Could Self-Driving Trucks be Good for Truckies?

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Self Driving Trucks

A recent article on TheAtlantic.com examined whether self-driving vehicles could actually be a good thing for truckies.

Although the general outlook of self-driving trucks for truck drivers is grim, researchers at Uber’s Advanced Technologies Group say there may be an increase in trucking jobs as more self-driving trucks are introduced.

In the article Alden Woodrow, the product lead for self-driving trucks at Uber says the outcome will not be as we expect,

“We’ve been disappointed over the last year to see a lot of stories about how self-driving trucks are going to be this huge problem for truck drivers,”  

“That’s not at all what we think the outcome is going to be.”

Source: https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2018/02/uber-says-its-self-driving-trucks-will-be-good-for-truckers/551879/

The first reason Uber doesn’t believe trucking jobs are in danger is because self-driving trucks wont be doing “dock to dock” runs for a long time, instead these autonomous vehicles will drive highway miles between what Uber calls transfer hubs. In this model human truck drivers will take over the driving for the last kilometers through complex urban and industrial terrain.

He goes on to explain that the company saw their self-driving trucks complementing human drivers instead of replacing them.

Woodrow says that he saw their version of self-driving trucks as complementing humans, not replacing them. To make their case, Uber created a model of the industry’s labor market based on Bureau of Labor Statistics data. Then, they created scenarios that looked at a range of self-driving-truck adoption rates and how often those autonomous trucks would be on the road in comparison to human-driven vehicles.

Read more at https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2018/02/uber-says-its-self-driving-trucks-will-be-good-for-truckers/551879/Uber’s Woodrow agrees that drivers do a lot of things beyond driving which robots cant do.

He goes on to explain how if successful and efficiently utilised, self-driving trucks could drive down the cost of freight, stimulating demand and leading to more business.

Uber believes with more freight on the roads, more humans will be required to run it around locally which would therefore require more truck drivers and not less.

Despite Uber’s attempts to calm the industry, in the past other researchers have reported to the contrary. In fact a Goldman Sachs study predicted truck driver job losses of 25,000 per month in the United States as self-driving trucks are rolled out.

McKinsey Global Institute put out a report with the possibility of a staggering 1.5 million jobs lost in the trucking industry over the next decade in the United States.Read more at https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2018/02/uber-says-its-self-driving-trucks-will-be-good-for-truckers/551879/

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