"Automation, electrification, digitalization: all interconnected"

Einride is an industry-disrupting freight technology company providing end-to-end solutions for electric and autonomous shipping. By deploying integrated technologies using its data-driven operating system, Saga, it enables customers to decarbonize their operations by making an immediate shift towards digitalized, electric road freight. In 2019, Einride became the world’s first company to operate an autonomous, electric freight vehicle on a public road. Its vision is to make Earth a better place through intelligent movement.

Zeljko Jeftic, Director Autonomous Electric Transport (AET) at Einride, shares this vision at this year's Drive Forward event. With a reason, as the event is focusing on digitization and decarbonization, exactly what Einride is trying to achieve.

How is digitization, including AI, accelerating the shift toward autonomous logistics?

Jeftic: "Einride has taken on three big transformations of the freight industry: digitalization, electrification, and now – automation, with digitalization being essential for the application of autonomous technology. Our digital platform is the foundation for the complex planning and evaluation of our electric autonomous operations as well as our electric manned operations, ensuring efficiency across the supply chain. For example, it enables efficient handling of charging time slots, charging duration, dynamic route allocation for e-trucks and autonomous trucks."

"AI and machine learning are two significant digital innovations that have presented boundless opportunities for accelerating growth and enabling scaling. There is a broad understanding that both AI and ML are crucial for autonomous vehicles to handle the immense complexities of driving on public roads that cannot be solely hardcoded into algorithms."

What role do digital twins play in testing and optimizing transport systems?

Jeftic: "As part of our journey to transform freight, we continuously aim to shift left: conducting testing activities earlier in our development cycle to increase development velocity, shorten feedback loops, and reduce the time it takes to bring innovation to market. Simulation, or digital twins, plays a pivotal role in this shift. It enables us to provide engineers across the organization with accessible, cost-efficient test beds and powerful tooling, ultimately accelerating our ability to learn fast, test bold ideas, and validate critical safety assumptions. But testing early is not just about quality assurance, it’s about building incremental evidence for our safety case throughout the development lifecycle. As we continue to scale, we’re also thinking about ways we can use digital twins to help create efficiencies for our customer flows as well. As our operations and products are on both private and public roads, this proactive approach becomes increasingly critical."

What is Einride's role in this?

Jeftic: "We see it as our responsibility to be at the forefront of innovation. Our holistic approach and purpose-built technology make us uniquely positioned to deploy autonomous operations at scale, in a manner that meets transport demands in environments that are ready to ship autonomous and electric, ensuring we are maximizing efficiencies and proving the business case across the board. Being part of Einride’s ecosystem, which holds one of the largest electric manned truck fleets and autonomous daily operations across two continents, provides us with great learnings on how we can improve efficiencies by applying autonomous to global logistics sites. "

How important is the development of smart infrastructure for autonomous transport?

Jeftic: "As the industry continues to advance at such a fast pace, it is essential that we work with governments to put the infrastructure in place so that these technologies provide maximum public benefit. Smart infrastructure provides the framework for the application of our autonomous technology. We always thoroughly assess the profiles for the roads and areas where we look to deploy autonomous vehicles. Because our autonomous vehicles are purpose-built and unmanned by design, we are dependent on 5G to monitor the operations remotely via sensor and camera inputs. We also have experience partnering with mobile network operators in places with fewer 5G connections."

What are the key challenges in integrating autonomous vehicles with existing transport networks?

Jeftic: "Ultimately, there are three things that need to align to deploy autonomous transportation: technological development, regulatory maturity, and customer readiness. While we already have technological capabilities to deploy autonomous at scale, we need all three to align to truly unlock the potential of how autonomous freight at scale can revolutionize the global supply chain."

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How can IoT and V2X (Vehicle-to-Everything) communication improve safety and efficiency?

