Daimler partners with Amazon on self-driving trucks

Berlin, Feb 17 (AFP/APP): German automobile giant Daimler, the world leader in heavy-goods vehicles, said Wednesday that it had enlisted Amazon to help with its testing of Level 4 self-driving trucks.

Daimler subsidiary Torc Robotics, which specialises in vehicle automation software, selected Amazon Web Services as a cloud provider for its upcoming truck tests in the US states of New Mexico and Virginia, the German company said in a statement. Amazon’s “extensive capabilities” in areas such as data transfer, storage and analytics would help Torc “accelerate its testing and commercialization” of Level 4 technology, Daimler said.

Torc Robotics, which is based in Virginia, first partnered with Daimler Trucks in early 2019, and was later acquired by the German giant. In October 2020, Daimler also signed a global partnership with Google-Alphabet subsidiary Waymo to equip US company Freightliner’s Cascadia lorries with Level 4 technology.

In June 2020, it announced a partnership with US chip company Nvidia to develop AI driving applications which included Levels 2, 3 and 4. Vehicle autonomy is classified along a scale from 0 to 5, with 5 indicating essentially total autonomy.

At Level 4 autonomy, a vehicle does not need a driver but operates in a specified geographic area.

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