EVwire brief: Einride and Lidl have put a cab-less, SAE Level 4 autonomous electric truck into daily operation on a public road in Germany, running under the country's first permit of its kind from the Federal Motor Transport Authority (KBA).
The truck runs in Edermünde, near Kassel in Hesse, connecting a Lidl warehouse and distribution center directly to a nearby Lidl store, with no driver or safety operator on board.
The truck carries up to 15 EUR-pallet positions per run, making as many as three trips a day, for a combined total of around 45 pallets moved per shift. Einride and Lidl are running the four-month pilot on a fixed distribution-center-to-store route for now, with plans to expand it into a multi-stop “milk run” serving several Lidl stores later on. The companies expect the truck to move more than 3,000 pallets over the course of the trial.
Einride announced the program with a video on X:
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Roozbeh Charli, Einride's CEO, described the project as a way to bring the company's autonomous technology onto public roads in Germany with actual customer operations.
We're excited to now bring this technology to public roads in Europe's largest road transport market, and to prove its value together with Lidl and the broader ecosystem of Schwarz Group. Germany's approval process is among the toughest in the world, and obtaining clearance there gives us a foundation to scale with confidence.
Lidl's Thomas Dangelmayer said the company is using the project to evaluate how autonomous technology can be integrated into its logistics operations.
With this innovative project, we are testing a technological milestone step by step and safely in real-world operations to examine how future-proof solutions can be optimally integrated into our site logistics.
Einride and Lidl expect the autonomous trucks to transport 3,000 pallets during the project’s four-month period.
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Context:
This is Einride's latest step in an ongoing push into driverless trucking. Last month, the company partnered with truck-maker DAF to bring Level 4 autonomous driving to electric trucks. The company also has existing autonomous and electric operations in the US, including its 75-truck electric deployment for Amazon.
More recently, Einride also announced that it has ordered 500 Tesla Semis. In an interview, Charli stated that approximately 75 of those trucks were expected to be deployed in 2026, with the remaining 425 scheduled to enter service by the end of 2027. The trucks are intended for U.S. operations on Einride's Saga platform, including freight for Amazon and other shippers.
Source: Einride and Finanznachrichten.de
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