Startups and transportation juggernauts alike are entering the race toward the self-driving truck, but no two strategies look alike.
There will come a time in the not-so-distant future when — instead of using a CB radio to communicate with a freight driver — you will use a line of code. A recent study conducted by the White House concluded that at least 80% of trucking jobs will be lost to automated technology.
Companies such as Otto (Uber’s robot division), along with start-ups Starsky Robotics, Embark, and Drive.ai are championing the cause of self-driving trucks. These companies are hoping to capitalize on an industry that needs revitalization. With a shortage of about 75,000 jobs and a turnover rate that tops 90%, the current climate is ripe for change.
Self-driving doesn’t mean driverless
Trucking is a $700+ billion industry, with about a third of the costs going to driver compensation. It stands to reason that there is serious incentive to get this technology rolling out onto the highways, removing the need for drivers. However, so far, most plans don’t seem to involve going cold turkey.
Both Otto and Embark will have the automated system take over for the driver when the truck is up and running on the highway. Then once the truck exits, the driver returns to the controls. The benefit of this system is the ease of which the automated driver can navigate highways, as opposed to local roads. Additionally, this system will put less stress on the driver, who can rest while the truck is on the highway.
Starsky Robotics, while not looking to do away with drivers, wants to remove them from the trucks. Starsky’s trucks will be completely autonomous on the highway. Upon exiting, the job will be turned over to trained experts that remotely guide the trucks to their final destinations. Starsky believes by bringing the drivers off the road, and into offices, freights will run more efficiently and on time, while not putting undo stress onto drivers.
While the competition focuses on long-haul trucking, Drive.ai has begun testing automated freight services on around-town delivery vehicles, which it feels is an easier way to introduce its technology. The company says it is developing software to control trucks using a small computer that “learns” how to drive, rather than using complex computers programmed with every conceivable move the vehicle could make.
Bumps in the road
While testing is underway for many of these technologies, not every course has proved smooth sailing. Most notably, Waymo, Google’s self-driving car project, has filed a lawsuit against Uber, accusing the company of using trade secrets taken by Anthony Levandowski, after he left Waymo to found Otto.
Currently, it’s unclear which company will emerge as the leader in the race to automated trucking. What is apparent, though, is there’s no putting the genie back in the bottle.
Automation technology is only becoming more prevalent. With the trucking industry in its current state, it’s only a matter of time before self-driving trucks become the norm.
“If I were a truck driver, I’d be looking to make a career change.” This has been my first thought when considering the future of self-driving cars, or autonomous vehicles.
It seems that the rise of autonomous trucks is inevitable. The major players in the automotive industry are heavily focused on developing autonomous vehicles, and newcomers like Apple and Uber are joining in the pursuit. The required technology is advancing every day, and the financial incentives associated with commercial transportation and vehicle services provide an opportunity that will likely result in early adoption when compared to personal vehicles.
The U.S. trucking industry
The trucking industry is massive, and the United States economy is hugely dependent upon it. Truck driving is the most popular occupation in 29 of the 50 states, with 3,500,000 truck drivers in the U.S. This means that in most of the country, one is more likely to meet a truck driver than any other occupation.
Seventy percent of total U.S. freight tonnage, an equivalent of 10.5 billion tons of freight per year, is transported via trucking. Every product you purchase, consume, or see in a store is dependent on trucking.
Amazingly, 38,000,000,000 gallons of diesel fuel are consumed each year to keep goods moving in the United States. The industry generates $750,000,000,000 in revenue each year, and is expected to grow rapidly. The shear size of this market provides an incentive for innovation, and it is expected that autonomous trucking will remove significant cost from the supply chain.
The driver shortage
Despite the importance of the trucking industry, there are fundamental problems. It is expected that almost 100,000 new truck drivers will be required every year for the next 10 years based on industry growth projections, and trucking companies have already been complaining about a driver shortage for years. Industry growth will only compound this shortage.
This has led companies to focus on recruiting and retention, but it has been difficult to attract new participants to the industry. The industry is a comparatively “old” industry. One challenge is that to obtain an interstate CDL license, one must be 21 years old. When most young people graduate high school at 18 or 19, this forces years of idle time before one is even eligible to drive a truck. As a result, the industry is not an option for new graduates, and new graduates start down other paths.
The driver shortage is increasing labor rates in the industry, and labor already constitutes a third of the costs of transport. Autonomous trucking would help remove some of these costs from the supply chain.
Autonomous-vehicle technology
Autonomous vehicles are not a new idea. The concept has existed since 1920, but it is only recently that the technology has manifested itself in a commercially viable way. LIDAR and RADAR technology has improved in recent years, and advanced cameras by companies such as MobileEye can help a human-less vehicle see.
Perhaps the largest contributor has been improvements in software development and decision-making algorithims — technology that is still in its infancy, but rapidly maturing. Vehicle-to-vehicle communications have recently advanced and have facilitated “platooning,” or a single driver commanding a platoon of vehicles. Google, Uber, Apple, Tesla, Volvo, Mercedes and others are investing in the technology. Interestingly, the market literature for the Mercedes Future Truck 2025 is adamant that the autonomous vehicles will only aid a driver, and that the driver will remain with the vehicle for the forseeable future.
Challenges
Even with rapid technological advancement, there are challenges to the adoption of autonomous trucks.
