So here we go: autonomous-vehicle technology is starting to roll out – in this case for peloton trucking.
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… computer-assisted truck was able to follow closely behind a human-driven truck perfectly, maintaining exactly 33 feet of distance between the vehicles. The promise is a future of safer, more fuel efficient, and more robotic trucking. …
Peloton says the “technology saves more than 7% [of fuel] at 65mph – 10% for the rear truck and 4.5% for the lead truck,” which is tremendous because “Long-haul fleets spend 40% of operating expenses on fuel, accounting collectively for over 10% of U.S. oil use and related carbon emissions.” These savings come primarily from reduced aerodynamic drag.
Google thinks they’ll be on the road in 2017.
I have an idea. Why not physically connect the trailers? Then there would be no need for a separate cab and driver. And maybe you could find some sort of way of automatically steering that doesn’t require any electronics at all, like maybe a pair of rails or something. Imagine – you could probably string together, like, a HUNDRED of those things!
Peak supplementing city buses too.
As James notes, it’d be nice if we’d rolled out more rails (and trams). But given we have the asphalt (and streets) it’s good to use it.
On the topic of automatic cars, planes, trucks and buses, I have been expecting automatic trains for a bit now. The thing with large freight trains is that they are so hard to stop, the human engineer has a limited ability to react in time in any case. And automatic trains would seem to open up the possibility of frequent connections to all parts of the continent with shorter trains and more container hubs. The idea would be that a container could go from all corners of the continent to all the other corners every week. First to replace some air cargo and then to replace some truck cargo. The cost and time of shipping small lots of goods continentally is still large compared to the cost of large bulk transfers, but with a “smart” automatic system, there would be less reason for this to be the case. And of course individual packages could be carried to your door or to a local depot with automatic delivery trucks. Such a logistics advance would make internet shopping and supply chains generally more efficient.