Revolutionising Rail in the US With Autonomous Freight Cars - Intramotev CEO, Timothy Luchini

Throughout its history, the city of St. Louis in the US state of Missouri has been a hub of trade and transportation. It's now the home of Intramotev, a technology startup that has developed an autonomous freight car that can be used in standard railroad interchange service.

"We have the ability to consistently show customers, you're gonna save money and you're going to hit your emissions goals," Intramotev's CEO, Timothy Luchini, tells Auto Futures..

The company was founded in 2020 by Luchini and co-founders, Alex Peiffer and Corey Vasel.

"We really founded this company from a couple of outsiders to the industry. Alex was doing his MBA at USC and California. And I was, at the time, engineering manager at Boeing, helping lead a team of up to 40 engineers build the flying cars and package delivery drones and these urban Air Mobility platforms," says Luchini.

"We started riffing on what were the problems in rail. What does rail do well, what could we build that complements the strengths of North American freight trains being a mile or two in length. That's why we got to the point of, let's make every rail car able to drive itself but still able to fit into that big train," he adds.

The end result was the TugVolt. It's a fully battery electric self propelled railcar that can decouple to service the first and last mile legs.

"You get about 100 tonnes of payload about 100 miles with the smallest version of it. And then we have a larger version that you can get up to 600 miles from. With the smaller version, you can do that with about 100 kilowatt hour battery, which, for reference, is about the size of a car battery."

Another feature it offers is inceased certainty on where products are located on the rail system. 

"Once you electrify you start to get all these other benefits that GPS tracking brings, because there are sensors and electronics onboard. That communications is inherent so you can go down to centimetres where your vehicles are...You really get a lot more visibility, a lot more insight and that helps you optimise on the back-end as well as tracking these vehicles, assets and commodities that need to go from where they are to where they need to be."

Intramotev has also developed a railcar called ReVolt, which can capture energy via regenerative braking to reduce a locomotive's diesel consumption.

A Safer National Network

In the US, close to a million freight railcars sit idle in switching yards, awaiting locomotives to bring them to their destination. Intramotev's technology offers operators increased efficiencies for rail operators, as well as a reduction in polluting emissions.

"We're training the autonomy specifically to the routes it's going to be running on. Largely it's driven by a camera system that detects the environment. However, in rail, you've got a couple of advantages and one of those is that the trains can't swerve. The trains on the track have to follow the track. You go where the track tells you to go," says Luchini.

"If our vision system detects something unusual from the norm or somehting breaking the tracks, even if it's a UFO or a flying car or wind turbine blade, it knows that it has to stop even though it doesn't know what that thing is."

Luchini believes its autonomous railcars will actually lead to a safer rail network. 

"Today, when a rail system sees something and wants to stop, it will try but often it's just too much mass to start stopping. It might take a mile or more to start and stop some of these large trains. This you can start and stop like a semi. You start to get into those ranges where you can actually avoid catastrophes and potential incidences that certainly you want to avoid," he says.

The state of Michigan has bought into Intramotev's technology. It's issued Intramotev with a grant to fund the deployment of a fleet of TugVolts to a mining facility.

"They're an early adopter of emerging technology, so that's really an incentive for them. To adopt the technology and use it." 

"Our near term plans are - we're going to support the deployments of these TugVolts as well as deployments of these ReVolts. And support those customers first and foremost with their transportation needs, making sure that they get what they need from our system and our solution. And that it seamlessly connects in with the way that they move their materials today via rail or other solutions. And then continued to grow from there," explains Luchini.

Understanding The Vision

Being located in St. Louis brings benefits as well as challenges.

"When you're building something as technology forward as this in an area that doesn't necessarily traditionally have emerging technologies coming out, like you would expect in Silicon Valley or for other regions of North America, that gives us access to a talent pipeline which is here, which wants to work on these types of projects and make these types of impacts but maybe doesn't want to relocate," says Luchini.

"We'll just have to work harder to do stuff like bring in strategic investment. We're not part of the Silicon Valley ecosystem. We're not part of the New York investment ecosystem. On that side of things, we'll just continue to find people who are passionate and understand our vision for what we're doing and want to join us on that journey."

"I don't see a future where this doesn't exist, where you don't have a self propelled railcar of some kind moving on these networks, moving materials in a very responsible way. And I'm excited to be a part of that. We're going to make that change and step in that direction," concludes Luchini.