The industry is highly visible to the public, and recent technological development has sprouted a wide-spread fear of automation. It is likely that any accidents related to self-driving vehicles will receive the utmost scrutiny in a very public forum. Further, truck drivers are faced with challenging, and sometimes even life-or-death, decisions as part of their daily activities. In the event of an accident, a driver sometimes must decide how to crash, and the results of these decisions may cause death to the others involved in the accident.
Imagine, for example, a situation where the driver must choose to avoid a vehicle in the road, hit a pedestrian, or direct the truck off the road into a barrier. In each situation, someone will be hurt. If we rely on automation to make these decisions, we must program the right decision. As the computer system making the decision will be forced to make this decision with limited and imperfect information, even if the system is programmed “morally,” it will be forced to make imperfect life-and-death decisions.
Also to consider:
Will society be comfortable delegating these decisions to automation?
Who will purchase a vehicle that might choose to kill its passengers?
In these type of situations, who is liable? The programmers? The truck manufacturer? The trucking company?
If there is no individual responsible for the accident and there is no threat of imprisonment, only of fines, does this change the current traffic accident paradigm?
These questions must be confronted before the widespread adoption of autonomous vehicles.
The threat to drivers
If we accept that these challenges are resolved, it seems that the threat to truck drivers from autonomous vehicles is limited. The concept of completely driverless trucks is based on a drastic oversimplification of the trucker’s actual job. Over the road trucking has been rated toward the middle of the top 100 occupations for risk of being automated by the Brookings Institute.
Truck drivers do much more than just drive the truck, such as taking inventory, inspecting loads, manipulating loading docks, and placing orders. Many of these tasks are much more complicated than just conducting a truck on the interstate.
In the future, the truck driver will be reimagined as a logistics expert. A slogan from OTTO, the self-driving company responsible for the recent Budweiser beer run, sums up the current direction of the industry well: “We want to make it safe for the driver to sleep from exit to exit.”
The consensus amongst industry analysts is that the trucker will remain with the vehicle for the forseeable future. Even truck driver labor organizations such as ATBS are embracing autonomous vehicles as a productivity improvement in their industry.
Conclusion
Given the rapid growth of the industry, the current shortage of truck drivers and the demand for new drivers over the coming years, it seems like truck drivers should not be afraid of losing their jobs to automation in the short term. Likely, autonomous vehicles will be implemented gradually, and will serve to increase a truck driver’s productivity rather than replace the driver completely.
It is expected that over one-third of the trucks on the road in 2025 will be heavily automated, but complete autonomy is still in the distance future. Autonomous trucks may help to relieve the industry driver shortage, but they are unlikely to displace the millions of Americans that depend on driving truck for their livings.
Jacob Rossman is a manufacturing engineer at a major pharmaceutical company. His passions include futurism and technology. He lives in Rochester NH, with his wife Whitney, dog, cat and two pet rabbits.
The shortage of drivers paired with the continued growth of the trucking industry paves the way for driverless trucks.
This guest post comes to us from Rachel Everly, a writer for Cerasis, a top freight logistics company and truckload freight broker.
The trucking industry has been serving America for many decades, and even today it is the main method by which freight is transferred all over the country. Anyone who says the trucking industry is facing a decline or a reduced demand is way off the numbers. More large trucks are coming on U.S. roads, traveling more miles, and transporting more good than ever before.
We have seen more than 3% increases in the number of trucks, which translates to almost 11 million trucks. Also, trucks are still transporting 73% of almost all cargo weight moved in one year. With all these impressive numbers, surprisingly there is a shortage of drivers. That spells both trouble and opportunity for this industry.
Where is there a shortage of drivers?
The U.S trucking industry is facing a severe driver shortage. One estimate shows that around 48,000 drivers are required to move about 70% of freight.
To improve safety, in December 2015, the U.S. Department of Transportation’s Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration (FMCSA) announced that driver hours will be recorded via Electronic Logging Devices by 2017. This becomes mandatory by December 18, 2017. This was introduced because the existing systems of time-logging are purposely made very complicated, thus not allowing one to check how many hours is a driver on the road.
This is being introduced to ensure that driver safety is not compromised, keeping fatigued drivers off the road. According to calculations, this will save 26 lives a year and prevent 562 injuries every year. Not just this, the ELD will save companies the hassle of paperwork, eventually leading the trucking industry to save somewhere around $1 billion due to reduced paperwork and time-savings.
However, this means reduced hours per driver, thus increasing the need for more drivers. Small trucking companies will be hit the hardest, but overall the industry will be in a better position thanks to this rule. It is estimated that this new rule would cost the industry $1.8 billion, but cost savings from reduced accidents and paperwork amount in excess of $3 billion.
The way to driverless trucks
Humans are amazing creatures, but we are prone to human errors. Human errors account for the majority of the road accidents. Plus with the new rule in, companies will need more drivers, adding to costs. Uber has been actively working on getting driverless trucks on the roads, with a project already started in Singapore, and now has turned its eyes on the trucking industry.
Uber has recently acquired the start-up Otto. Otto has made great inroads into driverless trucks. Otto currently has 6 working self-driving trucks, with plans to expand to 15. This year Otto is continuously running tests; trucks are hauling random items from the company’s garage to test how the vehicles respond to hauling weight.
The company is confident that soon they will be moving all kinds of goods for shippers. They have already started forging relationships with big names in the trucking industry. The self-driving trucks have shown that they can easily operate on highways, maneuvering off the open interstate is still a work in progress.
The following infographic outlines some of the benefits of driverless trucks:
