An Autonomous Trucking Startup Stays the (Very Long) Course

Nancy Sun, 37, is chief engineer at Ike, the autonomous-trucking startup named for President Eisenhower and his interstate highway system. Sun and her two co-founders, Jur van den Berg and Alden Woodrow, started the company in 2018 after leaving Uber Technologies Inc.’s autonomous-vehicle unit. An MIT-trained engineer, Sun has been working on self-driving trucks since she joined Anthony Levandowski’s Otto in 2016. Before that, she worked in the special projects group at Apple Inc. and before that for the defunct electric-motorcycle startup Mission Motors.

Trucking has become an area of increased interest and activity in the autonomous-vehicle industry in the last few years as efforts to build self-driving cars have proved more costly and time-consuming than expected. Ike competes with other startups, including TuSimple, Kodiak Robotics, and Embark Trucks, as well as industry pioneer Waymo, which increasingly views trucking as its fastest path to market. Yet the future of self-driving trucks is also uncertain. Last month, trucking startup Starsky Robotics shut down after four years in operation. In a Medium post announcing the company’s end, founder Stefan Seltz-Axmacher wrote that “supervised machine learning doesn’t live up to the hype.” The economic fallout from Covid-19 adds to the challenges facing the industry, but also, potentially, to the demand for autonomous technology.