Story by: James Jaillet

Speaking last week at the FTR Transportation Conference in Indianapolis, Indiana, representatives from three autonomous truck tech developers sought to quell fears about their technology displacing drivers’ jobs.

Instead, they offered a rosy outlook for the technology, in which autonomous trucks don’t displace drivers but alter the job to boost home time, reduce the grind of spending hours behind the wheel and increase the industry’s efficiency.

“We see this partnership between automated trucks and human-driven trucks, [and] in our model, we’re actually making truck drivers jobs more valuable and more rewarding,” says Morgan Brewster, head of strategy for Ike Robotics, who earlier this year landed $54 million in seed funding for its autonomous retrofit system.

He foresees the driving job as “[shifting] from the really hard over the road long-haul segment and [moving] those jobs to home-daily jobs.”

“We don’t want to get rid of drivers. They’re the lifeblood of our company,” says Paul Schlegel, senior vice president at Starsky Robotics, who just this year ran a completely unmanned 9-mile test run in Florida with a remote driver monitoring the driverless run. According to the article from overdriveonline.com and its author James Jaillet.

In our opinion, autonomous technology will change the industry forever but not the way that most think.

We are still at least a decade away from fully autonomous (level-5) trucks roaming our roads and highways. And even then human interaction will be still necessary as someone would have to watch over the “driverless” technology for years to come.

Read the full article HERE

Source and credits: overdriveonline.com / James Jaillet / iTrucker  / Mario Pawlowski