GM's BrightDrop eyes future self-driving EV delivery trucks

Jamie L. LaReau
Detroit Free Press

General Motors' subsidiary, BrightDrop, will offer self-driving electric commercial delivery vehicles in the future.

During a webcast presentation at the Evercore ISI 2nd Annual Technology Conference on Thursday, BrightDrop CEO Travis Katz said the company is "actively" looking at how to apply autonomous driving technology to its commercial trucks.

But BrightDrop spokesman Daniel Roberts said Friday the company has no immediate plans to offer self-driving vehicles.

BrightDrop's new EV410 all-electric commercial van to be built in 2023 for Verizon.

"We can say with certainty that autonomy is going to play a huge role in commercial delivery," Katz said. "There is no need to have humans driving vehicles in all of these routes. One of the benefits of being General Motors, is we have our sister company Cruise, which is one of the leaders, if not the leader, in autonomous systems."

Katz said BrightDrop's EVs can save a fleet $10,000 to $12,000 of cost per vehicle each year. Also, some say that eliminating the driver could result in greater cost savings.

"There really aren’t enough drivers to do the work and it’s not a super glamorous job," Katz said. "It’s a hard job.”

In June, the GM-owned Cruise became the first company to run a commercial taxi service of self-driving cars in a major city −San Francisco, where it is based, Katz said

BrightDrop, which GM started in early 2021, offers two commercial electric delivery vehicles — the Zevo 600, which resembles the big brown UPS-style truck, and a smaller EV410 midsize truck. They will be built at GM's CAMI Assembly plant in Ingersol, Canada, which opens in the fourth quarter. Katz said it expects to be making 50,000 trucks a year there starting in 2025 and bring in "a lot of revenue."

"We’re lining up customers. We’re hiring like crazy … across all fronts, support, software development, engineering … we see big growth ahead," Katz said. "We feel pretty good about the supply chain heading into next year. We have a lot of people managing this and we’ve worked through the hardest moments. We’re not seeing anything on the horizon that’s scaring us.”

Katz said he did not have specific news to share yet on self-driving technology, but he said that Cruise has been testing autonomous delivery vehicles with Walmart. It has been using the Cruise Origin, which is the self-driving vehicle that Factory Zero in Detroit and Hamtramck will make.

“There are a lot of challenges to still be solved,” Katz said. “The last 100 feet, you can’t just have an autonomous vehicle pull up, you have to figure out how does the vehicle get to the end? We have e-carts and things like this and software” to help design a solution.

But he said commercial self-driving vehicles will be "huge" and "we’re better positioned than anyone else in the industry to go after it.”

Besides the delivery trucks, BrightDrop also offers technological solutions for the delivery industry such as a propulsion-assisted electric pallet to move goods over short distances, including from the delivery truck to a front door. It also offers mobile asset management for the pallet to allow for location monitoring, battery status and other remote commands.

FedEx and BrightDrop have completed a Guinness World Record for the greatest distance traveled by an electric van on a single charge, using a BrightDrop Zevo 600, an all-electric, zero-tailpipe emissions delivery vehicle, from within the FedEx delivery fleet.

BrightDrop currently has FedEx, Merchants Fleet and Walmart as its biggest clients. Its biggest truck, the Zevo 600, made the Guinness World Records in April when driver Stephen Marlin achieved the record for the greatest distance traveled by an electric van on a single charge. He drove a Zevo 600 that's part of FedEx's fleet from New York City to Washington, D.C., a trip of nearly 260 miles.    

Contact Jamie L. LaReau: jlareau@freepress.com. Follow her on Twitter @jlareauan. Read more on General Motors and sign up for our autos newsletterBecome a subscriber.