How Martina Hultén is helping Scania advance safe and precise autonomous transport

Martina Hultén’s Scania Teams profile has the cheeky line “I’m older than you”, but maybe it should read “I’m bolder than you”.

That’s because Martina, who could be described as the doyenne of the autonomous team, is an adventurous, can-do person who has no doubt in her mind that self-driving vehicles should be the transport mode of choice in the future.

In her job as Product Owner and leader of Scania’s driver team for hub-to-hub autonomous transport, Martina practises what she preaches. She is often in the cab as the safety back-up driver in one of the autonomous trucks that drive in a loop over two Swedish highways from and back to Södertälje.

Martina also thinks that the recent Red Bull-Scania challenge will help to reassure people who wonder about the safety aspects of self-driving vehicles, due to the incredible precision that enabled a daringly successful jump through the hollow trailers of two passing Scania autonomous trucks. Martina herself had an important role to play at the event, though she describes it as “behind-the scenes”.

“I coordinated the vehicles and trailers, managed the track facility and did extensive testing as a safety driver for the scenario for weeks before the event. Then on the day itself I was in charge of one of the autonomous trucks, and I’ve never reversed so much in my life because every time we had to go again when the timing wasn’t quite right, we had to back up the vehicles to re-start the sequence.

“After a while it became a competition between me and my colleague Adam Jenåker, who was the safety driver in the other truck, to see who could reverse quicker. Unfortunately he was faster than me but he’s a young guy and I’m a 60-year-old woman!”

It doesn’t sound like a behind-the-scenes tole but Martina explains why.

“When the trucks were set up I had to hide in the forest and Adam hid in the ditch beside the road because we couldn’t be visible on the film when Matt Jones was making the jump. There were actually 50 people there, but you almost can’t see anyone else on the film apart from the bike rider and his crew.”

Martina may be in the later stages of her long Scania career, but she is still really passionate about her work.

“We’re doing software releases for our autonomous technology partner Plus every second week,” she says. “We’re just following the development of the programme and of course we aim for this technology to be on roads a lot more soon.”

“I’m proud to be the oldest one here, where everyone else is 30-something,” she adds. “It’s great that I got to this special part of Scania and I think I’m appreciated and good at what I do. It’s the perfect place for me to be for at least the next five years. What else should I do? It has to be something exciting like this. And for the safety and precision it gives us, autonomous is the future of transport.”