The following is an edited Q&A with Suma about his vision for Loadsmith and how he sees it helping decarbonize freight movement in the U.S. and benefiting smaller fleets nationwide.
FleetOwner: You just announced a deal to buy 800 autonomous trucks from Kodiak. While other fleets have been making deals to add self-driving technology to their operations, these would be Loadsmith’s first trucks of any kind. Why are you taking this approach?
Suma: We have a first-mover advantage because we’re purpose-building the world’s first fully autonomous trucking company instead of retrofitting our current network. So we will go build for deployment instead of taking retrofitting trucks.
Our job currently is to build the ability—from a Loadsmith freight network perspective—to have the scale to deploy the truck. Second, we’ve got to build the technology that optimizes all the loads.
FO: How will the autonomous technology fit in with local human-driven trucks?
Suma: If you think of every load that we ship, we’re going to have to break it into three different pieces: first mile, middle mile, and last mile. Unless you’re pairing a last-mile delivery with a first-mile pickup, the unit economics won’t work. We’re going to have to build that optimization that breaks every load into these three pieces—and we’re going to be putting it back together in three different pieces paired with two other levels. So there’s a lot of optimization we’ll have to build into our platform. We’ve got to continue to build density, and we’ve got to continue to distribute trailer pools.
We have to build all this optimization while Don and his Kodiak team have to work on building a viable safety driver that they can deliver to us by 2025. That is when we’re saying we will be driver-out in the second half of 2025.
FO: California’s state assembly recently passed a Teamster-supported bill banning humanless trucks from its roadways. Some of the most significant freight lanes start and end in Ontario, California, for example. How can you create your network without the Golden State?
Suma: California will get there eventually. I’m very confident in California. I think their regulatory hurdle will be quickly overcome as soon as somebody can adequately articulate how they can decarbonize the Ontario-to-Stockton lane, the densest lane in all of the United States. It’s the largest lane from a greenhouse emissions perspective in the U.S. that can only be decarbonized through autonomous because the economics of it won’t work if you don’t.
FO: How does autonomous trucking cut down on emissions?
Suma: It’s a combination of the efficiency of the truck and the utilization of the truck. Because I can utilize that truck 2.5 times that of a conventional truck. It’s also the predictability that will be needed to drive utilization. Just because you can use the truck 2.5 times more doesn’t mean you will if you don’t have the freight network to support it and all the other ancillary stuff of optimizing the first and last miles. So you have to build the entire thing.
See also: Kodiak turns Class 8 EV into self-driving truck
Then you just have to build one truck port in Ontario and one truck port in Stockton for EV charging and hydrogen fueling instead of trying to solve the problem everywhere. That’s all you have to do.
If California wants to be a leader in decarbonization, the path forward for them is there, but it has to be autonomous to do it. They have to get on board, and the path to get them there is through decarbonization efforts.
FO: Locksmith plans to deploy 6,000 trailers on its freight network driven by autonomous trucks on the middle mile. But how will you handle the first and last miles of the network, which still need human drivers?
Suma: We will contract with smaller fleets. I would love nothing more than to have an independent owner-operator come to me and say, ‘I’d like to have a three-year contract with you to work locally in Phoenix,’ or ‘I have five trucks, and my drivers want to come off the road. How can we partner and build a local fleet of independent and small carriers to provide more local driving jobs?’
I would love to have those conversations. Those people do really great work. And we want to be viewed as very pro-driver and very small fleet-centric. As a company, that gives opportunities to fleets that probably never would have had the opportunity otherwise.
FO: Many small fleets and owner-operators might feel that technology, such as autonomous and electrification, is making it harder for them to thrive in this industry. What’s your message to those smaller businesses?
We love them. None of this works without them. The biggest thing that people need to realize is that autonomous is great. It’s incredible technology. It will provide a lot of elasticity and stability in the supply chain. But it’s also great that we can build the future of work for these great men and women that do this job of driving.
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