Locomotion Video Transcript
George Abernathy
Hello I’m the proud President of Freight Waves, George Abernathy. Welcome to our Fireside Chat during our autonomous and electric vehicle virtual summit. Today’s title is Critical Opportunities on the Path to Full Autonomy. Today joining me in our brief fireside is Çetin Mericli the CEO and co-founder of Locomation. Çetin has done many things in the area of AI and around this very topic that his company that’s celebrating their third anniversary today. Congratulations on that and we’re going to spend just a couple minutes talking about what’s really going on. So let’s jump right into it Çetin. And you know Locomation is solving a really interesting problem in the marketplace, that midpoint, that intersection between human drivers and full automation. What about the market made it so interesting for you to pursue this particular strategy?
Çetin Mericli
It’s an excellent question so ultimately just like all the other companies we are shooting for an autonomous supply chain in the future but in order to get there you need to get to a point where you are make you can make sure that the technology is safe and reliable enough so that we can basically produce it in quantities and let it out in the real world in quantities. And safety is very important, it’s imperative for all of us. Uptime is also very important so you can build a system that is very safe but very unreliable, and uptime is also, you basically don’t have commercial viability. The combining the best of both properties of expert human drivers and machines with their superhuman reaction times today enables us to offer a fully autonomous solution in the form of human-guided convoying years ahead of time and use that solution to actually further perfect and further validate our autonomous technology for larger scale and fully autonomous deployments in the future.
George Abernathy
So let’s talk about the customers and the folks who are utilizing and will utilize this technology. What are some of the commercial impacts and what are some of the actual benefits and values that they’re going to see from Locomations technology so our first product called autonomous relay convoy is a two truck two driver system where two drivers basically can take a conveyor of two trucks on the move almost around the clock, one driving at a given time, and the other one is taking a rest, creating a 30% percent improvement in the operating margins, and effectively getting double the utilization from the existing resources, the same number of trucks, and same number of drivers now can do twice the work and in an environment where capacity is really short.
Çetin Mericli
This is a a game-changer so let me, and having been around the industry for a long time both on the acid and the honest inside I think there’s a difference between platooning and the AV the autonomous vehicle that you’re describing that that am I looking at that correctly for us platooning is just a concept of operations for a period of time. What we are building is a fully autonomous truck from the get go, but initially we will be deploying that fully autonomous truck or leading that auto letting that truck be fully autonomous only as long as it is right behind the human-driven leader track. So that’s why it looks like platooning in the early days but the core technology is fully autonomous and, as I said ,by deploying our system in the form of human-guided common early and at scale we actually will get to get through the validation of the technology for the fully driverless deployments sooner.
George Abernathy
Got it so that that leads me chatting to talk about safety and safety is always at the top of mine around AV. How have customers reacted? And I guess maybe the bridge to that is, you know, it’s almost a year ago now but the exciting announcement around Wilson Logistics and that first truck order you and your team are answering that safety question well because you’re getting these kinds of orders. How are you hearing customers react to how you’re delivering that safety message?
Çetin Mericli
It all starts with knowing how safe is safe enough. What it means to be safe. What are the different aspects of safety, the core technology hardware, what’s going to happen if something goes wrong with the hardware. That’s one part of the safety problem. How are you going to make sure your software is able to handle all the interesting situations and on the road that’s another part of the safety problem. What are the operational elements, how are you training the drivers, how are you doing the inspections, how are you monitoring the system? These are all different parts of the safety problem. So what we are doing is we are being extremely rigorous internally and extremely transparent externally when we are talking to our customers or future prospects. We are walking them through how we are approaching this problem and how we are making sure that one day when we say that okay so this is safe we will have the evidence to prove that it is actually safe against a very well-defined set of criteria.
George Abernathy
So one final question in our wonderful and incredibly informative time that we’ve had. You and I talked briefly, a three year anniversary is a remarkable achievement for a startup, you’ve been around many startups. Three years, congratulations on that. I have to ask what will you be doing to recognize and celebrate at Locomation your three-year anniversary.
Çetin Mericli
We’ve been growing very fast. We tripled our size in the past eight months or so. So today is an incredible opportunity for all of us to be in person back again so everybody is in Pittsburgh today. We are celebrating, we are taking photos, we are throwing parties, and sentimental speeches, and festivities all around. Let me put it that way and it’s not just a day basically everybody flew in for this entire week. So throughout the week we will be using this as an excuse to build the team, spend facetime that we’ve missed over the past year and a half desperately, and celebrate and celebrate. The first two, three years have been incredibly exciting and incredibly, how to say, high momentum and I can only imagine how the next three years will look like.
George Abernathy
Well that’s wonderful, and I know that they’re pulling you away so I’m gonna say Carnegie Mellon has to be extraordinarily proud of so many of the things that they’ve done but with your background there and what your team and you are delivering at Locomation I think it is genuinely a game-changer. And, it’s been my pleasure to have the opportunity to do this fireside chat with you so I’m sure that this interaction with your team folks looking forward to being face to face and being able to do that is going to be a really exciting exciting week. So congratulations for everything and I look forward to doing many more of these as you continue to grow and expand and deliver such an exciting technology to the marketplace.So Çetin Mericli thank you from Locomation for doing this with us today.
Çetin Mericli
Thank you so much. I’m also looking forward to doing many more designs. Thank you so much for the very very kind words.
George Abernathy
Thank you so much and thank you everyone, enjoy the Autonomous and Electric Vehicle Virtual Summit from Freight Waves.We’ve got so much content but thank you to Locomation for giving us the opportunity to talk about what they’re delivering and celebrate their anniversary. Have a great day.
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