The Center for Freight & Logistics Efficiency with Electrified and Automated Trucking is the culmination of five plus years of effort. Building on the work of the Transportation and Autonomous Systems Institute (TASI) at Purdue University—Indianapolis and the Center for Transportation Innovations in Education and Research (C-Tier) at the University of Memphis, the leaders in these centers recognized the critical need to advance the body of knowledge related to commercial road vehicles and logistics. Through an extensive customer discovery process, we interviewed hundreds of companies within the trucking industry and identified  common needs among them. This allowed for the refinement of our goals to research three main areas; electrification, automation, and freight & logistics efficiency in commercial trucking and public transportation.