Self Driving Trucks: Logistics on New Heights

 In real life, consumers will not advocate as strongly for self driving trucks as the business owner with a multi million dollar profit opportunity. There will be concerns regarding consumer self driving trucks that will pressure regulators and slow the process. But business will spend the dollars to make it’s case and approvals will come. Trucks will have CDL personnel in the cab when self driving trucks operations begin and they will be restricted to limited access highways and small distances beyond the off ramp. A single 24 hour ‘driver monitor’ replaces two team drivers. Later the monitor is removed because over the road saFDV trucks will have ‘x’ billion miles of safe driving” Truck drivers will be terminally unemployed. There is no natural next job for this set of skills. And, yes, this is a problem. In the beginning, the shortage of employees and attrition will help balance the negative effects of the faSDV truck. The problem is that the transition period will be relatively short. it will be governed more by manufacturing capacity than a slowly emerging desire for faSDV trucks.

In the real world, the economic savings of not paying a driver will be extreme. These savings will be employed in two ways: 

1.increased owner profits and

 2.lower prices for customers (shippers). 

Companies are naturally competitive and will use their lower cost base from faSDV trucks to try to increase their business and gain market share.

And these lower prices will ‘terrorize’ the trucking companies that rely on human drivers. They will need to match prices and the effect is, at best, a loss of profits, and, at worst, the loss of business leading to business failure. And the ONLY response possible is to ‘fight back’ by acquiring faSDV trucks as soon as possible and at any price. In the early years, a price premium of $100,000+ for a long haul faSDV truck would not surprise me. Which means that the trucking industry might turnover completely to those businesses (perhaps not now in trucking) that have access to massive amounts of low cost capital AND connections with manufacturers to get a priority position on deliveries.

Bottom line, I expect that drivers will quickly become unemployed at a rate that far exceeds attrition and job vacancy. And that many of the company in the shipping industry will fail as well. SELF DRIVING TRUCKS tech is a revolution big, noisy, and very destructive to human beings.”