The driverless truck is coming, and it’s going to automate millions of jobs

A convoy of self-driving trucks recently drove across Europe and arrived at the Port of Rotterdam. No technology will automate away more jobs — or drive more economic efficiency — than the driverless truck.

Shipping a full truckload from L.A. to New York costs around $4,500 today, with labor representing 75 percent of that cost. But those labor savings aren’t the only gains to be had from the adoption of driverless trucks.

Where drivers are restricted by law from driving more than 11 hours per day without taking an 8-hour break, a driverless truck can drive nearly 24 hours per day. That means the technology would effectively double the output of the U.S. transportation network at 25 percent of the cost.

And the savings become even more significant when you account for fuel efficiency gains. The optimal cruising speed from a fuel efficiency standpoint is around 45 miles per hour, whereas truckers who are paid by the mile drive much faster. Further fuel efficiencies will be had as the self-driving fleets adopt platooning technologies, like those from Peloton Technology, allowing trucks to draft behind one another in highway trains.

Trucking represents a considerable portion of the cost of all the goods we buy, so consumers everywhere will experience this change as lower prices and higher standards of living.

While the efficiency gains are too real to pass up, the technology will have tremendous adverse effects as well.

In addition, once the technology is mature enough to be rolled out commercially, we will also enjoy considerable safety benefits. This year alone more people will be killed in traffic accidents involving trucks than in all domestic airline crashes in the last 45 years combined. At the same time, more truck drivers were killed on the job, 835, than workers in any other occupation in the U.S.

Even putting aside the direct safety risks, truck driving is a grueling job that young people don’t really want to do. The average age of a commercial driver is 55 (and rising every year), with projected driver shortages that will create yet more incentive to adopt driverless technology in the years to come.

While the efficiency gains are real — too real to pass up — the technology will have tremendous adverse effects as well. There are currently more than 1.6 million Americans working as truck drivers, making it the most common job in 29 states.

The loss of jobs representing 1 percent of the U.S. workforce will be a devastating blow to the economy. And the adverse consequences won’t end there. Gas stations, highway diners, rest stops, motels and other businesses catering to drivers will struggle to survive without them.

The demonstration in Europe shows that driverless trucking is right around the corner. The primary remaining barriers are regulatory. We still need to create on- and off-ramps so human drivers can bring trucks to the freeways where highway autopilot can take over. We may also need dedicated lanes as slow-moving driverless trucks could be a hazard for drivers. These are big projects that can only be done with the active support of government. However, regulators will be understandably reluctant to allow technology with the potential to eliminate so many jobs.

Yet the benefits from adopting it will be so huge that we can’t simply outlaw it. A 400 percent price-performance improvement in ground transportation networks will represent an incredible boost to human well-being. Where would we be if we had banned mechanized agriculture on the grounds that most Americans worked in farming when tractors and harvesters were introduced in the early 20th century?

We often discuss the displacement of jobs by artificial intelligence and robots in the abstract, as something that we’ll have to eventually tackle in the far distant future. But the recent successful demonstration of the self-driving truck shows that we can’t afford to put off the conversation on how we’re going to adapt to this new reality.

“In the early 70’s they wanted to build a transit system here in Pittsburgh called Skybus.”

Didn’t they let that thing hang over Corrigan Drive in South Park for years? I remember seeing that as a very young kid (it was long abandoned by then). I think they finally dismantled it in the early 80s.

Wasn’t it built for a county fair in the early 70s?

I don’t know if Skybus was the answer overall ... however, they failed miserably transitioning over to busses instead of building out the rail system. The rail from Library to downtown is great, but they should have worked to expand that to other points in the region.

Busses are terrible ... I remember when PAT went on strike in the early 1990s ... I had absolutely no problems getting into the city during rush hour since no busses were clogging up Route 51 :-). Once they settled, it was a miserable commute once again.

The term ‘luddite’ gets thrown around a lot, whenever the subject of automated vehicles comes up. Its almost a mini version of Godwin’s Law.

But the term does not apply at all.

Here is where the assertion takes a wrong turn: the Luddites destroyed technology that had already been developed and demonstrated to work...better than human beings.

There is no such technology, when it comes to driverless cars. And there won’t be.

Does that make me a Luddite? Not at all. Just a person who knows a bit or two about how these systems work. I’ve gone into detail here before about the limitations...and of course been called a Luddite. But let’s take a different approach, and examine the premise of this story.

1. It lists the cost of coast to coast freight. As an earlier poster points out, there are TRAINs for that. I imagine the bulk of coast to coast deliveries are package shipping related...anybody who has to do this on a regular basis would quickly find a cheaper way (train). Anecdotally, I’ve known several long haul truckers, and they have never talked about coast to coast trucking.

2. The article asserts that $3,375 a day in costs is for labor. This is important, because if there is no sound economic reason to go driverless, nobody will pursue it. Is $3,375 correct? Well, a driver on the top end of the scale gets 40 cents a mile...lets add 50 percent for other costs related to pension and healthcare...60 cents a mile...with an 11 on and 8 off schedule, a driver could squeeze in 16 hours in a day...at a typically governed speed around 60 mph, that’s $576 paid to the the driver (and his pension etc). So where does the author get $3,375 from? Well, he probably is looking at what he might pay to send a truck coast to coast...which is very different than the company’s cost...which includes overhead and profit...which will necessarily still be there, even with a robotic truck. So they save $600 bucks - not thousands.

And, they still have to pay people to inspect the tire pressure, lights, etc. on a robotic truck, so the savings is actually less.

Now I happen to know what the charge out rate is for just one element of driverless vehicles - the LIDAR they use. Let me just say that the chargout for 16 hours of LIDAR exceeds 600 bucks. And there’s also computers to be charged to it...and an array of sensors, cellular network subscriptions, etc.

So....at this juncture, there isn’t even an economic advantage to driverless trucks. And, absent government intervention, it will not even be seriously attempted.

As an aside, I would expect, long before we saw widespread use of this on highways, we would see it used extensively in mining and farming, where a lot of the variables could be reduced (ie fixed location radio towers eliminate the need to be ‘on network’). That hasn’t happened full scale yet.

As another aside, I think use of computing power to better manage driver time and truck down time sitting at a rest stop would be a better use of technology to streamline trucking. The railroads do a very good job of this (ie switch off engineers at the right place and time) and the trucking industry could get much better.

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