Logistics make the world go round. Almost every item you own or see needed to be transported from point A to point B. And more often than not, there are a big number of intermediary steps before a product arrives to its end user. This whole process of moving goods around is based on people navigating certain modes of transportation, such as: ships, trains, planes and trucks. The latter of these modes of transportation is the point of discussion in this post. We have all heard about self-driving cars, with the most prominent example being Tesla. Based on concepts such as machine learning and algorithms, some companies have already managed to produce autonomous cars that drive fairly reliably.
The concept of self-driving cars isn’t anything new. But a less talked about concept, is the self-driving truck. This autonomous truck could potentially revolutionise the logistics sector. According to BBC, at this moment there are several companies working on the development of these self-driving trucks. With some of those companies already reporting remarkable progress. A prime example is the tech company TuSimple. CNBC reported that the company is already doing test drives with semi-trucks that are autonomous. It still has human supervision on board for the test drives, but by the end of 2024 the company hopes to have the first fully autonomous trucks on the road.
This futuristic development will be a game changer for logistic companies in terms of money savings and efficiency of transportation. They wouldn’t need to pay a driver for the hours they put in and the self-driving truck doesn’t need to take breaks so it can do the desired routes way quicker than a human controlled truck. But the downside of these trucks is that it would mean that lots of truck drivers would be deemed unnecessary and would thus lose their jobs. NPR estimates that just in the US alone there are about 400.000 people employed as long-haul truck drivers. The technology is not even close to being able to replace all of these truck drivers but it could lead to problems in the future. To conclude, the development of autonomous trucks is an exciting one but it should be noted that a large number of jobs would be at stake if the technology will be widely applied.
- https://venturebeat.com/2019/10/18/volvo-will-report-autonomous-truck-financials-from-2020/
- https://www.bbc.com/news/business-56332388
- https://www.cnbc.com/2021/05/19/tusimple-self-driving-trucks-saved-10-hours-on-24-hour-run.html
- https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2021/05/25/999784202/is-there-really-a-truck-driver-shortage?t=1631872899963
Hey Koen, that’s a great blog post I must admit! It’s crazy to think how close we are to autonomous vehicles and the way they’re going to impact the whole supply chain industry. I’d love to believe that the benefits will outweigh the drawbacks, but what do you think is going to happen to the large number of jobs that are going to be vanished?
Thanks for your comment Andrius. I think on the long-term the main drawback is the amount of jobs that’d be lost. I think that in general this is a common problem for the current automation trend where lots of processes that were previously done by people are done by machines now. Maybe on the long-term there will be some regulations implemented to make sure not too many jobs are going to be lost due to automation.
What a great blog post, very interesting! I think autonomous driving in the truck world is showing huge potential but I feel like that there are just too many drawbacks. Firstly, what about the firing of all the current truck drivers, would that not result in huge losses for truck companies? And what about loading and unloading, who would be in charge for that? Lastly, don’t you think that there will be a lot of issues with the range of the trucks, will the truck be able to charge itself?
All for all, I believe that is shows some potential but it will take a long time before autonomous trucks can be fully implemented. Do you believe this type of technologie will be available in the near future?
Thanks for your comment Djan. There are definitely a lot of drawbacks. The potential implementation of these trucks would cost a lot of jobs in terms of people driving them and that’s one of the reasons why I don’t think it’s going to be easy to change over to these self-driving trucks. The (un)loading and charging of the trucks will still have to be done by humans.
Super interesting that you talk of autonomous driving trucks, never thought of that concept before. I feel like what is hindering self driving cars the most is the aspect of safety, because they aren’t able to recognize danger the same way that we humans do and have learned in an unsupervised manner. Also, in self-driving cars, the concept is that the car drives, but that the user is still in the car being moved from A to B, I feel like that is very fundamentally different than what is proposed with autonomous truck driving. Therefore I wonder, do you really think trucks will become fully autonomous (then there would be nobody in the truck at all being responsible for e.g. the cargo), or do you think that the truck drivers will be supported by the technology, but not replaced? The reason I ask this is because e.g. if there is nobody on board of the truck, how is the fueling process arranged over long distances? It might be a more feasible concept is the driver is supported rather than replaced in my opinion.
Interesting point Anne, if the trucks would work in the way you proposed that’d also take care of the loss of jobs of truck drivers because they’d still be needed to drive the trucks. I think in terms of charging the trucks it’s already necessary that there’s a driver on board. But in terms of safety and regulations I think it will be required to have a qualified driver on board anyways.
Hey Koen, that’s a great blog post I must admit! It’s crazy to think how close we are to autonomous vehicles and the way they’re going to impact the whole supply chain industry. I’d love to believe that the benefits will outweigh the drawbacks, but what do you think is going to happen to the large number of jobs that are going to be vanished?
Hey Koen, thanks for the very interesting post. I do believe that autonomous vehicles, such as trucks, will make the roads much safer in the future. Vehicles will eventually be connected and will be able to communicate and better coordinate their routes to avoid interferences.
However, in the most immediate term, do you think the public will be willing to drive their private cars next to a self-driving truck? I think there will be a lot of resistance, as people will be scared of being involved in an accident. We just do not trust things that are not ran by humans.