Seeing the future of sharing autonomous trucks in logistics business, G7 is engaged in lifting the pressure off drivers and advanced safety.
In China, 130 million tons of cargo are transported every day, and 78% of cargo is carried by long-haul trucks. With five million heavy trucks and 14 million light and medium trucks, the total road freight market value is estimated to USD 728 billion (CNY 5 trillion), according to Bain. Technology is transforming China's inefficient road freight industry. Last year, the birth of Manbang heralded a revolution in hauling freight in China. Dec 10, with the core competitive edge on overlooking fleet logistics industry in China, G7 secured an astonishing funding of USD 320 million and has become one of the most valuable IoT companies in the world.
Artificial Intelligence in IoT (AIoT) platform
G7 introduced the proprietary Artificial Intelligence in IoT (AIoT) platform to tie with logistic enterprises and freight fleets, providing them integrated fleet management solutions and services, covering safety, assets, payments, financing. Based on the platform, G7 is able to overlook the whole fleet logistics industry and even explore Intelligent-equipment-as-service model.
“The scale of our data and neutrality of our industry-wide platform are at the core of our competitive edge”, said MA Zheren（马喆人）, a former Executive Vice President of Tencent and the chairman of G7 since he joined the team in Aug 2017.
We will talk about assets in the second part and address the three things concerning freight fleets most: safety, payments and financing.
For safety, G7 provides hardware, Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) and insurance products cooperated with insurance companies. According to a report co-published by Bain and G7, in the traditional management model, five managers from calling center usually are responsible for 10 vehicles while one manager is for 100 vehicles under the digitalized model. The number is ramping up to 400 in G7 platform now, according to ZHANG Jielong（张杰龙）, G7's CFO, which keeps rising weekly. Every manager knows exactly the condition of cars and drivers and what happened on the highways before the phone calls. Efficient and effective safety fleet management leads to fewer loss settlements for insurance companies.
Businesses that use G7 are opened to a world of opportunity beyond just track and trace. Services such as G7's ETC( Electronic Toll Collection ) allow vehicles to go cashless on expressways and reduce waiting times at toll stops by 80%.
Comprehensive bidding platforms help private fleets connect directly with potential shippers within days. G7's fuel services take a headache out of monitoring fuel theft and managing fuel cards. These are just a few of the cost-savings benefits of being part of the G7 Family.
For Financing, G7 fills the gap between shipper long payment and instant capital demands on small or middle size fleets. In conclusion, G7 deals with all the stuff correlated with management, what their clients need to consider is only relationships with shippers.
Seeing the future of sharing autonomous trucks in logistics business, G7 is engaged in lifting the pressure off drivers and advanced safety.
Intelligent-Equipment-As-Service(IEAS)
For the past half year, G7 has started to explore innovative models of IEAS urged by their 60,000 customers and over 800,000 commercial vehicles in China to provide intelligent trailers. Once the company called the strategy as Intelligent Asset. June, G7 debuted intelligent trailer to address thorny issues like loading, weighing, safety, docking monitoring, tire safety and parking blind. April, G7 announced a joint venture with Nio and GLP called Inceptio Technology（赢彻科技）. Inceptio highlight efforts by G7 to stay relevant for a generation raised on ride-hailing and car-sharing and poised to embrace self-driving vehicles. Inceptio is committed to developing next-generation of heavy-duty truck by new energy technologies, autonomous driving and logistic big data. The truck fleets, accounting for a large part in the balance sheets of transportation companies, isn't as important to the future transportation companies as it was in the 1980s or 2000s. Subscribing to a fleet is a convenient way to have one without financial burden.
However, it does not mean that these companies will rely on sharing-truck completely but stick with their own fleets to serve regular clients and provide dynamic clients with sharing-truck, Said MA. Built on G7's massive real-time data and fleet management capabilities, Inceptio hired 70 people to train their autonomous algorithms for smart truck and management systems.
Inceptio aims to target Level 3 autonomous driving in three years using driving behaviors data, fuel consumption data of their customers, most of the existing angle customers are coming from G7, and transform into self-cycling data in five years.
Nov, Inceptio has been issued the test permit for autonomous driving trucks on logistics highways in Baoding, Hubei Province. The company is catching up with incumbents in the autonomous driving industry in road testing, such as Tesla, Waymo, and Tusimple.