Driverless Truck Essay

We are experiencing a massive technology shift in road freight industry, which promises a much leaner and more sustainable supply chain including improvements in customer experience, costs, and efficiency. The most common use of autonomous vehicles in logistics will be driverless trucks. Like their car counterparts, self-driving trucks will depend on mapping software and short-range radar to assess the vehicle’s surround-ings. Wireless connections to other vehicles and to the road itself will provide additional information that will reduce roadway congestion and accidents. Among its benefits are reduced fuel usage, better traffic flows, and reduced emissions.

This “digitized trucking,” and the logistics industry of which it is a part, is still at least a decade in the fu-ture, but parts of it are already being put in place, thanks largely to two major global trends that are transform-ing the trucking industry.

Second, social and cultural changes are opening up new markets and increasing expectations for the efficiencies to be gained through autonomous vehicles and the digitized supply chain.

The effect of these trends isn’t just a matter of how trucks move down the highway, or how the global supply chain is managed. Rather, digitized trucking will transform how virtually every stakeholder in these linked businesses — original equipment manufacturers (OEMs), logistics companies, warehouses, and local delivery businesses — will operate. Some stakeholders will see a wide range of new business models open up, while others will likely struggle as their roles in the logistics chain are