Gatik and ChargePoint Partner to Develop an Electric Ecosystem for Autonomous Electric Medium-Duty Trucks
It’s been one year since we announced our Electrification Strategy with the industry’s first autonomous electric box trucks: a groundbreaking solution offering hyper-efficient goods movement for our customers, impactful savings on fuel and powertrain maintenance costs and a solution to help reduce some of the 2,200 million metric tons of CO2 emissions unleashed each year by North America’s transportation sector.
This week we announced the next phase in our Electrification Strategy: a strategic partnership with ChargePoint to develop an electric ecosystem for autonomous vehicles designed to maximize sustainability, operational efficiency and economics for Gatik’s customers across North America. Through the partnership, infrastructure and integrated services will play a significant role in helping to decarbonize the B2B short-haul logistics sector and offer a simple and seamless solution to help Gatik’s customers meet their corporate sustainability goals.
Customers transporting goods in Gatik’s autonomous electric fleet will have access to ChargePoint’s expertise in site design, interoperability validation, and lower investment costs. Gatik will also have access to a nationwide charging network and fleet-specific software that provides telematics intelligence configurable to each customer’s operations, as well as modular charging hardware to minimize upfront costs by reducing required electrical capacity. This strategic electric ecosystem collaboration for the middle mile will play a key role in the electrified logistics sector.
Powered by ChargePoint’s scalable charging technology, Gatik launched the industry’s first autonomous electric box trucks with Walmart in 2021, delivering goods from a Walmart Supercentre in New Orleans to a pick-up point in Metairie, Louisiana. The service unlocks the opportunity for customers who live further away from Walmart’s store in New Orleans to benefit from the convenience and ease of Walmart’s pickup service — with all the benefits electrification brings. Our vehicles are designed with an all-electric powertrain, boast a range of 120 miles and can reach full charge in less than 1.5 hours. Compared to long-haul trucking, where the trade-offs between battery range and route length pose significant obstacles to success, operations on the middle mile involve multiple journeys per day on relatively short distances.
This means our autonomous electric box trucks can charge while they’re being loaded and unloaded, allowing foruninterrupted service. The increased uptime and enhanced vehicle performance offers significant emissions reductions and dramatic savings on fuel and powertrain maintenance costs. These savings can, in turn, be passed on to consumers — contributing to a sustainable logistics ecosystem that connects service provider, customer and consumer.
As the retail, E-commerce and logistics sectors look to decrease their carbon footprints, demand for Gatik’s product offering among national retail and E-commerce giants has soared, leading to rapid expansion of ChargePoint’s infrastructure at Gatik’s vehicle depots and customer locations across existing and emerging markets. With consumer expectations for real-time access to goods increasing faster than the most confident predictions, there has been an influx of freight-moving vehicles added to North America’s roads. This has made sustainability both a collective challenge and a collective responsibility for leaders in the logistics industry to contend with.
We take this challenge seriously: Gatik’s fleet of class 3–6 autonomous electric box trucks drive sustainability across critical operational metrics, and our partnership with ChargePoint gives our customers access to the necessary infrastructure and integrated services to support a cleaner, more efficient and more responsible logistics sector.
