Inceptio Technology, a Chinese developer of autonomous driving technologies for heavy-duty trucks, announced agreements with logistics and insurance partners at its second annual Tech Day in Shanghai last week.

The company also shared key data points from over 50 million kilometres of accident-free autonomous driving, and showcased the core technologies that power its autonomous driving system’s truck navigate-on-autopilot (T-NOA) capability.

It announced procurement and collaboration agreements with logistics companies STO Express, ZTO Freight and Deppon Express. As part of these deals, STO Express has ordered 500 Inceptio autonomous trucks jointly developed with Dongfeng Commercial Vehicle (DFCV), and ZTO Freight has ordered 200 Inceptio autonomous trucks jointly developed with Sinotruk. Inceptio also announced a cooperation agreement with China Pacific Insurance (CPIC) that aims to develop insurance products tailored to autonomous heavy-duty trucks.

During the event, Inceptio presented the results of two joint studies confirming the safety and driver experience benefits enjoyed by operators of Inceptio autonomous trucks. First, Inceptio and CPIC jointly released an insurance data safety report, which found Inceptio’s trucks perform 75 to 99% better than human-operated trucks across a range of safety indicators. In particular, Inceptio trucks registered 0.1 collision warnings per 100km, which is 98% fewer than human-operated trucks.

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

From 50 million kilometres of commercial operations, Inceptio’s partners have realised labour cost savings of 20 to 50% and fuel savings of 2 to 10%.

The trucks come equipped with the T-NOA feature, and receive over-the-air (OTA) updates as the autonomous driving system improves itself. T-NOA offers 100% coverage of China’s line haul network and Inceptio has commercial business covering 70% of that network.

It replaces the traditional autonomous driving software stack that uses discrete perception, prediction, planning and control modules with an end-to-end network that is smart and reliable. Guardrails ensure the reliability and safety of network output. An occupancy grid map-based representation uses significantly less computing power and memory.

Inceptio Super Driver is a trove of real-world driving data used to train a customised 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 includes an autonomous driving control unit (ADCU) designed for heavy-duty trucks and suitable for long-distance use in harsh conditions with weak wireless signals; software with features that enhance development efficiency and can be adapted to new vehicle models in nine to twelve months; and truck electrical and electronic architecture with features including full modularity with decoupling of software and hardware, facilitating efficient upgrades.

“After another year of hard work and momentous achievements, we couldn’t be more excited to share Inceptio’s progress with the world,” said Inceptio CEO Julian Ma at the event. “We are truly proud of the great strides we have made to commercialise our technology, making nearly 50,000 trips on 340 routes for more than 100 freight and logistics customers.”

For more information on Inceptio Technology, visit en.inceptio.ai.