In a recent Los Angeles Times article, “Robots Could Replace 1.7 Million American Truckers in the Next Decade” goes into some detail on what the motor carrier industry has been looking at for awhile-addressing the driver shortage through some level of automation.
The spectrum of options is pretty broad-from 1) “platooning” where a lead truck guides one or more following vehicles to 2) intermediate states where the driver is still in the truck, but can sleep part of the time while the vehicle is on autopilot, to 3) the completely robotic (autonomous) truck where there is no driver in the vehicle at all. Major carriers have been participating in the development and prototyping of these options, especially in the wide open highways of the western U. S. And there have been reports from Europe as well. Both the National Highway Transportation Safety Administration (NHTSA) and a number of states have announced regulations that pertain to driverless trucks.
Probably the highest profile move in this area was Uber buying Otto, a company that plans to retrofit existing vehicles so that drivers can extend their hours by letting the truck drive itself while they sleep.
Planners, port operators, and economic development professionals should take note of the following:
- Like any disruptive technology, autonomous vehicles will take awhile to coalesce around standards. Some areas are looking at dedicated lanes, while others will be instrumenting highways so that both cars and trucks will be communicating and connected. So we look for a fairly long transition period-5 to 10 years minimum before sizable numbers of autonomous vehicles are operating. The commercial world may move a little faster because of driver retirements.
- Nobody is expecting in-city deliveries to be driverless in the near term, unless the delivery is within a couple of miles of the terminal so that Kiva like robots can handle it. Motor carriers will likely confine autonomous vehicles to the long distances between cities for quite some time, possibly well beyond the 10 year horizon. A faster transition will require considerable progress beyond even Tesla style autopilots-big rigs are potentially too dangerous, and liability too high to allow major city deliveries without a fail-safe system.
- But if/when driver expenses for long haul shipments go down, intermodal economics takes another hit. Right now intermodal double stack is competitive at least beyond 500 miles. With driverless trucks that number could go back to 700 miles or even further. To avoid that, the railroads will have to look at automating their yards even more.
- And driverless trucks could be a way for ports to improve drayage operations. If automated port terminals can connect to intelligent vehicles, all the benefits of automating on port operations loading and unloading could extend to much better drayage control as well.
See the Los Angeles Times article: http://www.latimes.com/projects/la-fi-automated-trucks-labor-20160924/
