Digital, electric, autonomous: How Einride is shaping a new era of freight
While the freight industry hasn’t experienced sweeping change since the standardization of the shipping container – in the 1950s – it is now in the midst of three major disruptions occurring in parallel: digitalization, electrification, and automation. In this edition of Swedish Chamber Insights, find out why the freight technology company Einride is part of leading the charge on all three fronts.
Entrepreneurship and innovation are at the core of Einride, a Stockholm-based tech company founded in 2016 to accelerate the transition to sustainable transportation through the design, development and deployment of freight mobility technologies.
Einride is a transformation partner for some of the world’s largest shippers – including Global Fortune 500 companies in Europe and North America. It recently announced the largest electrification of European road freight within FMCG, in partnership with Mars. The deal will reduce 10% of Mars Europe’s transport greenhouse gas emissions with the deployment of 300 electric vehicles, starting in Germany and continuing in the UK and the Netherlands. These operations will also include an autonomous pilot, to be implemented in 2025.
Such partnerships are about more than helping shippers transition away from diesel. By leveraging digitalization to address inefficiencies within a heavily fragmented sector, Einride is showing the world a new and more intelligent way to move. The company’s combination of cutting-edge digital, electric and autonomous technologies has been praised in the media and awarded numerous accolades over the years, including places on CNBC’s 50 Disruptor List and Time Magazine’s 100 Best Inventions . In addition, Einride won the prestigious Swedish Chamber Business Awards 2023 in the esteemed category Entrepreneurship, marking yet another triumphant milestone for the innovative company.
Freight capacity as a service
Einride helps businesses decarbonize their shipping operations. It is a complete service that includes operating electric and autonomous vehicles, providing all charging infrastructure, and integrating the freight operating system that unlocks the intelligent movement of goods. It is freight capacity as a service with a direct path toward scaled-up electric fleets. By guiding businesses through the entire transformation process and executing the freight operations, it is enabling customers to reduce their shipping CO2e emissions by up to 95%.
Einride’s primary offering is freight capacity as a service. The one-stop turnkey solution enables shippers to make the switch from traditional fossil fuel-based transportation to sustainable road freight, based on electric vehicles supported by an intelligent ecosystem. Additionally, it provides the shipper with a clear path to add autonomous freight transportation into their network.
Linnéa Kornehed Falck, Founder and Deputy CEO of Einride, says this way of packaging the solution speaks to the entrepreneurial mindset of the company: “Only by designing a solution from the ground up, are we able to address the overwhelming issues of fragmentation within the freight transportation sector. Freight capacity as a service means that Einride provides the shipper with everything they need to go electric today, supported by a strong business case.”
You can’t go electric without going digital
By shipping with Einride, businesses are able to have their goods moved efficiently and without any direct tailpipe emissions. They also don’t need to make costly overhead (CAPEX) investments, as Einride provides all the required vehicles, as well as all the necessary charging infrastructure and the software that connects every aspect of the solution.
The role of digitalization cannot be overstated when it comes to Einride’s mission to enable the future of freight. Einride Saga is the freight operating system at the heart of it all. According to Einride’s Chief Strategy Officer, Ellen Kugelberg, the intelligence of Saga wouldn’t be possible without Einride’s innovative spirit. It has allowed the tech company to overcome electrification barriers and cater solutions toward customers’ specific needs: “Einride is leading the way by gathering specialist knowledge across all facets of the electric freight ecosystem. We have expertise in vehicles, batteries, chargers, energy, AI, telematics, UX, logistics, and a lot more; and we connect the data from all these domains.”
Ellen continues: “We build out and develop all the different pieces to create the digital infrastructure that will ultimately give us – as well as the entire ecosystem – more efficient transportation. It includes having deep insights of the vehicles, the chargers, driver behaviors, and a lot of other factors that directly affect the performance, like the topography of the route, the climate, the weight of the goods, and so much more”.
The future is autonomous
Einride is working toward an ambitious vision for the future of freight, one enabled by autonomous transportation. Its autonomous technology doesn’t just look impressive – it is also making its mark with a range of historic milestones. In 2019, Einride became the world’s first company to operate a cableless autonomous electric vehicle on a public road – when the vehicle took to the pavement in the Swedish city of Jönköping. Since then, it has become the first company to achieve such a milestone within the United States – following a successful pilot for GE Appliances in Selmer, Tennessee. This pilot has now evolved to ongoing day-to-day operations.
Einride has also been part of the world-leading MODI project, a European cross-border initiative, co-funded by the European Union, to improve the transport and logistics industry by accelerating the introduction of Connected, Cooperative and Automated Mobility (CCAM) solutions. Einride serves as the leading autonomous partner of this European flagship project which aims to, among other things, demonstrate an autonomous electric vehicle crossing a country border – the first in the world.
Making intelligent moves
“When the company first envisioned putting an autonomous electric vehicle on the road, the naysayers were out in force” says Robert Falck, Founder and CEO at Einride. Robert explains:
“A big part of creating a new business is setting high ambitions. When we launched the first autonomous prototype, a project conceived by just a few unbelievably talented individuals, we still didn’t know what solutions and challenges would cross our path. Our ambition back then was to paint a picture of what we see the future to be. A future we believed was worth taking risks for.”
