T2 drove an autonomous truck in and out of its driver-swap hubs on ordinary roads

T2 Inc. said on October 21 that it had driven an autonomous truck automatically out of and into the hubs where its drivers get in and out, a step it had not previously managed, because those hubs sit off the expressway and reaching them means driving on ordinary roads as well.

The runs took place in September, after public-road testing began in the middle of the month. One went from the hub T2 calls Transgate Ayase, near the Ayase smart interchange on the Tomei Expressway in Kanagawa, along an ordinary road and through the interchange toll gate onto the expressway. The other came off the Chugoku Expressway through the Nishinomiya-kita interchange toll gate and along an ordinary road to Transgate Nishinomiya-kita in Hyogo.

T2 said it designed the trajectories to within a few centimeters in advance, so that a roughly 12-meter truck would keep at least a meter from road edges and structures while passing through a hub entrance only about 10 meters wide. It said on-vehicle sensors recognize pedestrians and cyclists across 60 meters ahead, after which the truck follows or stops for them.

In the same experiment a worker used a web application T2 wrote to dispatch the truck from a smartphone, which is the operation the company expects at Level 4 once the driver has got out. T2 said it will phase the new software into the commercial service it already runs for about 30 companies from January 2027, and that ahead of that it carried freight on Fukuyama Transporting services on October 19 and 20.

T2 said this is the first case in Japan of a transport operator developing and deploying the technology, citing its own web research as of October 21.