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Merc’s self-driving lorry leaves truckers plenty of time to pursue... other interests. We investigate
Merc’s self-driving Future Truck 2025 could overhaul haulage forever. TG gets an exclusive audience
The inspiration was the French group Daft Punk. They wear helmets on stage so no one knows how they look...” So says Mercedes senior designer Bertrand Janssen of the ‘face’ of his latest concept, the self-driving Future Truck 2025. It is fair to say that references to French electropop groups do not often grace the world of lorry design. Nor do highfalutin terms like “sensual purity”, or cabins upholstered in cream leather and open-pore wood. Then again, the Future Truck 2025 is no normal, grot-laden, pallet-lugging lorry.
“It is very pure, very anonymous,” says Janssen, an afable, stubbled Dutchman. His truck ditches the traditional vehicle face for something rather weirder: the front of the 2025 truck is pockmarked with dozens, hundreds of LEDs. In normal driving, these pulse white – “the heartbeat of the car” Merc calls it – but in autonomous mode, fip to blue. No headlights or conventional indicators, either. “We don’t need headlights because the driver doesn’t need to see any more,” Janssen explains. “The lights are only to warn others.”
Were the autonomous Future Truck 2025 real rather than concept, it would, of course, require headlamps, if only so the poor driver could see where he’s going if required to take control of his truck at night (“Er, guys? Who switched the lights out?”). But that bulb-free front end is a tongue-in-cheek indication of how self-driving tech could start to warp the conventions of truck – and indeed car – design.
Same story in the cabin, a calming, most un-truckish cocoon of plush leather, acres of timber and many hi-res screens. Even here there’s a cheeky design-stab at convention: push a button by the headrest and the driver’s seat swings 45 degrees clockwise, angling away from the steering wheel and into the cabin. Even sat stationary, it’s an unnerving experience to feel your legs spin away from the pedals, to have your gaze taken from the road ahead.
But behind its concept fourishes, the 2025 truck is rooted surprisingly deep in reality. The body in white is that of Merc’s familiar Actros. There’s no hybrid-hydrogen drivetrain on show, instead Benz’s latest diesel block, a sensible 12.8-litre six-cylinder churning out around 500bhp and a pifing 1,800lb ft of torque. “There’s no rocket science,” says advanced engineering boss Georg Stefan Hagemann. “The technologies on this truck we could release in a very short time.”
Including the self-driving systems. They’re all very much real-world, borrowed in part from Merc’s latest S-Class. The 2025 truck has already completed tests on a section of autobahn, cruising happily at 50mph without ploughing other vehicles of the road or taking a wrong turn and getting stuck under a low bridge.
How does it do it? With many, many eyes. Within the truck’s front bumper lurks a radar sensor, equipped with a long-range and short-range sensor. The former scans an 18-degree segment of the road ahead, up to a distance of 250 metres, while the latter has a far wider sweep – 130 degrees, but covering a 70-metre radius.
At the base of the windscreen, a stereoscopic camera gives the truck a 3D view of the road up to 100 metres ahead, scanning 45 degrees horizontally and 27 degrees vertically. This stereo camera can not only recognise cars, pedestrians and stationary objects, but also road markings and trafc signs. On each fank of the cab sits another radar sensor, scanning the length of the truck and trailer to efectively eliminate blind spots. Chuck in V2V (vehicleto-vehicle) and V2I (vehicle-to-infrastructure) networking, and you’re looking at a truck that can communicate, via standard WLAN wireless, with both nearby vehicles and also transport architecture: bridges, toll booths, even truck-stops.
It won’t, however, trundle its way from Minsk to Maidenhead while the driver has a kip on the in-cabin bunk. “The truck will observe the driver. He must wear his seatbelt and not fall asleep,” says Hagemann. “If the system does not get data [that the driver is awake], it will alert the driver. If it cannot pass control back to him, it will slow to a gradual stop at the side of the road.” As it stands, the truck will slavishly keep its lane: if the driver wants to overtake, he has to manually override the self-driving systems.
