Another autonomous truck manufacturer has its vehicles on the road, this time in the state well known for manufacturing vehicles.
Torc recently announced the expansion of its autonomous truck testing operations to public roads in Michigan. The company said it is using the latest-generation Daimler Truck autonomous chassis based on the industry-leading Freightliner Cascadia.
Building on Torc’s established testing operations in Dallas-Fort Worth and Blacksburg, the company said expansion in Michigan marks a significant step in Torc’s engineering presence and broadens testing capabilities.
Testing its autonomous trucks in the greater Ann Arbor, Michigan area represents the natural next step in Torc’s strategy to bring this technology safely and reliably to the long-haul trucking industry. After establishing the Ann Arbor engineering office last year, the development work taking place there is now “on the road” in Michigan and contributing to Torc’s next generation of software. The company said this enables the validation of autonomous performance across new environments and seasonal conditions for both hardware and software performance using real-world data.
“Validating our hardware and software together on public roads is a critical step in the marathon toward autonomous trucking commercialization,” said Felix Heide, head of Artificial Intelligence at Torc. “Each new hardware generation allows us to further validate our AI inference models, strengthen our simulation accuracy, and ensure our autonomous system performs safely and reliably in real-world conditions.”
Torc, headquartered in Blacksburg, Virginia, is a subsidiary of Daimler Truck AG.
