Truckers wary of autonomous big rigs
Danny Spell thinks that the idea that a robot will be driving his 18-wheeler one of these days is hogwash.
“I been listening to a lot of crap on the truckers’ channel,” Spell, 49, said, after pulling in to refuel his big rig at a Pilot truck stop near the crossroads of Interstates 70 and 81 in Hagerstown, Maryland. “I think that if the government approves it, they’re going to get a lot of people killed.”
Spell, who lives in Clinton, North Carolina, was in a hurry, but also a surprisingly good mood considering that he had just spent an hour or more in traffic around Washington, D.C. Chained to his trailer were huge rolls of artificial turf that had stripped from a playing field in Chantilly,Virginia, and were headed to recycling at a firm in Pennsylvania.
He’s also not the only skeptic when it comes to the idea of transforming the trucking industry with automation. He doubts that self-driving technology will ever get to the point that truckers become unnecessary.
“Anything that’s run by a computer is going to get messed up,” Spell said. “They don’t have no bulletproof software.”
What worries him more these days is the coming of electronic logbooks. The increased level of monitoring - which must be implemented by the end of the year - is another headache on top of the usual road hazards he faces out there, such as a “bunch of rude drivers.”
“Like right now, they don’t understand my truck is probably weighing 77,000 pounds and how I could crush them because they’re acting like an idiot,” Spell said.
Truckers are by turns dismissive and wary of the technology revolution that might alter their role or even remove them from the cab someday. A recent report by the U.S. Energy Information Administration says autonomous vehicles will transform the trucking industry before self-driving vehicles move into the consumer market, largely because there are bigger financial incentives to save on labor and other costs such as fuel.
Autonomous trucks have already appeared on the road in limited numbers, largely as demonstrations. But analysts foresee the technology getting to the point that large caravans of self- driving trucks could be running the highways someday. Truckers would work more like airline pilots, maneuvering big rigs onto the highway and then flipping on the autopilot for most of the trip, taking over again only when they have to get off the main route.
But most analysts also agree that the transformation will occur step by step, with driver-assisted trucks arriving long before driverless trucks. Chris Spear, president and chief executive of the American Trucking Associations, said fully autonomous truck fleets are still decades away, even though the framework for assisted driving is already starting to emerge.