beach, California, crossing the North American continent.
The driver who piloted the truck across America for three days and nights was not a veteran freight hauler. It was an autonomous driving artificial intelligence system. Maas Auto, an autonomous driving system startup founded in 2017, successfully completed an autonomous freight transport project in partnership with Hyundai Mobis, Lotte Global Logistics, and LX Pantos. The 3,379-kilometer journey represents the world's longest single-route autonomous freight transport.
"This US cross-country project goes beyond simply moving large freight with an autonomous truck," Maas Auto CEO Park Il-soo told The Seoul Economic Daily on January 15. "While our competitors in autonomous trucking are content with single-state routes, we proved that Maas Auto can achieve autonomous driving at the 3,000-kilometer scale."
From 10 Million Kilometers of Road Learning to Crossing America