UPS is Moving Forward with Autonomous Vehicles and Tesla Relaunches Its Solar Company

This is the B2B Shortlist for Wednesday, August 21st, with Geoffrey Short.

UPS confirmed that it has been actively hauling cargo autonomously since May of this year on a 115 mile stretch in Arizona.

This news comes as UPS also announced a minority investment in the self-driving truck startup TuSimple. The United States Postal Service has also been testing the trucks to deliver mail between Dallas and Phoenix.

“Implementation tends to be a little bit easier because we’re primarily doing highway driving. We’re offering a hub-to-hub solution so that’s delivering goods from a customer’s distribution center to another distribution center and we think that we’ll be able to have factory production-ready trucks by 2023, 2024 range,” said TuSimple CFO Cheng Lu in an interview with CNBC this Summer.

For now these UPS trucks will still have an engineer and a driver on board in case of an emergency.

Tesla is also looking ahead with a new product offering. Elon Musk announced this weekend the re-launch of Tesla Solar. Homeowners in six states will soon be able to rent the company’s solar panels for just $50 per month.

“On Tesla’s end, I think it kind of makes sense when you consider that Tesla is a company that’s been trying to create an ecosystem of product use. It’s not just the Tesla vehicle itself, they have the gigapacks that you can use in your garage to charge up your car, they want to try to integrate these other types of technology,” said Brian Cheung, reporter for Yahoo Finance.

The eligible states include Arizona, California, Connecticut, Massachusetts, New Jersey and New Mexico.

That’s what’s happening in the world of B2B today.

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