US-based startup Intramotev is on a mission to take rail freight into a new era. The Missouri-based company is focusing on developing a battery electric autonomous rail car, enabling freight to move with the flexibility of a truck with the efficiency of rail. Founded in 2020, the company draws on co-founder and CEO Timothy Luchini’s experience as an engineer at Boeing, working on urban air mobility and cargo air drones, moving packetised air freight using electric propulsion systems.
“Alex [Peiffer, Intramotev co-founder and COO] sent me a paper about battery electric hybrid locomotives, and he was asking me what I think about that tech in the context of rail,” Luchini recounts. “I told him the truth. I think that it’s an interesting incremental improvement on the current model, but maybe not transformational. And he said: ‘Okay, well what happens if you take all this tech that you’re building for these cargo air drones – the autonomy systems, electric power systems, the motors, the batteries, the sensors – and then we applied that to rail?’”
… “We have two primary products. One’s called the TugVolt and one’s called the ReVolt. The TugVolt is a rail car first and foremost, it has the standard North American air brake system and the standard North American coupling system and is compliant with North American safety standards. But we have modified that to allow for each rail car to drive itself. So, it can be backwards compatible and pulled in a train, but it can also enable point-to-point movement. “