So Uber officially launched its not-so-secret trucking business, Uber Freight, on Thursday, as the Silicon Valley tech titan looks to infiltrate another lucrative industry: long-distance road freight.
Uber first announced the service back in September, but the program had remained in stealth mode ever since. In a nutshell, Uber Freight wants to do for the trucking and logistics industries what Uber has been doing for the personal mobility sphere for years — match supply with demand. More specifically, it wants to connect trucking companies with loads that need to be hauled, minimizing the amount of time trucks travel empty after delivering their load.
“We take the guesswork out of finding and booking freight, which is often the most stressful part of a driver’s day,” explained Uber Freight product manager Eric Berdinis. “What used to take several hours and multiple phone calls can now be achieved with the touch of a button.”
For Uber, the move makes total sense. At its core, Uber isn’t a simple online taxi service — it’s a transport network and marketplace that bridges distances to connect buyers with sellers. This is why the company has already branched out into food delivery and dabbled in other forms of product deliveries.
But the trucking industry is being disrupted from multiple angles and perspectives, with Uber merely the latest player to enter the fray.
In fact, there has been a flurry of activity across the tech-truck realm in 2017. Here, we take a look at five other emerging trucking startups, each looking to claim their slice of the lucrative freight delivery pie, whose annual worth is more than $700 billion in the U.S. alone — a figure that stretches into the trillions globally.
Peloton
Founded out of Mountain View, California in 2011, Peloton Technology is developing a platform designed to help improve safety, fuel consumption, and operational efficiency in truck platooning.
With Peloton’s technology integrated into every truck in a fleet, vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) communications is used to enable each truck to automatically react to the actions of the vehicle in front of it. This allows the trucks to operate more safely as part of a closer pack, which helps lower fuel consumption and reduce emissions.
The company is working with a number of truck manufacturers, including Volvo,…