Einride’s cab-less Level 4 truck at a Lidl site in Germany. Credit: Einride Lidl has put Einride’s cab-less Level 4 electric truck into daily service between a logistics centre and a store in Germany, under a first-of-its-kind permit from the federal transport authority. The route appears to be less than a mile, and the permit is national, so it does not travel across European borders. Lidl has put a cab-less autonomous truck into daily service on German public roads, Einride said.
It is the country’s first Level 4 truck built without a cab to run in commercial operations. Einride built it, and the federal transport authority granted a first-of-its-kind permit. The Swedish company already rents about 200 electric trucks to customers including Heineken and PepsiCo. There is no driver and no safety monitor on board.
A remote operator watches, and can move the vehicle at up to 6 kph to handle docking and edge cases, but does not drive it. The truck carries nine cameras, six radars and four lidars, and is assembled by a contract manufacturer in the Netherlands. It runs one shift a day, five days a week, carrying about 45 pallets between a distribution centre and a store at Edermunde in Hesse. Lidl’s head of operational logistics in Germany, Thomas Dangelmayer, described it as a milestone being tested step by step in real operations.
The route is very short. Comparing the footage against Street View, InsideEVs put the distance at under a mile, with the store sitting next to the warehouse. Einride says the next step is a milkrun with several stops. The permit is the achievement here, not the mileage.
Einride’s chief executive Roozbeh Charli called German clearance “among the toughest in the world“. Germany rewrote its Road Traffic Act in 2021 and followed it with an ordinance that lets a driverless Level 4 vehicle operate inside a defined operational area, approved case by case. No other European country has an equivalent national route carrying goods every day, and Berlin is treating it as a showcase. A transport ministry state secretary, Christian Hirte, said projects like this establish Germany as a pioneer in deploying advanced mobility technology.
That is also the limit. EU type approval for automated driving systems exists under a 2022 regulation, but the permission to operate stays with each member state, which is why Waymo is starting in Munich rather than anywhere else. Einride would have to win this argument again in every country it enters. It is already in talks with Lidl’s parent about putting more trucks on the road.
The company listed on Nasdaq in June at a $1.35B valuation, down from the $5B it once discussed with banks. A permit nobody else in Europe holds is worth more to it than a mile of road.
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