Swedish automaker Volvo and Canadian self-driving truck startup Waabi have announced a strategic partnership to develop autonomous freight transportation. The companies made the announcement on their websites.
- The collaboration with Waabi builds on the relationship established in 2023, when Volvo Group Venture Capital invested in the Canadian startup.
- Waabi's next-generation AV2.0 approach, based on an end-to-end interpreted and validated artificial intelligence model, enables its virtual driver system, Waabi Driver, to generalize road scenarios.
- As part of the partnership between the two companies, Waabi Driver will be integrated into Volvo's flagship long-haul truck in the U.S. market, the Volvo VNL Autonomous.
- The Volvo VNL Autonomous is a self-driving truck with six critical systems - dual braking, steering, communications, computing, power, energy storage and traffic management - that enable safe operation.
“We now have everything we need to scale our product,” Raquel Urtasun, founder and CEO of Waabi, commented to TechCrunch.
Waabi plans to launch commercial pilots using Volvo trucks in Texas in the next few months, with a demonstration of the finished product on public roads planned for late 2025.
A fully driverless commercial launch - directly between customer warehouses from day one, rather than through terminals - will follow shortly thereafter, Urtasun said.
