Daimler partners with Amazon to help with its testing of Level 4 self-driving trucks

German automobile giant Daimler, the world leader in heavy-goods vehicles, said Wednesday that it had enlisted Amazon to help with its testing of Level 4 self-driving trucks. Daimler subsidiary Torc Robotics, which specialises in vehicle automation software, selected Amazon Web Services as a cloud provider for its upcoming truck tests in the US states of New Mexico and Virginia, the German company said in a statement. Amazon’s “extensive capabilities” in areas such as data transfer, storage and analytics would help Torc “accelerate its testing and commercialisation” of Level 4 technology, Daimler said. [caption id=“attachment_9318801” align=“alignright” width=“1280”] Representational image of a Daimler truck[/caption] Torc Robotics, which is based in Virginia, first partnered with Daimler Trucks in early 2019, and was later acquired by the German giant. In October 2020, Daimler also signed a global partnership with Google-Alphabet subsidiary Waymo to equip US company Freightliner’s Cascadia lorries with Level 4 technology. In June 2020, it announced a partnership with US chip company Nvidia to develop AI driving applications which included Levels 2, 3 and 4. Vehicle autonomy is classified along a scale from 0 to 5, with 5 indicating essentially total autonomy. At Level 4 autonomy, a vehicle does not need a driver but operates in a specified geographic area.