Ep. 33 | From Autonomous Golf Carts to Semis: The Journey to the Self-Driving Truck
Two engineering students developed an autonomous golf cart system to transport people across campus. One accelerator program and a lot of engineering later, the same two engineers founded Embark, an autonomous trucking company that rapidly grew into a $5 billion endeavor. In 2018, when the company was only two years old, Embark claimed an industry-first: a 2,400-mile coast-to-coast journey for an autonomous truck from LA to Jacksonville, Florida. For the first time in many people's minds, autonomous trucking seemed to have arrived. This is the story of Brandon Moak and Alex Rodrigues, CTO and CEO respectively of Embark. Moak joins us in the Lobby to talk about the challenges of scalable autonomous systems, gaining acceptance in the transportation industry, and the differences between passenger autonomous vehicles and those meant for the infrastructure of shipping.