On Thursday, the arbiters of future trivia questions awarded the 132-mile road trip as the “Longest continuous journey by a driverless and autonomous lorry.” To all you non-Brits, that means a tractor-trailer.
For the record books, the trip in a tricked-out vehicle from tech company Otto, hauled 51,744 cans of Budweiser beer from Fort Collins, through downtown Denver and onward to Colorado Springs on October 20, 2016.
With state police nearby, the self-driving truck drove approximately 131.99 miles, according to Guinness.
While a man did sit in the driver’s seat occasionally, he was recorded walking to the sleeper berth in the cab to read. But he was also monitoring the trip from the back seat. He never took the wheel, according to organizers of the experiment.
Autonomous vehicles are being tested in certain states nationwide. Earlier this month, Colorado passed its first law regulating the testing of self-driving cars in the state. As long as the vehicles obey existing road rules and companies notify the state’s Department of Transportation and State Patrol, testing is allowed.
Whether the Otto truck will make another beer run in Colorado is unclear. Otto, which was acquired by Uber last August, is the target of a lawsuit by Google. Former Google self-driving car engineer Anthony Levandowski, who co-founded Otto, joined Uber at the time but was later sued by Google for allegedly stealing trade secrets. Uber fired Levandowskiin May.
tags: otto self driving , self driving budwieser , self driving semi truck , world record , nathan finneman , breed of speed, semi truck otto ,