Uber Freight CEO joins self-driving freight trucker Waabi: ‘It’s go time’

Lior Ron, the founder and CEO of Uber Freight, is joining the self -lasting truck attempt as the chief business officer.

Ron believes that the movement is based on the belief that the period of the largest autonomous towers on the roads is here and that the driverless technology in the semi -cab of the load industry will be transformed by the economy.

“The first decade of my career in the field of logistics was to build the Uber burden and reveal rails in the age of digitalization for logistics.” He said. “It is time to focus on the most basic change of the next decade.

Waabi expects entirely driverless trucks to handle load routes in the southwest of the United States by the end of the year. The region, from states such as Texas and Arizona to California, has been selected as the first region of the country that scares the technology due to a large amount of burden on the solar zone, and the absence of snow and ice -like weather conditions (the extraction of a variable to enter the navigation of autonomous technology). However, Ron said the target is to meet the entire North America with driver -free load trucks in the next five years.

Ron will remain as the current president of Uber’s electrification strategy and former Tesla Charger, Rebecca Tinucci and the president of Uber Freight.

According to the company, Ron has reached a revenue of $ 5 billion in the last decade by working with one-third of Fortune 500 transporters and managing a burden of close to $ 20 billion for customers such as Colgate, Nestle and Anheuser-Busch Inbev.

Raquel Ortasun, the founder and CEO of Ron and Waabi (two managers know each other for ten years) and Waabi and Uber – For a long time. Ortasun worked in the advanced technology unit in Uber before he founded Waabi. A major investor at Uber and Uber Freat became a key partner in testing Waabi’s autonomous truck technology on roads. A program that has been going on in Texas since 2023 And it is an current goal of deploying for billions of miles. Commercial loads are currently transported by Waabi trucks between Dallas and Houston.

“We focused on product development and R & D and now enter the commercialization stage,” he said, “We focus on product development and R & D,” he said.

Waabi ranked 35th in the CNBC Disruptor 50 list this year.

Currently, Waabi’s approach included drivers in the cabinets as part of the test phase. However, Ron said that there will be no driver in vehicles until the end of the year. “Four years have passed since Waabi’s beginning, and this time.” He said. “We start with certain routes and quickly scares between multiple customers,” Uber Freight, including Uber Freight.

Ron, as Volvo (Waabi is already an agreement), is already investing in truck OEMs, “He’s looking for everything and bending, Ron Ron said. Now, “This is about people who buy trucks.”

Ron is waiting for a relatively fast adoption cycle – with both logistics companies, cargo fleets and transporters such as large retailers, with their own truck assets and operations. Authorized, the load truck industry to adopt the existing restrictions in the tail wind, he said. Traditional load trucks can move cargoes seven to eight hours a day, and autonomous trucks can double this with a driver and a better safety profile and more fuel efficiency.

Within five years, Ron says that there will be a common landscape in the supply chain and especially in the Sunbed corridors “.

Although most of the people’s focus on driving on their own continues their innovation of Waymos and Tesla Robotaxes (Lock Test Markets for Texas and Arizona), the Waabi executives say that the costs in the load truck industry constitute a much stronger lawsuit for the deployment of scale.

“Costs always fall with a scale,” Ron said and claims that the autonomous load will allow customers to compensate for their investments “faster than other investments in a truck fleet”.

For truck drivers, things will not be lost overnight and an average truck driver in the United States is around 55 years of age, according to Ron, according to Ron, it will provide time for the career for the next decade to stay in their work. Waabi executives expect more driving business to be at the last miles in the future, which is a more complex task for the mastery of autonomous systems and a more complex task for the emergence of new technicians on autonomous load operations.

They also stated that there is a long -standing truck driver shortage in the US, which is a sign that there is no longer a very sought -after career option. “Nobody wants to be a long truckman,” he said. “This is not something that people have to do, as the labor force changes, it will be done for a while, so there will be no great deterioration.”

Self -driving arrangement is still handled at the state level, one reason that Texas was located in the early days of Waabi, but a recent meeting with the secretary of the Ministry of Transport, Sean Duffy, said the desire to achieve a federal framework to achieve a faster, more simple way to commercialize this technology. “

“All benefits are open, and the United States wants to maintain the leadership position here, and this management wants to double to make it possible, but remains as a state policy,” he said.

Waabi calls himself a “physical artificial intelligence” company in order to place his systems beyond trucks, whether in robotaxi, warehouse robots or humanoid robots. “It is clear that we will do more than trucks at the right time.” He said.

However, the aim is to establish an autonomous truck business to scale and grow the flow of income on commercialization. There is no existing plan to make a first public presentation. “Many people set up Waabi for our next series, but our capital productivity allows us not to need capital. Now we don’t have a public offering.” He said. “The first task is to bring the solution to the market.”

In addition to Uber, Waabi is supported by others, as well as Khosla Ventures, Nvidia, Volvo Group Venture Capital and Porsche Car.