Major moves are underway for Torc Robotics next year as the company enters the productization phase of their self-driving truck offering. On-road operations are shifting to Texas while the company stands up a new automated vehicle development hub in Michigan.
Founded in 2005 at an early point in the self-driving vehicle era, Torc has over nineteen years of experience in pioneering safety-critical self-driving applications. Torc offers a complete self-driving vehicle software and integration solution and is currently focusing on commercializing autonomous trucks for long-haul applications in the U.S.
Working with their majority owner and development partner Daimler Trucks North America (DTNA), the partners have locked in product specifications, enabling testing of all facets of their production-intent system.
As noted in my recent articles (here here, and here), trucking automation is approaching an inflection point. Multiple companies are transitioning from the testing phase to commercial driverless operations. Torc’s latest news is a vivid example.
Specifically, Torc is expanding to new markets with operations in Ann Arbor, Michigan, and the Dallas/Fort Worth area in Texas. The company says entering these new markets is driven by strategic considerations. Eastern Michigan is known for its concentration of transportation engineering talent, enabling a hub for continued innovation and development in autonomous vehicle technology. The company sees Dallas/Fort Worth providing a strategic advantage based on its proximity to a critical test route from Dallas to Laredo on Interstate 35.
The company has begun winding down its testing operation in Albuquerque, New Mexico.
Torc will be shifting many of its Albuquerque resources to Dallas and will begin a hiring push there and in Ann Arbor, hiring over 100 positions in each location over the coming months.
Driverless Proving
A key turning point leading to today’s announcement was the successful product validation of Torc’s autonomous trucks. This occurred without a driver in a multi-lane closed-course environment earlier this year, operating at 65 miles per hour to emulate real-world conditions.
This milestone highlighted Torc’s entry into scalable product release, with the company’s applied artificial intelligence technology, system architecture, production-intent embedded hardware, and safety engineering all converging.
“We observed impressive reliability in our repeated driverless runs, which leveraged Torc’s unparalleled embedded and integrated platform on Daimler Truck’s Freightliner Cascadia,” said Torc CEO Peter Vaughan Schmidt.
Torc is making a vital transition from engineering development to production intent hardware, software, and chassis. The validated L4-ready platform was fully built by DTNA.
Torc notes that their recent driverless product acceptance test underscores the company’s evolution to productization, positioning the company to scale and commercialize safe, robust autonomous trucking solutions by 2027.
“Torc has always been very methodical about when we scale and grow. And so now that we really have those proof points, we’re running on production intent hardware and production software,” said Andrew Culhane, Chief Commercial Officer at Torc Robotics. “It was really triggered from that closed course milestone, which was just the tip of an iceberg of all the things that must come together. And now it’s a great opportunity to pivot and really start driving towards commercialization. Having a cool technology is interesting; having a great product is awesome; having a successful scalable profitable business is the real goal. And these milestones set us up to be on that path.”
Culhane emphasized that every sensor, the power systems, and the chassis are all production-intent-awarded hardware or factory built by DTNA. Furthermore, the software went through full end-to-end requirements validation, traceability and release.
Real World Trucking
Culhane added that the focus in the I-35 testing will be “to work closely with existing fleet partners to understand everything about the scalable operation of autonomous trucks, from inspections, to job roles in the yard, to how we launch and recover the vehicles, to mission control factors.”
While the specific fleets which will be operating with Torc driverless vehicles on I-35 have not yet been named, the company website notes that key industry partners are Schneider and C.R. England.
Closing in on their 2027 launch timing, Torc says that the first live driverless operations will be on the freight lane between DFW and Laredo.
On that route, “keep an eye out for the brand new Cascadia with a fully integrated AV kit and fully redundant chassis out on the road. You’ll see more and more of that towards the end of this year and then really starting to ramp up into early next year,” said Culhane.
