After completely altering how taxis operate, y’all should be aware that Uber is now trying to step foot in the long-haul trucking business. When the ride-hailing giant first shared its plans for Uber Freight earlier last year, it disclosed that a full-service brokerage office was operational in Chicago, with another coming up in San Francisco.
A report from Reuters suggests that the company is pushing full-force in this direction, which became evident from the photograph of the massive 18-wheeler truck that was shared by CEO Travis Kalanick last week. It had hired a 5-member team behind a Chicago-based transportation brokerage company called 4Front Logistics in November of last year to set up the aforementioned office.
The ride-hailing giant added the brokerage firm, which helps connects merchants and retailers to truck operators and fleets, to its team without shelling out any capital. Their team is now working with Uber to define how long-haul trucking logistics can be simplified, just like the $68 taxi aggregation business it has built over the years. Though it is only a small team, 4FRont will help the company build capacity in this highly fragmented and cluttered business market of freight brokers.
As stated in an interview earlier, Kalanick is going all in with this idea and solving this cluttered challenge excites him. The chief executive further added,
It is a challenging, interesting, nuanced business, and it is going to be intense getting into it, but that’s exciting to me.
Uber Freight will be a spin-off the existing Uber business, where merchants will be able to book space within a truck via an app provided by the ride-hailing giant. They’d no longer have to contact the middleman to get themselves the best fare/price for the shipment. Uber Freight will be a marketplace and offer real-time pricing of how much you will have to spend to move your real-estate. It will be dependent on the supply and demand for the movement of goods across the country.
But much like self-driving cars, Uber has also acquired a self-driving truck startup, Otto for $680 million earlier last year. It is also the same startup that’s caught amid the patent infringement battle against Alphabet’s spin-off self-driving division Waymo. The latter has accused the former of building its self-driving sensors based on their technology that was brought to Uber by former Googler Anthony Levandowski. He is the co-founder of self-driving truck startup Otto, which is at the center of the lawsuit and has been termed as a front to transfer tech to the ride-hailing giant.
As for the self-driving efforts, Uber Freight has already completed its first autonomous delivery last year. The company packed over 50,000 cans of Budweiser in an 18-wheeler truck that drive itself from Loveland, Colorado to Colorado Springs. Uber’s autonomous truck drove at an average speed of 55 miles per hour and the whole drive passed without any hitch. A state trooper was even following the truck to monitor progress. It was a truck similar to the one shown in the photograph above.
