On August 7, T2 reached an agreement with seven petroleum companies—Idemitsu Kosan, Itochu Enex, Usami Koyu, Usami Group's Sanwa Energy, ENEOS, its group company ENEOS Wing, and Taiyo Oil—to cooperate in expanding the use of "carbon neutral fuel" (CN fuel) in autonomous trucks. This is said to be the first initiative to broadly promote the use of CN fuel in the field of autonomous trucks with the petroleum industry.
<Cooperation to expand the use of CN fuel>
Currently, the number of refueling stations for CN fuel is limited, and some fuels require specific procedures when refueling, making operations complicated.
T2 is developing hubs near highway interchanges to switch between autonomous driving (highways) and human driving (ordinary roads) for trunk line transportation using Level 4 autonomous trucks, and plans to set up refueling stations on the premises of these hubs. They also anticipate that using CN fuel will have a certain effect on reducing CO2 emissions.
This agreement will allow T2 to receive CN fuel from various oil companies and begin testing its use in its Level 2 autonomous trucks.
As part of the demonstration experiment, they will run vehicles using "B5 diesel," a mixture of diesel fuel and biodiesel fuel, and "renewable diesel," which is expected to be a diesel alternative fuel, in a demonstration already underway with the Sumitomo Chemical Group.
Going forward, they plan to share progress with each of the companies that have reached an agreement, identify and improve any issues in refueling operations, and consider using the system in commercial operations scheduled to begin in July 2025.
