The Long Road to Driverless Trucks
The new truck is coming out of the factory today, and it looks as if the day will never come. With autonomous trucks on the road, a new era has begun, but it is a time that many see as an uneasy one.
Driving a truck or car is not easy.
Driving a truck or car is not easy. The driver has to be aware of the environment, his blind spots and the hazards around him. It also requires a degree of concentration, which is not easy to maintain at speed. The trucks and cars we drive today are far more complicated and have far more things to do, and it has a lot more things inside the car or truck that can make us sick or kill us than any driver on the road today could have imagined.
What is needed, however, is for the truck and/or car to have a basic awareness of the world around them, and for the driver to be able to rely on and trust the system in which he or she is operating. This is a challenge that has been with us since the first car, and so it has been with the truck industry, but there have always been car companies that would never give up on the challenge to bring car technology to passenger-car level.
Now, some new truck builders are on the verge of having what some would call the first truly autonomous truck. And they can do it, for the simple reason that they really can build a truck to look like a car. But the real challenge lies in building the technology that will make it possible for the vehicle to be able to drive itself to places it has not been driven to before, or to keep itself on the road even when the road is being closed.
The Future of the Truck
In the past two decades, there have been some remarkable leaps forward in the way the truck industry operates. When the first diesel truck was sold on the road, it actually was a more powerful tractor. A diesel truck today can achieve a payload of up to 70,000 pounds, but with a heavy fuel bill. In the past, the cargo-hauling truck had to be able to make it to a destination. But today, the truck can make it to a destination