“Texas and specifically Dallas-Fort Worth has been a big market, a big focus of ours over the last two, three years,” said Narang in an interview. “So as you know, we started commercial operations in 2019 with Walmart in Arkansas initially and expanded to Texas in early 2001. So today for the Texas market, you know, we have shared partnerships with Georgia Pacific, KBX, Pitney Bowes,and now Kroger—all of these partnerships are going strong.
“This allowed us to do like long range detection, meaning it allowed us to do higher speed driving,” explained Narang. “So now we are seeing the benefits of that where the routes that we are onboarding includes a combination of urban and highway meaning we do driving up to 70 miles per hour right now initially with a safety driver on board.”
The biggest factor in reducing costs is being able to reduce reliance on large semi-trucks with Gatik’s smaller, autonomous vehicles making many more runs in a day, especially in Kroger’s far-flung Dallas-Ft. Worth distribution area.“For the DFW market it does not make sense to operate a semi-truck, rather it's beneficial to, you know, operate smaller trucks in a much more frequent fashion so the end consumer sees the benefits,” observed Narang.