The future is autonomous

Rarely a week goes by these days without an announcement from Swedish company Einride (pronounced En-ride), so Andy Salter took the opportunity to catch up with general manager for Europe Robert Ziegler at the IAA Transportation 2022 event last September.

In December, the company announced it had secured $500m (£407m) of funding (a combination of equity investment and debt facilities). It appears to have the foundations in place to play a significant role in the decarbonisation of the freight sector, both in Europe and North America. The company has opened up in Germany and Benelux and, we understand, a UK market entry is imminent – this is definitely a company to watch.

Einride was founded in 2016 by ex-Volvo engineer Robert Falck and it is tricky to pigeonhole. You could call it an engineering company (its electric autonomous truck certainly turns heads), a software systems company (it has some powerful tech driving its transport management systems and enabling the journey to carbon zero freight deliveries), or a logistics provider (it has a fleet of over 500 electric trucks on operation with clients in Sweden, Germany and Benelux) – and even then you would have probably missed something.

“Robert Falck, our founder, saw that transport is going to become more digital, electric and autonomous,” explained Ziegler. “Initially, he had this vision of the electric autonomous digital truck. Experience has told us that this is not going to scale quickly, so we have built the second logistics business on the side that is digital and electric.

“When we started that two years ago, everybody thought we were crazy. But if you go around the exhibition today, you’re not going to find any OEM without an electric truck on their stand. So I think we’re right on the board and the wave’s coming.”

Simplified design

The autonomous vehicle has recently had a facelift, refining the product offering, but the basic principle of a connected autonomous electric vehicle remains. “It doesn’t have a driver’s cabin, there’s no steering wheel, seats, no stereo, no air conditioning, no windshield, no windshield wipers,” Ziegler continued. “It reduces the complexity of the vehicle by more than 60%. When you speak to the other OEMs, you will find that this is the majority of their complexity. Just think about the UK. I mean, we don’t have to switch the steering wheel from one side to the other, it doesn’t matter. Basically, we have intelligence at the front of the vehicle and the rest is cargo space.”

The autonomous vehicles are already in service in Sweden running on public roads on a contract with SKF, while the first trials on US public roads took place last year. The driverless vehicles are controlled by a constantly monitored remote pilot who can stop the vehicles in the event of a problem. The intellectual property and design knowhow is all developed in-house by Einride, though the chassis and bodies are bought in.

Data-based decisions

“Fundamentally, we are a tech transportation company,” Ziegler said, explaining how the business relies heavily on data for its decision making. “When we work with customers at the beginning, we do what we call a transportation assessment. We take their data, run it through our machine and it gives us a report.

“As an example, it may say there is up to 40% of your route you can immediately electrify and then next year, you could do another 20% and so on. Our customers sign up for joint business plans over the coming years. And as technology evolves and charging infrastructure improves, we can make constant improvements.”

On the contract logistics side Einride has been building up its battery electric truck fleet, placing sizeable vehicle orders with Daimler and Scania for Europe and BYD for use in the US. “We have a couple more deals in the pipeline,” Ziegler said. “And a couple of retrofitters are also working for us.”

In terms of UK aspirations, while it would not have been on Ziegler’s initial hit list, he hinted at an announcement soon. “We have had a lot of interest from the UK,” he said. According to Companies House, two Einride legal entities were registered in the UK at the end of 2022 and the company has recently been advertising for a UK operations director. We await further developments.

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