Convoy touts progress of Automated Reloads offering

Since introducing its Automate Reloads program earlier this year, Seattle-based digital freight broker Convoy said today that the offering has yielded a 45% decrease on carbon dioxide emissions created by empty freight miles.

Launched in late June, Convoy said that Automated Reloads is geared towards booking multiple loads at a time. Convoy said this offering leverages algorithmically evaluates and continuously optimizes how loads can be grouped in real-time, all without human intervention. Carriers can bid their rates or instantly accept these pre-planned combinations of loads as a single job through the Convoy app for Automated Reloads, which, Convoy said, makes sure drivers are staying on the road moving freight. Convoy’s also noted that its algorithms customize live and also drop-and-hook packages in real time for each carrier, by understanding their unique preferences, hours-of-service and driver locations, wait times at facilities, and other considerations.

Convoy officials said today that Automated Reloads uses machine learning to automatically bundle multiple truckloads into one job, which, in turn, reduces empty miles and the resultant unnecessary carbon emissions. What’s more, it noted that over the three months since Automated Reloads was introduced in the United States, Convoy is currently bundling more than 50% of its loads in myriad lanes out of top freight markets, like Atlanta, Los Angeles, and St. Louis. 

And they added that a key benefit of Automated Reloads is that Convoy is able to automatically identify the right set of shipments to group together for a carrier and subsequently book them as a single job. The main benefit of this, it explained, is that it makes it easier for a carrier to find more loads and keep their truck full while earning and also reduce carbon emissions from empty miles that pollute the environment by 45%.

This is especially notable, when considering that 2017 data from the Environmental Protection Agency stated that medium and heavy-duty truck freight account for more than 436 million metric tons of carbon dioxide emissions per year, with half of those emissions coming from full truckload sector trucks, in which 35% of total mileage is empty. 

Putting that into additional perspective, Convoy said that if the trucking industry were to reach the same levels of efficiency, it would reduce CO2 emissions by 34 million metric tons, as per the EPA’s Greenhouse Gas Equivalencies Calculator, which is equivalent to:

• taking 7.2 million passenger vehicles off the roads for a year - approximately the number of passenger vehicles registered in the state of Florida;
• planting 559 million tree seedlings and allowing them to grow for 10 years’
• 7,163 wind turbines running for 1 year;
• eliminating 78.3 million barrels of oil; 
• eliminating 5.9 million homes’ use of electricity for 1 year; and
• 1.5 billion trash bags recycled instead of landfilled

“For decades, the miles that trucks run empty have been a seemingly intractable source of waste in the freight industry, unnecessarily emitting millions of metric tons of carbon dioxide,” said Aaron Terrazas, Convoy’s Director of Economic Research, in a statement. “More efficient route and schedule planning is the future of freight, and has the potential to meaningfully reduce the industry’s carbon footprint.”

Prior to the launch of Automatic Reloads, a Convoy executive told LM that finding reloads was a manual process in which carriers worked with different brokerages, which, in turn required hours of phone calls, faxes, haggling, and waiting as well as monitoring multiple load boards, which he labeled as a very time-consuming and inefficient process.

Convoy tested and refined Automatic Reloads for six months, a process, which the executive said, involved hundreds of carriers and thousands of loads.

Convoy identified multiple ways in which automatic reloads can increase carrier earnings, including:

• creating a one-time or recurring request for preferred lanes, or search for specific cities;
• looking for offers with reloads packaged together;
• optionally, adding more reloads to the suggested route; and
• tapping to bid or accept