Waymo Via, the Alphabet-owned autonomous vehicle company, has revealed further progress as it gets closer towards a finished product.
The company is planning to build a hub for its autonomous semi-trailer trucks on a nine-acre site near Dallas-Fort Worth, Texas. It also said it is partnering with rental truck company Ryder on fleet management as it looks to grow the delivery and logistics portion of its business.
Rocky Garff, Head of Trucking Operations, wrote in a blog post: “These past few months have been busy for Waymo Via. We’ve been ramping up our testing to help advance our fifth-generation Waymo Driver on Class 8 trucks, hauling freight for carriers’ top customers, and continuing our ongoing work with Daimler Trucks to develop a robust L4 redundant vehicle platform.
“To help support all these initiatives, we’re scaling up our operations across Texas, Arizona, and California, and we’re sharing a few exciting updates on our progress.
“We’re building a dedicated trucking hub in the Dallas-Fort Worth area as we grow our footprint in Texas and continue driving across I-10, I-20, and I-45.”
Located in South Dallas, the 9-acre hub will be built from the ground up uniquely for Waymo Via and its autonomous driving operations. It will be the primary operations centre in Texas designed for commercial use with its carrier partners and will be able to accommodate hundreds of trucks and personnel in an area where it is expected to carry out increasingly large and complex testing needs on its route to fully autonomous operations.
The hub will not only bolster Waymo’s operations in Texas, but is also well-suited to support long haul routes across the Southwest and connect with its Phoenix operations center.
Talking on the Ryder partnership, Garff commented: “As we expand our autonomous trucking operations in Dallas and beyond, we’ve partnered with Ryder for fleet management services, including fleet maintenance, inspections, and roadside assistance, across all of our Waymo Via hubs and testing sites. Ryder brings nearly 90 years of fleet management experience and has a national network of 500+ facilities that will offer access to standardised fleet maintenance across one network and enable us to scale efficiently.”
The two companies will partner on servicing and evolving maintenance practices for autonomously driven trucks across Waymo Via sites in Texas, Arizona, California, Michigan, and Ohio, as well as roadside service between hubs.
“While this partnership initially focuses on fleet maintenance, we see many opportunities to collaborate on autonomous trucking operations in order to successfully deploy these trucks at scale,” says Karen Jones, chief marketing officer and head of new product development, Ryder.
“Already, we’ve collaborated on the layout and design of Waymo’s new Dallas facility to ensure it’s optimised for serviceability of trucks and for the transfer hub model they plan to pursue in the near future. Autonomous Class 8 technology is quickly taking hold, and Ryder is poised to become a leader – not only in servicing trucks but also in managing the unique logistics of autonomous operations.”
