With a shortage of truck drivers in Canada, a tech company is looking to help ease the shortfall with driverless trucks, some of which can already be spotted on roads around the Toronto area.
In early October, Loblaw Companies Ltd. announced that it had started shipping select PC Express orders using fully driverless trucks. The goods move from a store in Toronto’s North York to two hub locations each in Mississauga and Brampton, and one in Etobicoke.Apart from this, Loblaw is also using autonomous trucks, but with a safety driver on board, on other routes in the Greater Toronto Area . It has in fact done so since 2020, in partnership with Gatik, a U.S.
In an interview with BNN Bloomberg, Gatik’s co-founder and CEO Gautam Narang, said, “Our thesis was that if we constrain the autonomy problem and have these trucks operate back and forth on fixed and repeatable routes, we can get to the point of driver-out faster and safer than any other application.”
In 2019, Gatik came to Canada looking for talent in robotics and engineering, and opened an office in Toronto. Narang explains, “Part of the reason was talent. The other one was that the immigration policies that Canada had were very favourable, especially for the high-skilled talent that we were looking to hire. Over time, we added customers and operations for the Toronto market as well.”
One of the reasons for Narang’s confidence in Gatik’s ambitious growth plans is the growing demand he sees for its service, mainly due to a large shortage of drivers in the U.S. and Canada, and at a time when customers are demanding faster and cheaper deliveries. Before introducing driverless trucks on any route, Gatik works closely with various stakeholders such as state transport ministries, local police and fire departments and other emergency services to brief them about their technology and plans. Narang calls it an “anti-Uber approach where we tend not to surprise anyone.”
The Canadian Trucking Alliance , an advocacy group for the industry, has been raising the alarm over the long-running shortage of truckers, a problem it says worsened during the pandemic.
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