A Fleet of Trucks Just Drove Themselves Across Europe (qz.com)

An anonymous reader shares a report on Quartz: About a dozen trucks from major manufacturers like Volvo and Daimler just completed a week of largely autonomous driving across Europe, the first such major exercise on the continent. The trucks set off from their bases in three European countries and completed their journeys in Rotterdam in the Netherlands. One set of trucks, made by the Volkswagen subsidiary Scania, traveled more than 2,000 km and crossed four borders to get there. The trucks were taking part in the European Truck Platooning Challenge, organized by the Dutch government as one of the big events for its 2016 presidency of the European Union. While self-driving cars from Google or Ford get most of the credit for capturing the public imagination, commercial uses for autonomous or nearly autonomous vehicles, like tractors from John Deere, have been quietly putting the concept to work in a business setting.In related news, as tipped to us by a reader, "Swedish automaker Volvo is planning on bringing a fleet of 100 self-driving vehicles to China from next year, in a project which will see local drivers test autonomous cars on public roads in everyday driving conditions. Dangerous driving and congestion in Chinese cities will likely prove a difficult challenge for the fleet." I am particularly interested in learning how this autonomous truck is controlled. From the article, it appears that these vehicles utilize Wi-Fi. Based on so many security incidents we continue to come across, perhaps these companies should first work on solving the technical challenges to make these trucks safe -- that is, bolstering the hardware and software security.

Comments

Movie Plot

[irrational_design]

I'm very surprised there hasn't been a movie yet (that I'm aware of) featuring an autonomous vehicle being hijacked remotely to do some dastardly deed.

Other than China, they also might want to try driving the vehicles through Cairo. I remember taking a taxi once from the area of the zoo to a hotel near Giza once and the number of near accidents, crazy driving, etc. in that 20 minute trip was greater than everything I've seen in every other country I've ever visited put together over the span of my entire lifetime (40+ years).

Re:This could destroy roads in the US

[Dutch Gun]

Trying to pre-emptively legislate based on speculation or predictions seems like a really bad idea. Let's address issues as they arrive. It's not like this is going to happen overnight.

Anyhow, to your point... railroads and trucking are rather different in their advantages and disadvantages, and so I suspect there may be less competition among these industries than you believe. Trucks will *never* match the efficiency per-pound of bulk goods carried by rail. However, rail can never match the speed and flexibility of trucks to make smaller point-to-point deliveries.

Re:It doesn't need to be 100% secure

[lgw]

If you're making more than a subsistance living driving trucks in the US, you're either doing something else besides driving, or you own the truck.

Some truck drivers are delivery drivers. They won't be replaced with self-driving trucks (though they might by delivery drones or whatever).

Some truck drivers are driving construction-related trucks. There's a lot more to operating a cement mixer or even dump truck than just rolling down the highway. Plus, autonomous driving on a construction site isn't a problem people are even thinking about yet (once you're on the site, where you actually go changes all the time).

And if you own something as capital-intensive as a big rig, whether you drive it or not you can still make money from providing haulage.