Fleet Management News & Business Info | Commercial Carrier Journal
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UPFRONT Along for the ride For driverless trucks, the future may be closer than we think BY JEFF CRISSEY A mericans have long had an infatuation with robots, from Robby the Robot in the 1956 sci-fi classic "Forbidden Planet" to Stanley Kubrick's HAL 9000 and Rosie the maid on "The Jetsons." Robots even have permeated the trucking industry, as we've seen "Transformers" leader Optimus Prime morph into a Mack Granite – word is he'll be a new Western Star model in the fourth movie. Of course, robots in the trucking industry are pure fantasy, right? Well, maybe not. The notion of autonomous big rigs has been generating a lot of buzz recently, from financial and tech blogs to The Wall Street Journal. The days of making driverless trucks possible on U.S. highways may be closer than we think. Technologies used by these automated trucks – including cameras to detect lane markings and radar systems for collision avoidance and adaptive cruise control – already are used on advanced tractors today. In fact, automated trucks already exist – at least in some farming and mining applications. For over-the-road applications, Japan's New Energy and Industrial Technology Development Organization (NEDO) just this year successfully completed a test whereby a manned truck was followed by three driverless trucks in what oddly enough started out as a fuel efficiency experiment. And Google – which seems to have its hands in everything these days – has its own driverless passenger car, expected to be commercially available in just four years. The test cars have been driven more than 500,000 miles to date without an accident. While we won't see autonomous trucks actually operating in North America anytime soon, if and when they do arrive on the scene, they likely will be limited to straight, lightly traveled sections of highways. They probably first will be used between two nodes, much like trucking uses rail in an intermodal relay today, with manned trucks performing the initial and final legs of the haul. Putting aside for a moment our fears of unmanned 80,000-pound tractor-trailers moving down the road at 50-plus miles per hour, let's just imagine the potential savings involved. Assuming an additional $200,000 per truck for the necessary technology, it would seem that return on investment would take decades, but the payback could be as little as a couple years. At 40 cents or more a mile, the biggest and most obvious savings would come from the lack of a driver (let me just stop right here and say in no way am I saying that's a good thing, but let's just continue for argument's sake). And the need to keep up with driver logs to comply with those pesky new hours-of-service rules? ... Pfffft. The ability to run the trucks in a near continuous cycle – stopping only to load and unload, refuel and perform preventive maintenance – is another major benefit, as is a 15 percent boost in fuel economy, as was the case in NEDO's test. In theory, a driverless truck's ability to monitor road conditions and obstacles hundreds of times per second and react just as quickly also would make it safer than a truck with a human behind the wheel. Whether or not driverless trucks actually take to U.S. roads in the next 10 to 15 years remains to be seen, but what is certain is that we are much farther down that path than we may realize. The Google Car, expected to be commercially available beginning in 2017, already has undergone 500,000 crash-free miles of testing. JEFF CRISSEY is Editor of Commercial Carrier Journal. E-mail jcrissey@ccjmagazine.com. 6 COMMERCIAL CARRIER JOURNAL CCJ_0813_UpFront.indd 6 | AUGUST 2013 7/25/13 3:44 PM