Mars Auto, an autonomous trucking startup, said Wednesday it has expanded its transcontinental autonomous freight route in the U.S. into a round-trip operation in partnership with LX Pantos, a global integrated logistics company. The two companies structured the round-trip route to carry Hyundai Mobis automotive parts on the westbound-to-eastbound leg and building materials from a Korean manufacturer on the eastbound-to-westbound return leg. The move expands a "Team Korea"-based long-distance autonomous freight transport project that Korean startups, large corporations, and the government have pursued together to a new stage. Through the partnership, Mars Auto and LX Pantos extended their transcontinental autonomous freight route from about 3,500 km one-way to more than 7,000 km round-trip. As the previously one-way route, already the world's longest fixed route, has been expanded to a round trip, the record for the world's longest autonomous transport route has been broken once again. The key to this expansion is securing "return cargo" to improve the deadhead, or empty-mile, rate. The current average empty-mile rate in the U.S. freight transport industry is about 16.7 percent. By linking eastbound return cargo, the two companies lowered the empty-mile rate to about 5 percent. This is about one-third of the U.S. industry average. Mars Auto operates its long-distance freight route based on "Mars Pilot," a camera-based Vision E2E artificial intelligence (AI) autonomous driving system. Through Tesla-style autonomous driving AI that uses no lidar or high-definition maps, the company is implementing autonomous driving technology that is scalable across various road environments. On this basis, it has accumulated more than 20 million km of driving data at home and abroad. In November last year, Mars Auto was selected for the Ministry of Trade, Industry and Energy's 18.2 billion won strategic project to develop unmanned autonomous driving commercialization technology for heavy-truck freight transport. More recently,