Plus is one of any number of autonomous trucking tech companies battling for elbow room at the table in a future of automated trucks.
Armed with a suite of sensors, the company's first commercial driver assist platform, PlusDrive, is far from a "driverless" tool, rather an added co-pilot layer of safety technologies.
Despite all the space-age tech that Plus has attached to the truck, the most important safety feature still sits in the driver's seat, because with the Plus system the driver is always the captain of the ship. I recently took a turn at captaining the autonomous ship – in this case a PlusDrive-equipped Peterbilt – around Nashville, Tennessee.
Following a systems check – a roughy 90-second process where the Plus system confirms all its components are online and working correctly – we struck out from downtown Nashville toward Interstate 65. The autonomous system isn't designed to provide support on crowded surface roads, so it was on me to get the truck to the on-ramp and headed out toward Louisville, Kentucky.
This autonomous middle-mile – the longest part of the haul – has always been the hunting ground for autonomous tech developers because interstate traffic patterns are more predictable, and tasks that call for mostly driving in a straight line are easier to automate.