Jeftic: "Safety is a key pillar for Einride and is central to every new deployment. Various testing circuits both in the planning, initial implementation and the daily operations of the vehicle are put into place. Ahead of the vehicle being on site, a set of safety gates is kicked off, a joint process across the engineering, techops, product, and management teams, to assess the state of the vehicle from a software and hardware perspective, being ready to deploy. These continue into the initial weeks of the vehicle being in place as well to ensure a successful start to operations. Safety performance indicators that are tracked daily are established, both as part of the regulatory permitting process and as a way to measure the improvement of our systems and processes. As we scale to more complex environments, technologies like V2X can be valuable in opening gates and understanding signal-time phasing of traffic lights."

What countries or regions are leading the way in connected infrastructure?

Jeftic: "Actually, the Netherlands and the Brabant region are definitely among the world leaders in the field, and I’ve been personally involved with leaders in this region for many years, since CVIS and FREILOT projects on C-ITS and connected infra. It's been inspiring recently to see renewed energy from European countries like Germany, France and Belgium. Similarly, the UAE is laser-focused on delivering a fully electrified autonomous ecosystem in the near term."

What role do real-time data and predictive analytics play in logistics planning?

Jeftic: "Our digital platform is the foundation for the complex planning and evaluation of our electric autonomous operations as well as our electric manned operations, ensuring efficiency across the supply chain. For example, it enables efficient handling of trucks, pallets, warehouse schedules and charging."

How can companies transition from traditional logistics to fully digitalized operations?

Jeftic: "I’m always a strong advocate for digitalization, and have written articles about this in my role as Head of Global Innovation at the IRU - World's road transport organisation. Today, my assessment is that most logistics players are digitalized, potentially with steps to take on fully integrating different solutions. I’d like to call on logistics players to electrify their operations today and consider autonomous transport seriously. In both of these cases, Einride could be the partner."

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How do we ensure that autonomous transport systems are secure from cyber threats?

Jeftic: "Security in autonomous transport isn’t an add-on, it’s foundational. At Einride, we apply a multi-layered cybersecurity strategy that starts with secure-by-design architecture, giving us fundamental resilience across the vertically integrated vehicle hardware and cloud platform. We continuously monitor, test, and update our systems using industry-leading threat detection techniques and dedicated engineered security monitors. When deploying our vehicles, we work closely with regulators and third-party security experts to independently verify the security of our systems. With complex, safety-critical autonomous systems like those in our autonomous truck, cybersecurity is all-encompassing. Our approach reflects that; we’re proactive, not reactive, because trust is everything in autonomous transport."

What measures should be in place to protect sensitive logistics data?

Jeftic: "Protecting sensitive logistics data requires a comprehensive data governance framework. That means end-to-end encryption, both in transit and at rest, strict access controls, and continuous monitoring for anomalies. At Einride, we segment data environments to reduce risk exposure and apply role-based permissions to ensure only the right people access the right data. We also follow international standards and regularly audit our systems for compliance and resilience. Beyond the tech, we invest heavily in training and safety and security culture - delivering safe and secure logistics technology can only be done by a safe and trustworthy organization.

What are the risks of over-reliance on digital systems, and how can we mitigate them?

Jeftic: "Einride’s autonomous technology is built on the fundament of using automation and digital technology to augment and empower humans - leveraging the qualities of human operators to provide adaptability and creativity, supporting big data feeds and AI analytics to create a system-of-systems which is scalable, resilient and ready for the future of freight."

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How will digitization change the economics of freight transport?

Jeftic: "We are strong believers of digitalization, electrification and automation being able to bring cost efficiency to customers across the board. There is no doubt that digitalization is set to revolutionize freight transport by unlocking efficiency, reducing costs, and enabling autonomous and electric freight at scale."

What new revenue models are emerging in autonomous and electric logistics?

Jeftic: "I believe we can expect a wider variation of business models compared to the traditional, one-year contracts which are common in the industry. Our capabilities are scalable pending different customer needs, and Einride’s autonomous capacity-as-a-service offering includes everything from site selection and network analysis to deployment of hardware and software and daily operations of the autonomous services."

What's the key message of your keynote at the Drive Forward event?

Jeftic: "Automation, electrification, and digitalization are all interconnected. While digitalization has already yielded certain advantages, electrification is now expanding rapidly. In specific scenarios, autonomous transportation is emerging already today as a practical and viable solution."