A few former engineers from Elon Musk’s Space X project, formed a startup called Parallel Systems, trying to innovate in the rail transportation market, using individual, electric and autonomous rail carts to transport the shipping containers all around the country in a new futuristic designed Electric Rail System
Parallel Systems, closed it’s Series A funding round with a great $49.55 million, so they are not the only ones that think and believe the freight industry is a great place to bring innovation and build competition for rail transportation. For those of you keeping score at home, Soule was the Head of Avionics at SpaceX for 13 years. The other co-founders are John Howard (formerly Head of Batteries at SpaceX) and Ben Stabler (formerly Head of Avionics Software, and lead engineer for motorized actuator electronics at SpaceX).
The railway business is a tough one to break into. It’s a static monopoly dominated by a few giants sitting on their railroad rights and making minimal investments to maximize profits. Over the years, railroads were privatized in North America, and the businesses have no issues closing smaller railroads. They often close smaller railroads when they can’t find a way to make money off of them and focus on the most profitable routes with longer trains on short distance. Despite those issues, freight trains have remained a good solution for shipping container transportation, since they are about four times as efficient as trucks. But, with trucks expected to become electric and autonomous in the coming years, they are going to close the efficiency gap with trains.
If you think that not a long time ago, we were affected by a supply chain bottleneck, the estimated shortage of 80,000 truck drivers in the US was taking part of the blame. That figure comes from the American Trucking Association, which also estimates that the shortage will double to 160,000 by 2030 unless something is done.
The zero emission, electric, autonomous rail vehicle model gives Parallel Systems the ability to break trains down into their component parts, enabling each railcar to split off individually or form new platoons with others. Configuring a train as a string of individually capable autonomous units opens up a world of possibilities, especially coupled with zero emission, low noise operation.
If we think about decentralization, as we talked many times in previous posts, why not think about decentralizing rail yards. Parallel Systems also suggests that its self-driving railcars could reduce if not eliminate the need to expand the nation’s stock of conventional rail yards, which are large, noisy, and typically located at the outskirts of the cities, where now we could start building new residential areas instead.
The end goal for Parallel is to decarbonize the freight industry. While the grid isn’t all using clean energy, taking out the diesel or natural gas-powered trains and trucks will open up the industry to reducing carbon emissions when the grid is cleaner in the future. We hope for better ways of regaining our natural habitat and for a cleaner and eco friendly society.
