Truckers often react to stories like this with comments like "Not in my lifetime" or "Robots cannot drive safer than a professional like me." But such denial does nothing to slow the rapid movement toward self-driving trucks. Some are in real-world use right now as explained and pictured in this thread.
Volvo has been promoting the concept of road trains -- convoys of trucks with the lead truck driven by a human and the trucks behind driving themselves, programmed to follow the lead truck. Volvo successfully ran such a convoy in Spain on May 22. Story here. Similar demonstrations in other countries and the U.S. are probably not far behind.
It takes very little imagination to picture a large truckload carrier putting a team in a lead truck to lead say 10 trucks from New York to Los Angeles where 9 local or regional drivers will meet them and drive the individual trucks to their final stop.
With self driving cars already legal in two states (CA and NV) for testing purposes, it is not hard to imagine at all that the trucks will eventually drive themselves to the final stops. I am skeptical of Volvo's concept and believe they are introducing the human-led convoy only to gain public acceptance of robot trucks. With the convoy trucks already able to drive themselves, I don't think Volvo and others will settle on the human-led convoy idea. They will take the concept of self-driving trucks to its logical conclusion and eliminate human drivers altogether.
With the cost savings of driverless trucks being huge and the technology finding acceptance among the general public, I am not in the "Not in my lifetime" camp. While it saddens me to accept the fact, I have come to believe we will live to see truck drivers follow into the sunset telephone operators, family farmers, freight train conductors, aircraft navigators and others whose work has been eliminated by technology.
Volvo has been promoting the concept of road trains -- convoys of trucks with the lead truck driven by a human and the trucks behind driving themselves, programmed to follow the lead truck. Volvo successfully ran such a convoy in Spain on May 22. Story here. Similar demonstrations in other countries and the U.S. are probably not far behind.
It takes very little imagination to picture a large truckload carrier putting a team in a lead truck to lead say 10 trucks from New York to Los Angeles where 9 local or regional drivers will meet them and drive the individual trucks to their final stop.
With self driving cars already legal in two states (CA and NV) for testing purposes, it is not hard to imagine at all that the trucks will eventually drive themselves to the final stops. I am skeptical of Volvo's concept and believe they are introducing the human-led convoy only to gain public acceptance of robot trucks. With the convoy trucks already able to drive themselves, I don't think Volvo and others will settle on the human-led convoy idea. They will take the concept of self-driving trucks to its logical conclusion and eliminate human drivers altogether.
With the cost savings of driverless trucks being huge and the technology finding acceptance among the general public, I am not in the "Not in my lifetime" camp. While it saddens me to accept the fact, I have come to believe we will live to see truck drivers follow into the sunset telephone operators, family farmers, freight train conductors, aircraft navigators and others whose work has been eliminated by technology.
