Automated Trucks

An excerpt from, “Self-driving trucks: en route to transform Europe’s freight sector” By Barbara Pinho, Horizon, May 6, 2025:

Along with greening and digitalising transport, automation could also help tackle the growing shortage of truck drivers.

Recent figures show that an increasing number of truck driver vacancies remain unfilled across Europe. The International Road Transport Union predicts that by 2028, Europe could be short of 745 000 truck drivers – 17% of the total required workforce.

“There’s a severe shortage of drivers and it’s only going to get worse in the coming years,” said Pia Wijk, a project manager at Einride, a Swedish freight technology company specialising in electric and autonomous vehicles.

Wijk also works as part of the MODI research team, which brings together experts from 36 public and private organisations, such as the Volvo Technology AB and DAF Trucks, based in seven EU countries, plus Norway.

. . .The MODI research team are currently exploring how automated transport can be integrated into the logistics sector, with a focus on key transport corridors across Europe. In doing so, they are identifying a range of challenges that must be addressed.

It is crucial to ensure that essential tasks accompanying any cargo journey – such as border crossings, documentation, refuelling, and loading or unloading – can still be carried out effectively in an automated transport environment.

By the time the project concludes in March 2026, the team will have conducted detailed impact assessments, compiled their findings, and developed business models to inform both companies and policymakers.

MODI’s primary focus is the 1 200-kilometre road corridor from Rotterdam in the Netherlands to Oslo in Norway. The researchers are assessing its infrastructure readiness for automated driving.

An excerpt from, “The Great Reset: Policing in 2030″ by Bob Harrison, RAND, April 20, 2020:

Police work was on life support from a technology that saved lives, eased the suffering and lowered crime—self-driving vehicles. Cops weren’t the only ones on the endangered list due to autonomous vehicles. By 2030, almost all commercial and transit fleets were automated. Truckers were relegated to being passengers that only parked trailers into their loading bays (into automated factories that loaded them without workers).

Almost half of all vehicles on roadways were already partially or fully automated, and roadways communicated with cars to keep them apart at safe distances and ease congestion. Three of 10 insurers had disappeared, since liability was lower, and had shifted from the owner to the manufacturer. Even the gig economy lost a major source of employment as Uber, Lyft and everyone else automated their fleets.

An excerpt from, “Driverless trucks are here” by Joann Muller, Axios, April 23, 2025:

Drivers along a 200-mile stretch of I-45 between Dallas and Houston should get ready for something new: The semi-truck in the next lane might not have anyone in the driver’s seat.

Why it matters: Autonomous trucking companies have been testing their fleets on Texas highways for several years, but always with backup safety drivers in the cab.

Now, one company, Aurora Innovation, says it plans to go completely driverless, a key milestone that promises to reshape the trucking industry.

. . .The big picture: Trucking is the backbone of the American economy, yet the industry is strained by high driver turnover rates, supply chain inefficiencies and rising costs.

. . .Where it stands: While the number of robotaxi companies has shrunk, at least 10 companies are developing driverless technology for trucks.

Most expect to “pull the driver” — or go fully autonomous — on public roads later this year or sometime in 2026.

They all plan to begin in Texas, known for its vital freight corridors, favorable regulatory policies and good weather.

Kodiak Robotics, which intends to go public soon, says it has already surpassed 750 hours of driving on private roads across West Texas’ Permian Basin without a human driver on board.

An excerpt from, “The driverless truck is coming, and it’s going to automate millions of jobs” by Ryan Petersen, TechCrunch, April 25, 2016:

A convoy of self-driving trucks recently drove across Europe and arrived at the Port of Rotterdam. No technology will automate away more jobs — or drive more economic efficiency — than the driverless truck.

Shipping a full truckload from L.A. to New York costs around $4,500 today, with labor representing 75 percent of that cost. But those labor savings aren’t the only gains to be had from the adoption of driverless trucks.

Where drivers are restricted by law from driving more than 11 hours per day without taking an 8-hour break, a driverless truck can drive nearly 24 hours per day. That means the technology would effectively double the output of the U.S. transportation network at 25 percent of the cost.

And the savings become even more significant when you account for fuel efficiency gains. The optimal cruising speed from a fuel efficiency standpoint is around 45 miles per hour, whereas truckers who are paid by the mile drive much faster. Further fuel efficiencies will be had as the self-driving fleets adopt platooning technologies, like those from Peloton Technology, allowing trucks to draft behind one another in highway trains.

Trucking represents a considerable portion of the cost of all the goods we buy, so consumers everywhere will experience this change as lower prices and higher standards of living.

In addition, once the technology is mature enough to be rolled out commercially, we will also enjoy considerable safety benefits. This year alone more people will be killed in traffic accidents involving trucks than in all domestic airline crashes in the last 45 years combined. At the same time, more truck drivers were killed on the job, 835, than workers in any other occupation in the U.S.