A U.S. Senate committee is considering whether legislation dealing with the future of self-driving cars should also pave the way to self-driving trucks, considering the impact such technology could have on millions of workers.
The Senate Commerce, Science and Transportation Committee held a hearing Sept. 13 on automated vehicles focusing on the future of self-driving commercial trucks and 3.5 million commercial truck drivers nationwide.
WASHINGTON — As autonomous technology evolves, drivers will remain integral to the movement of goods and services for the foreseeable future, top trucking executives told senators concerned about potential disruptions in the labor force.
To illustrate their point, the executives suggested that senators envision a bloc of truck drivers in the not-so-distant future as mechanical navigators charged with managing trips, similar to airline pilots whose planes utilize autonomous technologies.
CENTREVILLE, Va. — Lawmakers gave and listened to earnest speeches on vehicle automation last week, and the nation’s transportation secretary held forth on the subject at a university, but 28 miles west of Capitol Hill the engineers took over and showed what platooning technology for trucks can do today.
Navistar’s president and CEO told a Senate panel last week that autonomous vehicle technology likely won’t eliminate the need for truck drivers, but drivers may need to gain new skills as they’re asked to manage several trucks at once.
The manufacturer’s Springfield plant is one of the largest employers in Clark County, Ohio, where it employs more than 1,500 workers.
Frank Marino sat in a repurposed U.S. Coast Guard boat bobbing in Boston Harbor one morning late last month. He pointed the boat straight at a buoy several hundred yards away, while his colleague Mohamed Saad Ibn Seddik used a laptop to set the vehicle on a course that would run right into it. Then Ibn Seddik flipped the boat into autonomous driving mode. They sat back as the vessel moved at a modest speed of six knots, smoothly veering right to avoid the buoy, and then returned to its course.
Top automakers and tech companies are warning state officials the current regulations for testing self-driving cars may be too burdensome and could make it too hard or even impossible to test in Massachusetts, a move experts say would delay the economic and safety benefits expected from autonomous vehicles.
Autonomous vehicles are the wave of a rapidly approaching future that is already bringing increasing amounts of “smart” technology to cars and trucks, and could eventually make passengers of everyone in a vehicle.
Experts say smart cars will make the roads exponentially safer by taking the automobile’s weak link — its human driver — out of the equation.
Accidents would decline 90% by 2050, according to professional services company KPMG in a June report on the impact autonomous vehicles will have on the insurance industry.
ATLANTA — The trucking industry will continue to depend on drivers to assist with the navigation of autonomous and connected truck fleets, a policy expert at American Trucking Associations said at the Connected Fleets USA conference Sept. 25.
Manufacturers are rushing to perfect trucks capable of functioning autonomously, while a growing number of fleets are turning their attention to platooning systems for longhaul trips.
Efforts to include trucking-centric provisions in autonomous vehicle legislation that a committee will consider Oct. 4 were applauded by the top officer at American Trucking Associations.
In a letter to Sen. James Inhofe, an Oklahoma Republican and a senior Commerce Committee member, ATA President Chris Spear praised the senator and several of his Republican colleagues, such as Sens. Deb Fischer of Nebraska, Ted Cruz of Texas and Roger Wicker of Mississippi, for supporting policy language about trucks in legislation before the panel.
Cruise Automation’s self-driving cars are about to get a new set of eyes.
General Motors, which purchased Cruise last year, announced Oct. 9 that it is buying Strobe, a Pasadena, Calif., startup that makes lidar, a laser-based sensor that most autonomous vehicles use to see the world around them. Strobe’s 11 employees will now work with Cruise to perfect the technology.
General Motors says it “aims to solve some of the toughest transportation challenges created by natural disasters, complex logistics environments and global conflicts” with its new Silent Utility Rover Universal Superstructure.
That’s a flexible fuel cell electric platform with autonomous capabilities that can fit a myriad of uses. The platform was shown at the fall meeting of the Association of the United States Army, a commercially-designed platform that could be adapted for military use.
Alerts about traffic, weather, work zones and other conditions should start popping up early next year on the dashboards of digitally connected vehicles on 52 miles of the Ohio Turnpike near Cleveland.
The same information would serve autonomous (self-driven) cars whenever those start cruising the Turnpike between toll plazas 135 in Amherst and 187 in Streetsboro.
Intel Corp. has developed a system it says ensures that self-driving vehicles can’t cause accidents, an effort to reassure a skeptical public and help speed adoption of driverless cars on the road.
The world’s largest chipmaker is publishing a set of standards, based on mathematical formulas, that will govern the behavior of robot cars and trucks. If they’re adopted, Intel argues, it will bring certainty to questions of liability and blame in the event of an accident.
ORLANDO, Fla. — Autonomous trucks could give rise to a future in which 90% of crashes are eliminated and transportation becomes dramatically more productive and cost effective, technology expert Larry Burns told industry executives here.
Burns, a former corporate vice president of research and development at General Motors and a longtime advocate of automation and vehicle connectivity, shared his vision for how technology could reshape the industry during an Oct. 22 presentation at American Trucking Associations’ Management Conference & Exhibition.
Some consumers say they are wary of a driverless car future, but a new survey says the beginnings of the technology which will power that future are already available on most new vehicle models and many consumers are willing to pay thousands of dollars for them.
Ryder System Inc. teamed with autonomous technology developerEmbark and consumer products manufacturer Frigidaire to run a series of autonomous-driving technology tests in October, carrying Frigidaire refrigerators 650 miles at a time, the three partners said in a statement.
Elon Musk knows how to make promises. Even by his own standards, the promises made last week while introducing two new Tesla vehicles—the heavy-duty Semi Truck and the speedy Roadster—are monuments of envelope pushing. To deliver, according to close observers of battery technology, Tesla would have to far exceed what is currently thought possible.
The anticipated proliferation of driverless cars will bring a brand new problem for the world’s biggest oil companies — how to advertise to a machine.
BP Plc needs to figure out how it will draw cars run by computers to its fuel stations, said David Eyton, the company’s head of technology.
“That is the problem we’re all trying to think about, goodness gracious me, if you’re not driving the car, how is that car going to decide where it goes?,” Eyton said in an interview in London. “That matters if you’re supplying that car with energy.”
U.S. Army trucks using an autonomous driving system from Lockheed Martin logged more than 55,000 testing miles during a simulated warfare experiment program held at Fort Leonard Wood, Mo., and Fort Bliss, Texas, according to Lockheed Martin.
Advances in connected, autonomous and truck platooning technologies are expected to dominate the discussions during a Dec. 7 House transportation policymakers roundtable scheduled with executives from the trucking industry.
The House Highways and Transit Subcommittee will examine commercial vehicles’ autonomous capabilities, such as steering and braking through global positioning and sensor systems.
