Inceptio Technology, a Chinese developer of autonomous driving technologies for heavy-duty trucks, recently showcased its progress in commercializing Level-3 autonomous trucks.

At the company's second annual Tech Day in Shanghai, Inceptio:

• Announced new agreements with major logistics and insurance partners.

• Shred kkey data points from over 50 million kilometers of accident-free autonomous driving.

• Showcased the core technologies that power the Inceptio Autonomous Driving System's Truck Navigate-on-Autopilot system.

Inceptio announced new procurement and strategic collaboration agreements with major logistics companies STO Express, ZTO Freight and Deppon Express. STO Express has ordered 500 Inceptio autonomous trucks jointly developed with Dongfeng Commercial Vehicle. ZTO Freight has ordered 200 Inceptio autonomous trucks jointly developed with Sinotruk.

Inceptio also announced a cooperation agreement with China Pacific Insurance that aims to develop innovative new insurance products tailored to autonomous heavy-duty trucks.

Studies Highlight Autonomous Safety Benefits

During the Tech Day event, Inceptio presented the results of two new joint studies confirming the significant safety and driver experience benefits enjoyed by operators of Inceptio autonomous trucks.

Inceptio and China Pacific Insurance jointly released what it said is the industry's first annual insurance data safety report, which found that Inceptio's trucks perform 75-99% better than human-operated trucks across a range of safety indicators. In particular, Inceptio trucks registered just 0.1 collision warnings per 100 kilometers, which is 98% fewer than human-operated trucks, according to a news release.

Inceptio and a team of academics published a report monitoring truck driver fatigue levels on 134 trips covering nearly 120,000 kilometers of commercial operations. The study found that Inceptio's human safety operators experienced 35% less physiological fatigue and 11% less psychological fatigue than conventional truck drivers.

From 50 million kilometers of commercial operations, Inceptio's partners have realized labor cost savings of 20% to 50% and fuel savings of 2% to 10%, according to the company.

End-to-End Safety Network

Inceptio autonomous trucks come equipped with the Truck Navigate-on-Autopilot feature, and receive regular over-the-air updates as the Inceptio Autonomous Driving System improves itself. Inceptio's Truck Navigate-on-Autopilot system offers 100% coverage of China's line haul network, according to the release, and Inceptio already has commercial business covering 70% of that network, the company added.

Three core elements enable this technology, according to Inceptio:

• End-to-end network with safety guardrails: The traditional autonomous driving software stack with discrete perception, prediction, planning, and control modules is being replaced by an end-to-end network that is smart and reliable. Keys to this novel network are 1) guardrails to ensure the reliability and safety of network output; and 2) an efficient occupancy grid map-based representation with significantly reduced computing power and memory consumption.

• Inceptio Super Driver: A vast trove of real-world driving data has been used to train a customized large-language model dubbed TruckGPT, allowing Inceptio's virtual intelligent driver to surpass human drivers' decision-making ability in a wide range of scenarios.

• Inceptio Autonomous Truck Platform: This includes:

• A next-gen autonomous driving control unit designed for heavy-duty trucks and suitable for long-distance use in harsh conditions with weak wireless signals

• Software with unique features that significantly enhance development efficiency and can be adapted to new vehicle models in just 9-12 months

• Truck electrical and electronic architecture with new features including full modularity with decoupling of software and hardware, facilitating efficient upgrades.

"We are truly proud of the great strides we have made to commercialize our technology, making nearly 50,000 trips on 340 routes for more than 100 freight and logistics customers," said Inceptio founder and CEO Julian Ma. "The new orders we announced today represent a huge vote of confidence from our valued partners STO Express, ZTO Freight, and Deppon Express, which have all experienced the benefits of our technology first-hand.

"Through our new alliance with CPIC, we are developing insurance solutions that will help accelerate the mass adoption of autonomous trucks even further. We look forward to delivering more mass-produced L3 autonomous trucks to our partners in the near future."