Zirably Joanna Buttler walks around the silver truck. It’s an American truck, recognizable by the long nose that hides the engine. The hood is open, and Buttler points to two aluminum cylinders the size of an upper arm. “These are the actuators for the steering,” explains Buttler. The fact that the truck needs two of them and many other things are duplicated is because this vehicle can do without the trucker. Buttler is responsible for this; she has been in charge of the “Autonomous Technology Group” at Daimler Truck AG for six months. She is not a classic nerd, not even an engineer, but rather a strategically thinking manager.
Maybe that’s a good thing, because autonomous driving is one of the most important future projects of the commercial vehicle manufacturer, which was split off from the car manufacturer Mercedes-Benz at the end of 2021. Buttler had already worked on the “dual track” strategy with which the ambitious goal should be achieved. The approach is two-pronged, because Daimler Trucks offers autonomously driving trucks itself with its subsidiary Torc Robotics, but also supplies vehicles to Waymo, the company that emerged from the Google projects on self-driving cars.