The World’s First Self-Driving Semi-Truck Hits the Road
The World’s First Self-Driving Semi-Truck Hits the Road
By Alex Davies 05.05.15. 7:41 pm.
License plates are rarely an object of attention, but
this one ’s special—the funky number is the giveaway. That’s why Daimler bigwig
Wolfgang Bernhard and Nevada governor Brian Sandoval are sharing a stage,
mugging for the phalanx of cameras, together holding the metal rectangle that
will, in just a minute, be slapped onto the world’s first officially recognized
self-driving truck.
The truck in question is the Freightliner Inspiration, a
teched-up version of the Daimler 18-wheeler sold around the world. And
according to Daimler, which owns Mercedes-Benz, it will make long-haul road
transportation safer, cheaper, and better for the planet.
“There’s a clear need for this generation of trucks, and
we’re the pioneers who are willing to tackle it,” says Bernhard.
A Newish Kind of Semi
The Freightliner Inspiration offers a rather limited
version of autonomy: It will take control only on the highway, maintaining a
safe distance from other vehicles and staying in its lane. It won’t pass slower
vehicles on its own. If the truck encounters a situation it can’t confidently
handle, like heavy snow that covers lane lines, it will alert the human that
it’s time for him to take over, via beeps and icons in the dashboard. If the
driver doesn’t respond within about five seconds, the truck will slow down
gradually, then stop.
In hardware terms, the truck isn’t much different from
the latest trucks and passenger cars Daimler is putting on the road. A
stereoscopic camera reads lane lines. Short and long range radar scan the road
up to 800 feet ahead for obstacles. No sensors face backward, because they’re
not needed. There’s no vehicle-to-vehicle communication, no LIDaR. The software
algorithms are adjusted versions of those developed for use in Mercedes-Benz’s
autonomous vehicles.
If you can prove autonomous trucks are safer, you could
make them bigger, and thus more efficient at transporting all the crap we buy
on Amazon.
The Freightliner is still very much a test vehicle.
Daimler’s confident it’s safe for public roads, and the Nevada DMV agrees. But
the automaker needs a few million more test miles on the books, in a wide
variety of locales and conditions (snow, rain, extreme temperatures), before
it’s ready to offer even this very limited autonomous capability to any
customers. That’ll take a decade.
This super conservative approach is typical of the way
the major automakers have approached the shift toward cars that drive
themselves: step by step, never promising more than they can deliver, or more
than regulators are ready to allow. It may be unimpressive compared to a Google
car that cuts through city traffic, but it’s a crucial deployment of this
technology.
Trucks aren’t sexy, but they’re critical to our economy,
and there’s gobs of room for improvement in their safety record and efficiency.
Autonomous driving—even in a limited form—can deliver it.
Saving Lives
In 2012 in the US, 330,000 large trucks were involved in
crashes that killed nearly 4,000 people, most of them in passenger cars. About
90 percent of those were caused by driver error. “Anything that can get
commercial vehicles out of trouble has a lot of value,” says Xavier Mosquet,
head of Boston Consulting Group’s North America automotive division.
So it’s no surprise some of the country’s largest freight
carriers have in recent years started equipping their vehicles with active
safety features like lane control and automatic braking. The economic case for
these measures—the predecessors to fuller autonomy—is clear, says Noël Perry,
an economist who specializes in transportation and logistics.
There’s no reason these companies won’t want to go for
more. “They all love this.”
Humans Don’t Want These Jobs
Another point in favor of giving robots control is the
serious and worsening shortage of humans willing to take the wheel. The lack of
qualified drivers has created a “capacity crisis,” according to an October 2014
report by the American Transportation Research Institute. The American Trucking
Associations predicts the industry could be short 240,000 drivers by 2022.
(There are roughly three million full-time drivers in the US.)
That’s partly because long haul trucking is not an
especially pleasant job, and because it takes time and money to earn a
commercial driver’s license. The shortage will get worse, Perry says, thanks to
a suite of regulations set to take effect in the next few years. A national
database to collect company-performed drug and alcohol tests will make it
harder for drivers who get in trouble at one job to land another. Speed
limiters could keep trucks to a pokey 64 mph. Mandated electronic reporting of
hours driven will make it harder to skirt rest rules and drive longer than
allowed. These are all good changes from a safety perspective, but they’re not
great for profits.
Meanwhile, demand for trucking is growing rapidly, thanks
largely to the increase in online shopping that sends so many goods directly
from warehouses to our doorsteps.
Killing the Human Driver
The way to handle that growth isn’t to convince more
people to become long haul truckers. It’s to reduce, and eventually eliminate,
the role of the human. Let the trucks drive themselves, and you can improve
safety, meet increased demand, and save time and fuel.
The safety benefits of autonomous features are obvious.
The machine doesn’t get tired, stressed, angry, or distracted. And because
trucks spend the vast majority of their time on the highway, the tech doesn’t
have to clear the toughest hurdle: handling complex urban environments with
pedestrians, cyclists, and the like. If you can prove the vehicles are safer,
you could make them bigger, and thus more efficient at transporting all the
crap we buy on Amazon.
Trucks could platoon: one leading the way, with others in
a line copying its every move, separated by as little as 30 feet. Having one
driver lead seven trucks means significant savings on labor and fuel
efficiency, says David Carlisle, chairman of the board of auto industry
consultancy Carlisle & Company. Even if you still need a human in each as a
backup, all the vehicles benefit from reduced wind resistance, like a Tour de
France cyclist team.
A truck that controls itself even some of the time could
also ease the driver shortage, Perry says. If you can make driving easier, you
may be able to ease the qualifications for a commercial license, lowering a
barrier to entry for newcomers (and probably lowering wages). One of the
toughest tasks for a human could be done with no problem by a machine: Backing
up. Plenty of consumer cars on the market now offer self-parking, having a
truck do the same is just a matter of tweaking the software.
The end game is eliminating the need for human drivers,
at least for highway driving. (An autonomous truck could exit the interstate
near the end of its journey, park in a designated lot, and wait for a human to
come drive it on surface streets to its destination.)
The drivers recognize that, Perry says. They’re not
thrilled, but they don’t have much clout. Trucking unions like the Teamsters
are visible but represent a tiny fraction of the industry’s workforce. The
lobbying power they do have in Congress will likely go to arguing autonomous
features shouldn’t be trusted over trained, professional, humans. And there,
they’ll probably have a a significant ally: public perception.
Recent studies show American consumers are quite
interested in technology that makes driving partly or fully autonomous. But
there’s a sizable gap between a personal car handling itself and a 40-ton
18-wheeler barreling down the highway without a carbon-based life form inside.
Which would be understandably terrifying to lots of people. “The public would
hate to see empty trucks,” Perry says.
In his book Rise of the Robots: Technology and the Threat
of a Jobless Future, Martin Ford writes, “While the trucks may indeed soon be
able to essentially drive themselves, the staggering destructive potential of
these vehicles probably means that someone is going to remain in the driver’s
seat for the foreseeable future.” That’s Daimler’s line, too, (minus the
destruction talk). “We don’t want to get rid of drivers,” says Sven Ennerst,
head of Daimler Trucks’ development department. “We want to make their lives
more efficient and more easy.”
With time, autonomous features—both in trucks and in
passenger cars—will prove themselves far safer and more efficient than the
human driver model. Consumers will eventually accept the change. Regulators may
one day insist cars drive themselves, at least when it comes to highway travel.
Until then, if you see a truck driver on the I-15 playing
with his iPad instead of holding the wheel, try not to freak out.
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