CARSON CITY: Autonomous trucks likely to hit the roads before autonomous cars, says German company.The German auto group Daimler AG DDAIY has been granted a license by the state of Nevada to test self-driving trucks on public roads, as the United States and Europe race to establish a regulatory framework for autonomous vehicles.
That is partly because more trucks operate “in a less complicated traffic environment” out on the open road, while passenger cars spend more time in urban areas.
The truck uses cameras, sensors, and radar to scan the area all around it and determine its position on the road and in relation to nearby cars and trucks. Some of these features—staying in lanes and maintaining a safe following distance—already exist in top-of-the-line Daimler cars.
This is the next step. But unlike Google’s driver-less cars, the trucks don’t use LIDaR (a spinning laser-based sensor) and, at present, they are only able to drive highways—not city streets.
Truck operators also have a big financial incentive to adopt the technology, as it would bring savings in wages and fuel.
Despite making significant progress with the technology, automakers face a battle to bring their advance prototype vehicles to market in Europe and the United States due to regulatory hurdles and questions about product liability.
Bernhard said no customers had yet made a commitment to buying Daimler’s self-driving trucks.
“We think once the legislation is there and once the regulatory environment is there, we’ll be approached by customers,” he said. “We’re not at that point yet.”
Europe too is working on establishing test routes for autonomous trucks, although it will take time before freight companies can cross the continent with such vehicles.
One of the challenges for autonomous driving proponents is meeting safety concerns while persuading lawmakers that accident liability can still be established. Questions over who is in charge of a vehicle require trucks to have a driver present, even while it operates in self-driving mode.
Bernhard said other U.S. states — California, Arizona, Michigan — had shown an interest in self-driving trucks, but more states would need to get on board before the federal government took up the issue.
The trucks will hand off the controls whenever they’re overmatched by conditions or there’s a problem with the system. If the driver doesn’t respond fast enough, the truck will decelerate and stop until they do.
Some 3 million trucks and drivers haul 9.2 billion tons of freight (almost 70% of the total) across the US every year. Even assuming no further advances in the technology, and unlike other kinds of driving, much of trucking could, in theory, be automated soon. A good number of miles driven are dry, highway miles.
All this seems plausible even at a technological standstill. And further advances, like better sensors, machine learning, cloud AI, and vehicle-to-vehicle communications will increase the number of driverless miles possible. But Daimler thinks it’ll take a decade for everyday use of driverless trucks.
