I'm not sure I can describe the apprehension you feel when you sit down to drive a semi-truck for the first time in your life--and that semi-truck is roughly 2,500 kilometers away. In a demonstration at MWC Barcelona 2019 (formerly called Mobile World Congress), I overcame my anxiety and successfully drove a truck through a modest obstacle course in a parking lot in Götenberg, Sweden, while I sat surrounded by monitors in a conference hall in southern Spain. Thankfully, Einride, the company behind the truck I was driving, took precautions to make sure I didn't set a new world record for "Instigating a Traffic Accident from the Greatest Distance Away." Those precautions included limiting the top speed of the truck, called a T-pod, to five kilometers per hour regardless of how hard I stepped on the gas, and having an Einride employee on site in Götenberg with a kill switch at the ready. With a 4G network, driving a truck from half a continent away would be tricky, to say the least.

With all the talk of 5G phones at MWC this week, it's easy to forget about the practical uses for the public, enterprise and more. Applications across a range of industries are on display in Barcelona, and one of the most interesting is from Einride. The Swedish company has already made headlines for its T-pod autonomous, and all-electric, delivery truck. Einride later revealed the T-log, a version of the T-pod, but as the name suggests, a model designed for logging. Here in Barcelona, the company is showing off a new setup for the first time: a system that allows someone to operate the T-pod truck remotely over 5G.

Look at just about any rendering or essayistic sketch of the world's transportation future, and you'll notice two things about the cars, trucks, vans, and whatever elses tootling around the roads: They drive themselves and they run on electricity. The funny thing about that pairing is that there's no inherent relationship between a vehicle's ability to drive itself and what it uses to move its wheels. Relying on a battery can actually be problematic for vehicles running piles of computers and sensors, but electric rides are a popular choice for autonomy developers anyway, because they feel more like the future. For Swedish trucking startup Einride, though, the connection between electric and autonomous technology is fundamental. Getting rid of the human, founder and CEO Robert Falck says, makes the formidable challenge of running a truck on batteries far easier.

If a tree falls in a forest and there's nobody around, does the truck that comes in to pick it up make a noise? Not much of one, if it's the latest offering from Swedish startup Einride, an all-electric autonomous semi looking to carve out a niche in an increasingly crowded (but not yet entirely real) market. The new truck, unveiled today at the Goodwood Festival of Speed in the UK, is the T-log. Like on the T-pod, the truck Einride unveiled last year, there's no cab or engine, just a skinny, sculpted, white slab up front. At the back are upright supports to hold the logs in place.

After a quick holiday break, we have a social-media scandal involving a Kardashian (no, the other-other-other one) and big EV news from Volvo. A 2014 crash undid Virgin Galactic's private space-travel plans, but now the company says it'll resume powered test flights. This comes after a series of glide-only trials since December, and it hopes to reach the edge of space by the end of this year. Richard Branson is targeting the middle of next year for his first trip to space, with commercial passenger flights starting soon after. The first manufacturer to step away from gasoline.

Einride has just revealed the prototype of the T-pod, its autonomous electric truck. The Swedish company's self-driving vehicle can transport 15 standard pallets and can travel 124 miles on one charge. And because there's no need for a person to sit inside of it, the T-pod also has no cab space and no windows -- giving it a very futuristically odd look. The truck uses a hybrid driverless system. While on highways, the T-pod drives itself, but on main roads, a human will remotely manage the driving system.

It could be the end of'heavy, noisy trucks with monstrous emissions'. A Swedish startup has unveiled a radical design for a driverless truck that runs entirely on electric power with a range of 124 miles on a single charge. Deemed'cargo with wheels', the'T-pod' is fully autonomous on highways and only needs human intervention when it exits onto local roads - and a human controls it remotely. A Swedish startup has unveiled a radical design for a driverless truck that runs entirely on electric power with a range of 124 miles on a single charge. Deemed'cargo with wheels', the'T-pod' is fully autonomous on highways and only needs human intervention on local roads T-Pod is driverless truck that runs entirely on electric power with a range of 124 miles on a single charge.

Swedish transportation company Einride announced its global launch with news that it's working to establish the world's first totally emission-free road transportation system. Their aim: To knock out the current semi truck-based supply chain. Einride's emission-free model is based on an entirely new vehicle class, which it calls the "T-pod," a fully electric self-driving vehicle that can also be controlled by remote drivers. The "T-pod" is around seven meters (23 feet) long, with a cargo capacity of about 15 standard pallets and a weight of 20 tons when carrying a full load. Einride said it should be able to travel 200 km (124 miles) on one charge, which doesn't sound like much -- but the company thinks the system's efficiency and low demand for operators will make up for the loss of range.