AI Kinetics’ founder discusses challenges, timeline for autonomous trucks

Price says early adopters of AV technology will ‘scale fairly quickly’

FreightWaves’ Grace Sharkey spoke with Chuck Price, founder of AI Kinetics, at the F3: Future of Freight Festival about the future of autonomous trucks. (Photo Credit: Jim Allen/FreightWaves

This fireside chat recap is from Day 3 of FreightWaves’ F3: Future of Freight Festival live event in Chattanooga, Tennessee. For more information on the event, click here.

FIRESIDE CHAT TOPIC: Commercializing truck autonomy into the logistics ecosystem

DETAILS: FreightWaves’ Grace Sharkey spoke with Chuck Price, founder of AI Kinetics, at the F3: Future of Freight Festival about the future of autonomous trucks and what infrastructure is needed before we can expect to see driverless vehicles on the nation’s highways.

SPEAKER: Chuck Price, founder of AI Kinetics 

BIO: Prior to founding AI Kinetics, Price served as the chief product officer of TuSimple for four years, leading all aspects of product definition, partner ecosystem development, field operations and safety.

KEY QUOTES FROM PRICE: 

“We have reached an inflection point. I think it’s safe to say the science is done. We’re now at a point where we’re engineering to a commercial solution. And within, let’s say, three years, we believe we’ll start seeing scale.”

“OEMs are actively building the vehicle, the base vehicle systems and redundant chassis. These sorts of things that are required to make this a reality in production. They are engineering their factories to build these vehicles at scale.”

“I believe we’re going to see early adopters that will scale fairly quickly. It will be a regional growth. I think most of the technology players are focusing on the Sunbelt. So the I-10 corridor, then moving up from there. So full-scale or nationwide use could be in 10 years, but the early adopters are going to have trucks on the road much sooner than that and it will be in pretty surprising numbers.”

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Clarissa Hawes

Clarissa has covered all aspects of the trucking industry for 18 years. She is an award-winning journalist known for her investigative and business reporting. Before joining FreightWaves, she wrote for Land Line Magazine and Trucks.com. If you have a news tip or story idea, send her an email to chawes@firecrown.com or @cage_writer on X, formerly Twitter.