GE Appliances goes autonomous

If you get the chance to visit GE Appliance’s famed Appliance Park in Louisville, you might also get a chance to see the starts of a logistics revolution. Instead of tractor trailers, a small fleet of pods from Einride, a Swedish freight technology company, are shuttling trailer-load quantities of material between the five manufacturing and assembly facilities on the campus. They are aerodynamic and futuristic not to mention all electric and autonomous. No operator is behind the wheel – in fact, there’s no wheel. You can click here to watch a YouTube video of the pods in action.

The pods are one of two projects that GE Appliance, a Haier company, is doing with Einride. In the other, the appliance manufacturer is using all-electric drayage trucks from Einride in Georgia, Tennessee and Kentucky, with a goal of saving 970 tons of CO2 emissions within the first year. The electric vehicles are not autonomous. The deployments are part of a billion-dollar investment commitment by GEA in its U.S. manufacturing and distribution operations.