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| Dr Wolfgang Bernhard |
MERCEDES-BENZ has presented the Future Truck 2025, a self-driving
vehicle equipped with an intelligent assistance system enabling it to drive
completely autonomously at speeds of up to 85 km/h.
According to Dr Wolfgang Bernhard, a member of Daimler’s board of
management responsible for Daimler Trucks and Buses, the Future Truck has
already been tested in real life applications on a German freeway.
“The Future Truck 2025 is our response to the major challenges and
opportunities associated with road freight transport in the future,” he
said.
“[It] leads to more efficiency and better safety and connectivity.
This, in turn, results in a more sustainable transport system to the benefit of
the economy, society and consumers.”
At the truck’s recent world premiere, Bernhard said: “If the
legislative framework for autonomous driving can be created quickly, the launch
of the Highway Pilot is conceivable by the middle of the next decade.”
Volvo demonstrated how their robot trucks can slipstream each other
in 2009, covering 200 km in one day in Spain, with two trucks and three cars
moving autonomously behind the leading truck at 90 km/h, each only five metres
apart.
In Japan, the New Energy and Industrial Technology Development
Organisation did a similar test with a convoy of Nissan trucks, which were
spaced only four metres apart to save 15% in diesel by using the trucks’
slipstream.
Mining companies in Chile and Australia have also now been using
giant Komatsu’s self-driving 500-ton trucks since 2001 on both underground and
in open-pit mines.
Does the advent of self-driving trucks mean human truck drivers
will no longer be needed?
The realistic answer is yes — eventually. In fact, the only hope
long-distance drivers have of keeping their jobs in the next 20 years will be
for local hauliers to baulk at the price of autonomous driving systems, and
rather opt for a cheaper solution — to drive the trucks “on a leash”.
Designed by Autonomous Solutions Inc for the U.S. Army’s use in
Afghanistan, the leash is made from bomb-proof Kevlar, with sensors to relay
changes in direction and speed so that the self-driving trucks can follow the
leader truck in a precise path. Officially called the Guideline Robotic System,
“the leash” has been tested in convoys of up to 10 trucks following a human
driver travelling at 64 km/h over rough terrain.
Merc meanwhile plans for its trucks to trundle their own route only
in the next 10 years and Scania’s does not expect to see any of the European
Union laws changed before 2018, but the American Trucking Association needs
30 000 drivers right now. This has been the case since 2012, when federal laws
changed so that only people with permanent residency status in America could get
a commercial truck driver’s licence.
There are no official figures available to say how many drivers are
wanted in South Africa, but a perennial shortage of experienced drivers also
means companies are always ready to hire drivers who can reverse a super-link
truck. Pietermaritzburg-based Barloworld Transport Solutions is recruiting 700
drivers at present. It it this shortage of experienced drivers that the robot
trucks can meet, and by doing so the robots will relegate the truck drivers’
jobs to history, leaving room in the cab only for a robot minder to take over
when — not if — the roads throw the software a curve ball the programmer did not
plan for.
