All Arrows Point to Trucking

Truck platoons may well be the way average Americans first see autonomous vehicle technology in the real world. Photo: Peloton

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Last week, Amazon’s Jeff Bezos surpassed Bill Gates and (briefly) became the richest man in the world. And today comes the news that Mr. Gates has decided to invest in Convoy, a two-year old Seattle startup looking to crack the code on the same sort of real-time freight brokerage service as legally battered Uber Freight has been trying to do this year.

Gates has been sort of lurking in the background in automotive and trucking technology up to this point. It’s worth wondering if the $62 million investment in Convoy that he’s part of signals a bigger move into the world we all play in. I’m not a mind-reader, but my gut tells me, “Yes.”

Trucking today is worth an estimated $800 billion a year in North America. That’s excellent news for fleets, but hardly the motivating factor for guys like Bezos and Gates. They’re innovators and visionaries. They see the world in a completely different way than you and I do. A century from now, we’ll talk about them – and other tech leaders like Elon Musk and the late Steve Jobs the way we talk about Thomas Edison, the Wright Brothers, Henry Ford and Nikolai Tesla today.

This is a unique moment in time – one that doesn’t come around very often – and we should all be glad that we’re alive to see it: When new technologies and brilliant thinkers synch at exactly the same time to break new ground and move our society forward in dramatic fashion.

And, increasingly, it looks like trucking is going to be one of the industries that will bear the brunt of whatever is coming our way on the technology and innovation front.

In fact, I’ve argued …Read the rest of this story

Source:: http://www.truckinginfo.com/blog/truck-tech/story/2017/07/all-arrows-point-to-trucking.aspx