A self-driving truck, rolled out by Uber's subsidiary Otto, shipped 45,000 cans of Budweiser beer from Fort Collins in Colorado to a warehouse in Colorado Springs last week. Company officials confirmed that the self-driven vehicle completed the journey last week. It covered the distance of around 120 miles on highway in two hours with the driver only monitoring from the truck's sleeper berth, reported Reuters.

The truck drove through Denver, plying alongside regular passenger cars, and navigated to its destination without any glitch, reported The New York Times. An Otto spokesperson said that the only time the truck driver delivering the beer cans took control of the vehicle was while driving on and off the highway ramp.

Otto's co-founder Lior Ron and senior director of logistics strategy at Anheuser-Busch InBev, which owns the Budweiser brand, James Sembrot, told Reuters that this was the first time that a revenue-generating shipment was transported via an autonomous truck. Otto earned $470 (Rs 31,000 approximately) for the job.

According to experts, trucks plying on the highways are better suited than cars manoeuvring the busy city streets to apply this autonomous technology. Besides, this technology is the need of the hour keeping in mind the scarcity of drivers. The American Trucking Association faces a shortfall of 48,000 drivers, and said this could go up to 175,000 by 2024, reported Wired.

Uber had acquired Otto, which was co-founded by Google car and map project veterans Anthony Levandowski and Lior Ron, in August for around $680 million (Rs 4,500 crore approximately). “We think this technology is inching closer to commercial availability. Over the next couple of years, we’ll continue to develop the tech, so it’s actually ready to encounter every condition on the road,” Ron had said in an interview.