A former Silicon Valley and South Korean-born startup that’s been testing its autonomous vehicle technology at the Cincinnati/Northern Kentucky International Airport has taken a key step forward in its goal of commercializing that product by the end of the year.
ThorDrive, headquartered in Over-the-Rhine, is testing a proof of concept for its driverless tech aimed at the aviation industry – and with a new informal alliance in place with a Wisconsin-based equipment manufacturer, the company is on track to sell its first unit sometime in 2021, Eddie Shelton, VP of business development, said.
For nearly a year, ThorDrive has been mapping out the airfield as part of a first-of-its-kind partnership with CVG. It recently transferred its tech, which ThorDrive said can be retrofitted to any ground support vehicle used around the airport, to a baggage tractor. On Tuesday, that cart made several driverless runs between the terminal and airplane gates as part of a media demo. Shelton said the product is about 90-95% ready for market.
“We’ll be testing and further fine-tuning over the next few months, but the development really never stops,” he told me. “This is such a safety critical environment, so there’s always more data, there’s always a new scenario, something random that happens that you need to take into consideration and program for.”
I first featured ThorDrive in November. The startup, founded in 2016, has roots in Seoul, South Korea, and entered the U.S. market via Silicon Valley in 2018, where it launched a last-mile delivery product for a handful of small businesses around Palo Alto. It was quietly recruited to CVG in February 2020 – part of the airport’s ongoing push to drive innovation.
Until now, its test runs have been made using a small cargo van bearing the ThorDrive name. Through a new strategic alliance with Wisconsin’s Wollard International, a designer and manufacturer of ground support equipment, the tech has now been “upfitted” to the baggage tractor. The startup hopes to get its hand on a second tractor, an electric version, sometime this spring.
The overall goal, Shelton said, is offer cost efficiencies and improve safety. He said “pretty much any ground support equipment out there” could be made autonomous.
“Our goal is to take out any sort of operator error, or incidents due to lack of training and get those as close to zero as possible,” Shelton said. “Every year, airports report about $4 billion worth of damages due to ground support vehicles, and on top of that, you have the cost of injuries. We believe this creates a lot of synergies.”
With a proof of concept in hand, Shelton said ThorDrive, which employs 11 in Cincinnati, is on track to have salable units ready by the end of the year. He expects the initial price tag of $150,000 for the package to drop drastically over the next two to three years.
