The era of self-driving vehicles is getting closer to reality. Google announced a few of its self-driving cars will be cruising the streets around the company’s Mountain View, California headquarters this summer. If you’re in the area, rest assured that during this phase in the project, there will be safety drivers on board that can take over driving if needed. But if you’re off the side streets and on the highway, how do you feel about sharing the road with self-driving long-haul semi-trucks?
The first licensed autonomous commercial truck hit the road on an open public highway in Nevada. In a staged nighttime production to announce the milestone, Daimler Trucks’ Freightliner Inspiration drove on top of the Hoover Dam.
Here’s an important point: This truck falls under the “Level 3” category for limited self-driving automation. A licensed autonomous on-highway truck is not a driverless vehicle. A qualified truck driver with a valid commercial driver’s license must be in the cab and at the controls. The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration’s regulations state:
Vehicles at this level enable the driver to cede full control of all safety-critical functions under certain traffic or environmental conditions and, in those conditions, to rely heavily on the vehicle to monitor for changes in those conditions requiring transition back to driver control. The driver is expected to be available for occasional control, but with sufficiently comfortable transition time.
The autonomous vehicle system’s technology is responsible for maintaining legal speed, staying in the lane, keeping a safe braking distance from other vehicles, and slowing or stopping, based on traffic and road conditions. The system monitors changes that would require the driver to assume control of the vehicle again. In addition, the driver must be in control when the truck exits the highway, is on local roads, and when docking for making deliveries.
What are the advantages if there has to be a driver in the truck? The Freightliner Inspiration isn’t Optimus Prime, but Daimler Trucks believes the AV technology has advantages the long-haul commercial trucking industry needs: increased safety, fuel efficiency, reduced highway congestion, and making life on the road less stressful for the driver.
Self-driving trucks probably won’t be pulling into a truck stop this summer. However, as the Commercial Carrier Journal reported, “Freightliner gave not just this industry, not just this country, but the entire world a look at the future of transportation and logistics this week. Change is coming. And it’s coming far faster than any of us dared imagine just a short time ago.”
