Shipping experts say the big winter storm across a wide swath of the country should be business as usual--if their safeguards hold. Up to two-thirds of the US is facing down the threat of serious snow, cold, and ice this weekend, with the potential to snarl roads (and the businesses that depend on them) from Texas up to New York City . At this point, grocery stores, logistics experts, warehouse operators, and trucking companies have been prepping for days. Still, the effects on the supply chain--and the retail store shelves that depend on them--are yet to be determined. On one hand, this is winter business as usual.

Sen. Josh Hawley, R-Mo., commends President Donald Trump tearing into America's nation builders in the Middle East and weighs in on a Wisconsin judge being indicted for hiding an illegal immigrant from ICE on'The Ingraham Angle.' FIRST ON FOX – Sen. Josh Hawley, R-Mo., asked the Justice Department on Thursday to investigate a Chinese-owned self-driving trucking company, one of the largest in the U.S., citing allegations that it had shared proprietary data and other sensitive technology with state-linked entities in Beijing. The letter, sent to U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi and previewed exclusively to Fox News Digital, asks the Justice Department to open a formal investigation into the autonomous truck company TuSimple Holdings, a Chinese-owned company and one of the largest self-driving truck companies in the U.S. In it, Hawley cites recent reporting from the Wall Street Journal that alleges that TuSimple "systematically shared proprietary data, source code, and autonomous driving technologies" with Chinese state-linked entities-- what he described as "blatant disregard" of the 2022 national security agreement with the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States, or CFIUS. "These reports also revealed communications from TuSimple personnel inside China requesting the shipment of sensitive Nvidia AI chips and detailed records showing'deep and longstanding ties' with Chinese military-affiliated manufacturers," Hawley said. Sen. Josh Hawley, R-Mo., wants the Justice Department to investigate TuSimple Holdings, a Chinese-owned self-driving trucking company. He noted that to date, TuSimple "has not faced serious consequences" for sharing American intellectual property with China, despite having continued to share data with China after signing a national security agreement with the U.S. government in 2022, which was enforced by the Committee on Foreign Investment in the U.S. "If the reports about TuSimple are accurate, they represent not just a violation of export law, but a breach of national trust and a direct threat to American technological leadership," Hawley said.

Truck accident attorneys like to market their services by telling potential clients about how dangerous trucking is and how things are only getting worse each day. It is true that there are more trucks on the road and the industry is losing experienced drivers; however, emerging technologies are likely to have a significantly positive impact on truck safety. In particular, artificial intelligence will change the way operators drive their trucks, and tests show the use of this technology will greatly reduce truck accidents. In other words, an even better future for truck safety is just over the horizon. There are several ways that AI can help truck drivers.

Freight-matching services, which pair shippers to freight carriers like trucks and vans, are attracting growing investment. Despite a slow initial uptake -- in a 2018 FreightWaves survey, carriers that use freight-matching services said that they only sourced 11% of their freight from the services -- they've become a larger source of business as the pandemic encourages companies to invest in digital supply chain solutions. Flock Freight, Loadsmart, Next Trucking, and Convoy have raised hundreds of millions of dollars to grow their networks to hundreds of thousands of trucks. While the freight-matching sector is becoming increasingly competitive, new startups with novel approaches -- or what they claim are novel approaches -- are emerging to take on incumbents. Among the newcomers is Parade, which leverages AI-powered technology to help find matches of freight load, route, equipment type, and a carrier's (i.e., shipper's) on-time reliability.

For TuSimple, it was a perfectly-executed maneuver, one the company has practiced repeatedly under mostly ideal conditions on a familiar route. Days before and hundreds of miles away in Cupertino, Calif., a self-driving PlusAI Corp. big rig undertook an even more ambitious operation, merging onto Interstate 280 and into the crush of Bay Area rush hour, and motored on its own cautiously down the clogged highway. The maneuvers on public roads, both short demonstration runs with no commercial cargo on board, show the potential of a technology that has drawn billions of dollars of investment. But they also show how far it has to go before it can operate safely without a human at the wheel, allowing semi trucks to haul themselves over busy interstate highways, through gnarly weather and routes lined with construction. Most startups are pushing to achieve what is known as Level 4 automation, meaning the vehicle is capable of performing all driving functions under certain conditions.

Optimal Dynamics, a New York-based startup applying AI to shipping logistics, today announced it has closed an $18.4 million round led by Bessemer Venture Partners. Optimal Dynamics says the funds will be used to more than triple its 25-person team and support engineering efforts, as well as bolstering sales and marketing departments. Last-mile delivery logistics tend to be the most expensive and time-consuming part of the shipping process. According to one estimate, last-mile costs account for 53% of total shipping costs and 41% of total supply chain costs. With the rise of ecommerce in the U.S., retail providers are increasingly focusing on fulfilment and distribution at the lowest cost.

In 2015, I got obsessed with the idea of driverless trucks and started Starsky Robotics. In 2016, we became the first street-legal vehicle to be paid to do real work without a person behind the wheel. In 2018, we became the first street-legal truck to do a fully unmanned run, albeit on a closed road. In 2019, our truck became the first fully-unmanned truck to drive on a live highway. I remain incredibly proud of the product, team, and organization we were able to build; one where PhDs and truck drivers worked side by side, where generational challenges were solved by people with more smarts than pedigree, and where we discovered how the future of logistics will work.

Technology has upended one business after another across the United States. To cite only the most recent developments: Lyft and others have utterly changed personal transportation, and Airbnb has done the same for hospitality. And in January 2018, the first Amazon Go store opened, sans checkout clerks, promising similar upheaval for grocers. What is happening is fairly well understood, if initially underestimated. Digitization and other technological advances are exposing the vulnerabilities in every industry, particularly retail. And now, logistics companies are starting to feel the heat. Our new research has turned up five trends that offer startling indicators of impending change for the trucking, rail, warehousing, and logistics companies that move America's merchandise. Start with autonomous trucks (ATs), which will change the cost structure and utilization of trucking--and with that, the cost of consumer goods. Sixty-five percent of the nation's consumable goods are trucked to market.

A Dover company is using artificial intelligence (AI) to help trucking companies ship goods from Point A to Point B as efficiently as possible. Envio 360, with offices in the former mill building at 383 Central Ave. in downtown Dover, offers the trucking industry a platform with AI to manage and optimize the movement of shipping containers. The company draws data from a trucking company's transportation management system (TMS) to create the algorithms in its optimization software. "Here's where the artificial intelligence comes in," said Larry Cuddy Jr., chief commercial officer for Envio 360. "We're not just one and done, because in the course of the day everything happens: Trucks break down, guys call in sick, you got traffic jams on (Interstate) 93, the port closed early, whatever it may be. We continuously optimize to create the best plan every second. According to industry data, 70 percent of all freight moved in the United States is done by trucks, about $700 billion worth of food, medical supplies, fuel and other goods annually. Cuddy describes the company's software as "agnostic." "We can connect into any network, the Internet of Things (IOT), and internet supply chains," he said. "The platform we built is not the system of record.

This is the second in a five-part series covering the impact of Augmented Reality on the transportation and logistics industry. As we established in the first part of our new five-part series on Augmented Reality in the Transportation and Logistics sector, this is an industry under-going a great deal of change. A mix of factors are all propelling and enabling change in one form or another. The recent report by strategy and analysis firm PwC that we referenced in Part 1 of this series does a great job of graphically representing many of these factors. The series of concentric circles on this PwC chart shows how these trends relate to one another.