Self-Driving Trucks and the Platooning Stepping Stone: How Soon?
While it seems pretty certain that some forms of autonomous trucking are definitely on the way, the vision varies on just what that’s going to look like and how fast it’s going to get here. That was the takeaway from a panel discussion on platooning and autonomous vehicle technologies at the American Trucking Associations’ Management Conference & Exhibition.
Anthony Levandowski, co-founder of the autonomous trucking startup Otto, stood out on the panel, from his casual dress and orange sneakers to his visions of trucks being built with no cabs for drivers at all.
Levandowski, who formerly worked on Google’s self-driving car project and now heads up autonomous vehicle development of both cars and trucks for Uber after it bought Otto, said his vision for the future of transportation is liquidity and automation.
Liquidity is the ability to match carriers with shippers. If you’re delivering people, as Uber does via its ride-sharing app, why not food, why not packages, and why not freight, he asked. Uber is already doing last mile delivery for Walmart.
More specific to this panel was his second point, automation. Uber recently launched a fleet of about 14 self-driving cars in Pittsburgh. Although they still have drivers at the moment, “once you have a vehicle that can drive better than the best driver, you want to be able to put them on everything,” Levandowski said.
He showed a video of a Volvo equipped with Otto’s aftermarket system of cameras and other items driving down a freeway with no driver in sight. In the future, he says, you could have trucks that don’t need seats, windshields or HVAC and could operate nearly 24/7 without the productivity constraints of worrying about driver hours of service or fatigue.
The company is currently signing up fleets and owner-operators to beta test its technology at testdrive.ot.to.
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