Tech keeps on trucking
Driverless commercial vehicles moving from fantasy to reality that can up productivity, safety
MONTREAL— Once thought of as a distant fantasy, autonomous trucks are moving toward commercial reality on Canadian highways as companies look to boost productivity amid a driver shortage and governments seek to reduce deadly crashes.
They are not yet driving themselves out of warehouses and down the highways, but companies of all sizes —including General Motors, Google and Uber — are testing out the technology.
Already a banner year in self-driving advancements — including the first on-street test of an autonomous vehicle in Canada — interest in the sector picked up in the closing months of 2017 after Tesla Inc. showcased a fully electric semi-trailer truck equipped with semiautonomous technology including enhanced autopilot, automated braking and lane departure warnings.
Toronto trucking firm Fortigo Freight joined Loblaws and Walmart Canada in each pre-ordering Tesla semis, the $232,000 electric truck set to be delivered in 2019 that holds the promise of eventually becoming autonomous.
Despite his company’s investment, Fortigo president Elias Demangos isn’t holding his breath for widespread adoption in the next decade.
While the vehicles are ideally suited for corridors, such as Canada’s busiest route between Montreal and Windsor, Demangos believes drivers will still be needed for short-haul services.
Estimates on how far away we are from a driverless future vary widely, but completely driverless trucks are already being used far from traffic, on remote resource properties.
Suncor Energy is testing them at its oilsands operations in Alberta, while Rio Tinto is expanding their deployment at its iron ore mines in Australia.
Rapid advances in technology are “revolutionizing” the way largescale mining is undertaken around the globe, said Chris Salisbury, head of the mining giant’s iron ore division.
Transport Minister Marc Garneau travelled in October to Tesla’s headquarters in Silicon Valley as part of his push to study safety and privacy issues associated with automated technologies to inform regulations his government plans to craft.
He has asked a standing Senate committee on transport and communications to study regulatory and technical issues related to the deployment of automated commercial vehicles, which have the potential to improve the safety, efficiency and environmental performance of Canada’s transportation system. The committee is expected to deliver a full report in January.
The Canadian association representing the trucking industry — where autonomous technology could make the jobs of nearly 300,000 Canadians obsolete — urged the committee to avoid even referring to the technology as autonomous, much less driverless, preferring “advanced driver systems.”
Automating the trucking industry will be more efficient because it will cut labour costs by 40 per cent, and trucks can operate for longer hours, said Paul Godsmark, chief technology officer at the Canadian Automated Vehicles Centre of Excellence.
Automation advocates argue that removing human drivers from the road will increase safety.
Currently, about 10 per cent of all crashes the Ontario Provincial Police get called to involve a commercial vehicle.
While driver error is typically responsible for about one-third of incidents, a spike this year pushed that up to 65 per cent, Ontario Provincial Police Sgt. Kerry Schmidt of the highway safety division said after a fiery crash killed three people on Hwy. 400 north of Toronto in early November.
However, confirming the effectiveness of self-driving vehicles across many different driving conditions could be a challenge because autonomous systems don’t respond the same way as human drivers.
They react to patterns they’ve seen in the past and can’t make the choice between avoiding a small child or wild animal crossing the road on their own.
While autonomous trucks will never be totally safe, such “live or die choices” are very rare, Godsmark said.
Rapid advancements in self-driving technology will allow the system to react more quickly than the best human driver, he added.
“The expectation is if we get all of that right there will be a lot fewer crashes.”