Kamaz-owned road carrier Natcar organizes first driverless transportation using trailers between Russia, Kazakhstan

MOSCOW. May 28 (Interfax) - The Kamaz-owned subsidiary road freight carrier Natcar (JSC National Carrier) has organized the first transportation using driverless trucks between Russia and Kazakhstan, the press service of PJSC Kamaz said.

The trucks crossed the border of the two states and covered part of the route autonomously. The event took place during the state visit of President Vladimir Putin to Kazakhstan.

"The development of driverless transport is one of the current trends in the automotive industry. Kamaz has been developing driverless vehicles for many years and is the only Russian manufacturer of highly automated vehicles based on its own truck chassis today. The introduction of an experimental legal regime on Russian highways gave us the opportunity to launch highly automated Kamaz vehicles and allows us to test our developments on public roads. We are pleased that autonomous logistics, which during this time has confirmed its feasibility and efficiency, is now going international, and we are ready to provide further assistance in developing the project," PJSC Kamaz General Director Sergei Kogogin was quoted as saying.

The partnership between Russia and Kazakhstan in transporting goods by highly automated vehicles is logical due to a combination of factors - a land border, an extensive road network, plans to improve uninterrupted connections, and others. Until now, the countries have developed driverless technology exclusively within their own borders, in isolation.

"Logistics is a global living organism, and limiting its development to the borders of a single country is simply unpromising. I am confident that international projects and cooperation of this scale can bring driverless freight transportation to a fundamentally new level of service and technology," Natcar General Director Samat Sattarov was quoted as saying.

Natcar is one of the main operators of highly automated vehicles (HAVs) created by PJSC Kamaz based on the KAMAZ-54901. Its fleet includes 18 such vehicles, which transport goods along the country's major highways: the M-11 Neva, the Central Ring Road (A-113) and the M-12 Vostok.