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The time when truck drivers can kick back and read a newspaper while their tractor trailers safely navigate traffic and traverse the nation’s highways may be closer than we first thought. In fact, some of the autonomous trucking sector’s larger players have made major announcements in the last year, leading some industry analysts to start projecting widespread adoption of this technology within the next decade.
This rapid advancement signals a transformative shift in freight transportation, promising increased efficiency, reduced costs while also addressing the ongoing driver shortage. In Will autonomy usher in the future of truck freight transportation?, McKinsey & Co., says autonomous trucks offer compelling use cases and benefits to total cost of operation that could translate into an approximately $600 billion market in 2035.
“Major OEMs are continuing their commitment to autonomous trucking and are investing to bring the first vehicles of their kind on the road in the second half of this decade,” the global consultancy says, noting that the current use case for autonomous commercial vehicles is mainly suitable for scheduled traffic between logistics points (for example, distribution centers, factories and terminals) and the long-haul leg of multimode transport.
“To some degree, constrained autonomy could also work on nonscheduled point-to-point routes, but it is unlikely to be operationally viable on very short routes (such as milk runs or delivering goods from DCs to stores),” says McKinsey, which expects the autonomous heavy-duty trucking market to reach $616 billion in 2035 in China (about $327 billion), the United States (about $178 billion), and Europe (about $112 billion).
It says the U.S. will have the fastest adoption rate, with autonomous heavy-duty trucks accounting for 13% of trucks on the road by 2035. “High salaries and a scarcity of truck drivers create strong financial incentives for automation,” McKinsey adds. “Likewise, long distances between major cities and a weak train network favor autonomous trucking.”
Driving Innovation
Most U.S. states today allow for driverless vehicles, including Texas, New Mexico and Arizona. On May 1st, Aurora Innovation, Inc., launched its commercial self-driving trucking service in Texas. The company began regular driverless customer deliveries between Dallas and Houston, it says, and an Aurora Driver (the company’s self-driving system) has to date completed over 1,200 miles without a driver. The milestone makes Aurora the first company to operate a commercial self-driving service with heavy-duty trucks on public roads.
The Aurora Driver uses computers and sensors that can see beyond the length of four football fields, enabling it to safely operate on the highway. In over four years of supervised pilot hauls, the Aurora Driver has delivered over 10,000 customer loads across 3 million autonomous miles. It has also demonstrated extraordinary capabilities, including predicting red light runners, avoiding collisions and detecting pedestrians in the dark hundreds of meters away.
A Trillion-dollar Industry
Aurora’s first customers include Uber Freight and Hirschbach Motor Lines, both of which have already been involved with supervised commercial pilots with the company. Now, Aurora plans to expand its driverless service to El Paso and Phoenix by the end of 2025. Its Aurora Driver is an SAE L4 self-driving system that is first being deployed in long-haul trucking.
“Trucking is a trillion-dollar industry in the U.S. but it faces challenges, including an aging driver population with high turnover rates, skyrocketing operating costs and underutilized assets,” the company said in a press release. “These intensify every year, making the value proposition of autonomy – a solution that will offer safe, reliable capacity without an impact to jobs – highly attractive to the trucking industry.”
