Autonomous trucking startup TuSimple is taking 3 to 5 commercial trips a day

A little more than a year ago, autonomous trucking startup TuSimple i —flush with a fresh round of venture capital — was preparing to scale up its testing to two full truck fleets in China and the U.S.

TuSimple, a China-backed company with an R&D facility in San Diego and test operations in Tucson, has put that money to use.

The startup, which launched in 2015, is taking three to five fully autonomous trips per day for customers on three different routes in Arizona, TuSimple said Monday at CES 2019 in Las Vegas. All of these trips have two safety engineers, one who is behind the wheel, and another monitoring the data pouring in during each trip.

That’s a milestone for TuSimple and the burgeoning autonomous trucking industry, which is getting increasingly crowded.

TuSimple isn’t disclosing its customers. The company did say it has 12 contracted customers.

TuSimple isn’t slowing down either. The startup plans to expand from the 11 autonomous trucks it has operating in the U.S. today to 40 by June. An additional route from Arizona to Texas will come online in early 2019, the company said.

“Exactly one year after debuting our prototype system at CES 2018, we’re now running up to five commercial trips a day in Arizona, expanding our fleet and moving quickly toward our goal of creating the first commercial self-driving truck,” TuSimple founder, president and CTO Xiaodi Hou said.

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