None of this tech is vapourware. Radar-based cruise control and stereo cameras are already out there, with side radar soon to make its way onto production trucks. So why is Merc calling this the truck of 2025, rather than, say, 2016?
The major tech issue is integrating those many monitoring systems. Each of the individual elements is close to productionready, but each speaks a diferent language. Teaching the radars, cameras and wireless systems to talk to each other, to build a single, detailed picture of the truck’s surroundings, is a phenomenally complex job, one Hagemann expects to take years, not months.
ÒWE DONÕT NEED HEADLIGHTS BECAUSE THE DRIVER DOESNÕT NEED TO SEE ANY MORE...Ó
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“If you add more features, the system may weaken. We need a lot of testing kilometres. And there are a lot of legal issues.”
The latter represents probably the greatest hurdle to autonomous driving. Lawmakers around the world are right now wrangling with the implications of and legislation around driverless cars, and getting themselves in something of a tangle while doing so. The latest European regulations permit “corrective steering intervention” at speeds under 7mph, but not fully hands-free driving. That’s why, though the latest S-Class will happily steer, brake and accelerate to keep its position in motorway trafc without any human input, the driver must keep his hands on the wheel, or risk a relentless stream of beeps and bongs. Until international law has fgured a way to incorporate fully autonomous vehicles – and, indeed, got its head round the likely legal fall-out from the frst big crash – then the technology remains in something of a holding pattern. The hold-up isn’t, says Hagemann, for want of demand from truckists.
“Truck owners and feet operators are fully convinced by this idea,” he says. “Drivers make mistakes that are not efcient.” It’s an echo of that old racing cliche: the weakest nut is the one behind the wheel.
“COMPUTERS WILL SOON BE ABLE TO DRIVE FAR BETTER THAN WE FLAWED, FLAKY HUMANS”
Much as we might recoil at the idea of a handful of microprocessors and wires somehow mastering a dance as delicate and unpredictable as modern driving, truth is that computers are soon going to be able to do it far better than us fawed, faky humans. Computers, after all, don’t tend to lose concentration when engaged in an exploratory nose-pick or bellowing at an amoeba-brained caller on TalkSport.
And autonomous driving, reckons Merc, could free up truckers to sort other work with their spare time on the road: to manage feet logistics, perhaps, from the 4G tablet in the cabin. A crueller publication than TopGear might suggest that, faced with a long journey and freed from the tiresome burden of preventing their lorry from crashing into stuf, some truckers might fnd less selfess ways of exploiting their new-found freedom than, say, increasing resource utilisation by tweaking route algorithms. Eating salt ’n’ vinegar crisps and crunching those fantasy football numbers, perhaps.
Self-driving lorries matter to us non-truckers, too. You might register juggernauts only as the lumbering fatties that clog up the inside lanes of our motorways, that cause hundred-mile tailbacks when one attempts a half-hour overtake on a steep hill, and thousand-mile tailbacks when one jack-knifes on the M25 on an icy Monday morning. But lorries are, to pinch Ford’s strapline, the backbone of our continent. A recent survey commissioned to investigate the consequences if road haulage were to suddenly cease in Europe predicted social chaos within a week of deliveries drying up, as populations, deprived of their regular fx of food, drink and TopGear magazines, swiftly turned feral. Unless the government erected a few million extra miles of railway overnight, we need an efcient truck network to keep Britain ticking.
Autonomous trucks – provided they don’t rise up against humanity and enslave us all – will, as and when they arrive, make haulage more efcient, and free up extra space on our roads too. They’ll allow trucks to run closer, faster, at quieter times of the day, and with fewer infuriating overtakes. And providing truckers with all that extra leisure time will surely ofer a welcome boost to our nation’s fagging adult magazine trade, too. Though perhaps that’s one industry that’s already succumbed to this brave new digital age…