A €4.44 Million Autonomous Truck Deal Still Leaves the Mixed Lane Unsolved
A port does not fail because the autonomous truck cannot move a container. It fails when that truck shares a lane with a manned one, a crane holds the box, and the exception has no owner. PD Teesport awarded Westwell a framework for autonomous horizontal container transport at Teesport Container Terminal 2. Splash247 reported the contract at €4.44 million, or $5.1 million, covering electric autonomous terminal tractors and an automation system, running from October 2026 to October 2031 with an option to extend. The truck is the visible piece. The readiness is the terminal around it.
The Truck Is Not the Readiness Check
Bijoy Bhaskaran, director of mobility at TÜV SÜD America, said in written comments to The Supply Chainer that controlled industrial environments such as ports are among the most suitable settings for highly automated vehicles, because operations are structured, predictable and governed by defined processes. The path from a pilot to routine commercial operation depends less on the vehicle and more on how it is integrated into infrastructure, traffic management, fleet operations, workforce procedures and safety governance.
The readiness question, he said, is not whether the autonomous truck can operate safely on its own, but whether the terminal as a whole is prepared to manage mixed operations between autonomous and human-driven vehicles. Before deployment, terminals should verify that the operational design domain aligns with actual conditions: traffic patterns, weather, lighting, container stacking, and interfaces with cranes, gates and yard operations.
Clear right-of-way rules, traffic management procedures and emergency response protocols are essential where the two types of equipment meet. Terminals should also run operational risk assessments and scenario-based validation for blocked lanes, disabled vehicles, communication failures, pedestrian incursions and unexpected equipment movements. Workforce preparedness matters: operators, maintenance and control-room staff need to know how to manage the system and intervene. "Operational readiness is fundamentally a system-level challenge involving people, processes, infrastructure, and technology, not simply a vehicle deployment exercise." He would favor phased deployment, with each expansion in fleet size or scope supported by evidence that the system still performs safely and predictably.
The same limit is already on the record. In The Supply Chainer's coverage of MODEX, Matt Yearling, chief executive of YMX Logistics, said: "Autonomy happens at the convergence of digital intelligence and physical execution. We're seeing real progress in yard operations, but autonomy isn't achieved through isolated technologies. It requires an operating system that continuously captures data, improves decision-making, and drives ongoing optimization."
A Conservative Stop Can Cost More Than a Risk
Safety and productivity cannot be treated as separate objectives, Bhaskaran said. In a commercial autonomous operation, the system must achieve both at the same time. An autonomous vehicle that responds very conservatively to every uncertain situation may demonstrate safe behavior at the vehicle level, but frequent stops or requests for assistance can create congestion and reduce terminal throughput. Optimizing movements purely for productivity can introduce unacceptable safety risks. Dispatch, charging, vehicle availability, traffic management and exception handling need to be evaluated as one operating system. Exception handling is particularly important: operators need to understand how quickly the operation can safely recover from blocked routes, communication failures, unexpected equipment movements or situations requiring human assistance. "The relevant measure is not how efficiently one autonomous truck performs its task, but whether the entire fleet can maintain safe, predictable throughput under real operating conditions."
A Pilot Is Not a Scale
Readiness to scale, he said, is demonstrated not by a successful pilot, but by sustained, repeatable performance across a broad range of operational conditions. On safety, operators should look for consistent performance within the defined domain, robust handling of foreseeable edge cases, and clearly managed residual risk. Incident rates, near-miss trends, disengagement events requiring human intervention, system availability, cybersecurity resilience and recovery during abnormal situations are the indicators. On productivity, the measures are throughput consistency, container move efficiency, mission completion rates, fleet utilization, equipment availability, and the ability to hold performance during peak demand rather than under ideal pilot conditions. Safety assurance should evolve alongside the expansion. "The real test of scalability is whether the system as a whole can maintain acceptable safety and operational performance as fleet size, traffic density, interactions, and operating complexity increase."
A €4.44 million framework puts autonomous tractors on a working terminal. It does not, by itself, set the right-of-way when a manned truck and an autonomous one meet at the crane, or say who recovers the move when the lane is blocked. Until those rules and the recovery time are on the record, the pilot can succeed and the throughput can still fall.
