The first-ever Bitcoin transaction was for pizza delivery. Now, fittingly enough, the longest commercial cargo ride by a self-driving truck was a 1am beer run.
I’m glad we’ve got our priorities in order.
On Thursday, a self-driving semi from Otto, the automotive company owned by Uber, completed a 120-mile trip from Fort Collins, Colorado, to Colorado Springs. It was carrying 2,000 cases of Budweiser beer.
Photo via Otto
A driver did help navigate the vehicle on and off the I-25, but he moved to the backseat after that, where he was joined by transportation officials along for the ride.
The run took weeks to prepare. As Business Insider reports:
To prepare for the beer run, Otto sent some of its trucks and team to Colorado to start mapping the roads for the truck a few weeks ago. Eventually, Otto started adding dummy trailers, eventually filling them with dummy beer to understand how the truck would react when it was fully loaded. The company spent weeks studying the traffic patterns and landscape before deciding that 1 a.m. was the best time to run the shipment.
It’s just too bad it wasn’t carrying better beer.
H/T Business Insider