Hi Everyone. Welcome to our webinar, Is Automated Trucking and Tethering a Key Solution to Emissions Reduction? I’m Michelle Demers Founder and CEO of Boundless Impact Research and Analytics. We have a great lineup of speakers and a very engaging topic to discuss today. I’m going to tell you briefly about our work here at Boundless, you want to just go back a slide, and then introduce our first speaker.
First, a couple of housekeeping items if you’d like to ask a question during this webinar we have a Q&A portion at the end. You want to do so by typing it into the webinar control panel on the right-hand side of your page. This window can be expanded for better viewing and we’ll be reading these questions after our speakers have presented. Also, keep an eye out for our next webinar on fungi-based meat substitutes which will take place on January 20th at 11 am. Registration is already happening on our website so you can go and take a look there next.
Boundless is an industry research and impact analytics firm that provides quantitative evidence-based information for investors, companies, and funds, And, the fastest-growing arm of our business is doing environmental impact assessments on specific products and technologies in the cleantech space. We’re unique because we’re backed by science. We base our methodology and life cycle assessment, it’s very science-based. We carefully select relevant metrics and industry benchmarks for every industry vertical. We analyze and we have industry experts that validate the data of the companies we’ve assessed.
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Next slide, a lot of noise exists in the ESG space and unfortunately, too many of the ways that companies are scored and analyzed are based on self-reported and unverified data. And, studies have shown that ESG ratings tend to disproportionately favor large and mega-cap companies. And they’re unfortunately biased against smaller companies. and also GHG emissions that are reported are usually just limited to a company’s central operation without accounting for some of the resource-intensive activities that are associated with their supply chain activities or their transportation or waste.
Next slide, and so it’s not surprising that the US Securities and Exchange Commission has recently, I guess it was last spring, they announced the formation of a task force aimed at ESG misconduct and compliance. Investors are starting to demand more detailed and accurate reporting around environmental performance.
Next slide, and so we believe science-based life cycle assessment which truly looks at all of the different types of data across the entire life cycle of a product and the entire activity of an operation is really the only way to go.
Next slide and the way that we validate data is using this lifecycle analysis-based approach, which enables investors to then decrease exposure to climate-related portfolio risks and gives them the data they need to figure out which technologies really are going to be the market leaders based on their environmental and market-driven performance. And we’re going to talk more about that later.
So let me move to today’s topic. Automated trucking increases the efficiency of the transportation of goods allowing for something like a daily range of 16 to 22 hours of operation for a single truck. it’s become the only way we can sort of reliably get goods to the places they need to get to. Autonomous driving has five levels increasing in autonomy with level five being fully autonomous but most commercial autonomous trucks operate around level two assisted driving where the driver is still in control. Automated truck tethering which we’re going to learn about today, falls in level three and up. And it enables trucks to reduce idling by up to 90 percent and increase fuel efficiency by eight percent on average.
I’m going to introduce our first speaker Burak Sen who’s served as the independent expert for the assessment we did. We’re going to talk about today of Locomation’s technology. Burak is currently investigating the sustainability implications of different electromobility and battery technologies at the Sakarya University in Turkey as Marie Curie TUBITAK Postdoctoral Research Fellow and he’s going to provide an overview of automated trucking and the state of the current landscape. Over to you Burak.
[A transcript of the full webinar can be found on YouTube]