A rather important deal took place in the transportation technology sector last week, as ride sharing giant Uber - which has been working on its own autonomous car technology - acquired Israeli-American company Otto, which has technology for self-driving trucks.
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Uber will buy Otto - which is less than a year old - for $680 million in stock, plus, it is being reported, an agreement to give company owners 20% of its trucking profits for some period of time. Otto has about 90 employees, almost all engineers.
Otto has technology that can turn an existing truck into an autonomous vehicle with a kit.
Otto was started by Anthony Levandowski, an engineer who helped steer Google's self-driving technology before leaving Google to start Otto with two other former Google engineers and robotics expert Claire Delaunay.
The vison for now is that the robot truckers would only take control on the highways, leaving humans to handle the tougher task of wending through city streets. Earlier this year, Otto outfitted three big-rig cabs with its automated technology for testing. The company completed its first extended test of its system on public highways in Nevada in May, when it said it was looking for 1000 trucks to volunteer for more testing.
Three months ago, a truck using Otto technology completed an entire journey on one of California's freeways.
Another Otto co-founder, Lior Ron said last week that he expected to start deploying Otto's self-driving fleets by early next year. The company is already test-driving six semitrucks around the San Francisco area.
"It's really silly to have a person steering a truck for eight hours just to keep it between two lines on the highway," Levandowsk has said.
The Uber-Otto deal comes during a week in which Ford announced that it would launch an autonomous car for the private market within five years and Uber declared that it would offer services from driverless taxis for residents of Pittsburgh within just two weeks.
Levandowski will now head Uber efforts for autonomous vehicles for both cars and trucks, the company says.
"We wanted to bring to the market as quickly as possible the vision of automated driving and the best and simplest way to do it is on highways with trucks," Ron also said last week.
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An Entirely New Model?
 Beyond the potential to accelerate the development of self-driving truck technology, Uber's acquisition of Otto opens up the potential for a dramatically different freight model altogether.
That would come from marrying the autonomous truck technology with Uber developing software for matching shippers with carriers, similar to what it does now with ride sharing for consumers.
The vision: a shipper books a freight move on a mobile app, and an self-driving truck shows up not much later to pick up the load.
Uber CEO Travis Kalanick recently wrote in a blog post that "More and more the world of atoms is interacting with bits. In order to provide digital services in the physical world, we must build sophisticated logistics, artificial intelligence and robotics systems that serve and elevate humanity."
We're not sure about all that, but clearly we may be on the cusp of a very new world in terms of moving freight.
Will self-driving trucks be here soon? What do you think of a model that comines autonomous trucks with an Uber app for freight? Let us know your thoughts at the Feedback section below.
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