We’re rushing along the road to change
The self-driving taxi and the electric long-haul truck will arrive in 2019, marking a turning point in the transportation revolution.
Walmart and J.B. Hunt, two of the nation’s biggest shipping companies, have placed orders for Tesla’s new electric semi-truck. CEO Elon Musk promises it will go 500 miles hauling 80,000 pounds on a single charge.
The truck stole headlines from Musk’s new sports car, mostly because trucking is potentially a more lucrative sector for electric vehicle manufacturers. Big rigs are expensive to maintain and operate, and an affordable electric-powered replacement would slash costs.
Electricity is cheaper than diesel fuel, and electric motors require little maintenance. There is also less range anxiety because federal law limits drivers to 11 hours behind the wheel a day. That’s a built-in break for recharging both the batteries and the driver.
Long-haul trucking is also a huge fuel market. With diesel already more expensive than gasoline, and trucks getting low mileage, truckers would love a way to save on fuel.
All of these factors make trucking a far more accessible market for Tesla. Engineers know what range to design the battery pack for, and because they only need to build a few thousands trucks a year, Musk doesn’t have to go through all of the process headaches that have kept him from mass-producing his new Tesla 3.
Self-driving taxis took a step closer to reality this week with Volvo agreeing to deliver 24,000 vehicles to Uber in 2019. That puts the company one step closer to eliminating drivers.
“This new agreement puts us on a path toward mass-produced selfdriving vehicles at scale,” Jeff Miller, Uber’s head of auto alliances, told
Bloomberg News. “The more people working on the problem, we’ll get there faster and with better, safer, more reliable systems.”
The first Volvos will be gasoline-powered, but the manufacturer has promised to move all of its models toward hybrid or electric drive trains. So when the order is completed in 2021, the final vehicles will be much more fuel efficient.
For years I’ve been writing about how ACES will transform the transportation and energy industries. ACES stands for autonomous, connected, electric and shared. Starting in 2019, all we will be missing in commercially available vehicles is the connected bit.
Developers have touted the potential benefits of allowing cars to communicate to each other for a decade, and research underway in Britain is showing the benefits of cars alerting each other to emergencies, traffic jams and even sudden braking by the driver ahead.
Connected vehicles can avoid accidents, traffic and even get out of the way of ambulances. The U.S. Department of Transportation was considering a rule requiring future American automobiles to include connectivity hardware, but the Trump administration is considering dropping the rule.
A federal mandate, though, will be unnecessary once vehicle owners recognize the benefits of connected vehicle technology. Note that I say owners, not drivers, because fewer vehicles in the future will have drivers, and even fewer passengers will own the cars they share with others.
An autonomous taxi company will want its vehicles to communicate with others to make sure they are evenly distributed and that they avoid traffic as much as possible. A robotic car will also want to signal its intentions not only with brake lights and turn signals, but also with telemetry sent to other robotic cars.
Many readers will think everything I’ve just described is science fiction, yet I refer you back to the beginning of this column. Two years ago most analysts predicted the first commercial autonomous cars would come no earlier than 2023. They are now slated for 2019.
Transportation experts told me that electric motors could never power a longhaul truck, yet Tesla plans to deliver them in less than two years. The world of transportation is changing more quickly than any of us could have imagined.
Quicker adoption also means quicker reduction in new demand for oil. And that is something everyone in the oil and gas industry needs to consider long and hard.