Germany Puts Its First Driverless Truck to Work

That would just be an Einride autonomous truck delivering groceries to a freundlich neighborhood grocery store.

The deployment marks another step toward commercial deployment of driverless freight vehicles, a move already seen across both Europe and the US.

The news is significant because Germany is Europe’s largest road freight market and has some of the continent’s strictest safety regulations governing autonomous vehicles.

Unlike many autonomous trucking demos that remain geofenced to test routes or industrial sites, the Einride truck is used in Lidl’s day-to-day logistics operation.

“Intelligence creates efficiency, and that is the backbone for permanently reliable product availability,” said Thomas Dangelmayer, head of operational logistics at Lidl in Germany.