The Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration (FMCSA) is planning to gather information on the industry’s opinion of autonomous trucks. It is not asking whether or not autonomous trucks should be allowed. Instead, FMCSA is looking for ways to convince fleets, brokers, shippers, engineers, and even drivers that Automated Driving Systems (ADS) should be integrated into “the road freight ecosystem” as quickly as possible.
FMCSA published their notice of New Information Collection in the Federal Register.
FMCSA is worried that because people don’t currently understand or have a friendly view of autonomous trucks that they may not transition to ADS quickly enough. This, FMCSA claims, would result “in the delayed achievement of safety, productivity, and efficiency benefits of ADS-equipped trucks.”
The proposed project is called “Trucking Fleet Concept of Operations (CONOPS) for Managing Mixed Fleets.” A survey would be conducted at four trucking industry conferences. Data would be collected form two thousand “CMV drivers, CMV fleet managers, industry engineers, CMV sales personnel, researchers, and State and Federal government personnel.”
Participants would fill out a questionnaire regarding their “baseline” opinions of ADS technology. They would then participate in a “hands-on” demonstration. After, they would fill out a second questionnaire to see how their opinions had changed. The whole experience is designed to take less than five minutes.
FMCSA plans to use that data to create a “rigorous, data driven CONOPS.” With that, they hope to be able to answer the question they say is frequently being asked by trucking executives: “How can I integrate ADS into my fleet operations?”
If you’d like to make a comment on the FMCSA’s plan, you can do so on the federal register website.
Source: FMCSA, ttnews, freightwaves
So this is why fmcsa wanted those elogs.
Ahhhh…….start rolling out autonomous trucks by the year 2035. Let technology get better, the tech is NOT safely there yet . Any sooner than that, I believe, won’t have “SAFETY” at the fore front rather than lobbyist and special interest finances pushing the change. Then again…..money ALWAYS comes before safety in this industry. Anyone that suggest otherwise is either a fool or they are lying. Either way, drivers are not going to have much, if any, say in the matter. Hell….it’s only our lively hood at stake, what do we know??!!!
You definitely right,God bless you
Let’s be real. Safety isn’t your top concern.
Show me a single study or field test where autonomous vehicles are going 5x-10x more miles between accidents than human counterparts.
The safety issues has been put to bed. The real problem IS the money. “Welcome Shareholders, to the 11th Autonomous Vehicles Inc Board Meeting. We did it! We finally have 12 months of autonomous vehicles full making up the majority of traffic. As outlook goes, we have some Good news, bad news guys – Good News? We just lowered traffic fatalities from 30k per year to 5k per year.
Bad News? 1,000 families are suing us because they hit the unlucky lottery.”
Basically, even if autonomous vehicles travel 1000x more than humans between fatality accidents, it will still cause people to lose their minds.
Because at the end of the day, you might have saved 25,000 hypothetical people, but they are just that – hypothetical. You can’t point to which 25,000 people your technology saved, just that it saved 25k random people who will never know they were saved. It’s like a tree falling in the forest when no one is around, did it make a sound?
But the 1000 people who die after having an accident with an autonomous vehicle? They will have names, and families, and probably… money & attorneys. Especially the first few generations.
That’s the biggest hurdle.
The Safety/Lives issue has been settled for a long time. The issue of what to do with victims in the rare instance of a fatality accident involving an autonomous vehicle is the last real hurdle.
correction:
“Show me a single study or field test where autonomous vehicles AREN’T going a minimum of 5x-10x more miles between accidents than human counterparts.”
I looked it up.
A: The average human goes about 165,000 miles between accidents.
B: Autonomous vehicles – 4,500,000 Miles between accidents.
That’s 27x better than humans.
Its not a safety thing. Humans ARE the safety hazard on the road. Cars don’t get in arguments with their spouse/kids while driving.
Cars don’t smoke crack or drive drunk.
Cars don’t text and drive.
Cars don’t road rage.
People? They do all of those things, all around us, everyday.
I’ve driven over 1.5 million miles. You mean I should have had 10 accidents by Now? I’ve had zero. I’d like to see a computer run 4.5 million miles without having a software quirk or a freeze up or a bad sensor or something. Hell, my eld freezes up or does something stupid every week.
If reducing accidents is your #1 concern, you are a fool.
If I just set aside all that it means to be a human having a good human life, like a sense of accomplishment and adventure and opportunities to feel in control of how I live out my days my weeks in my life, I can reduce accidents to zero.
Set the speed limit at 10 miles an hour.
No driving at night.
No driving in any form of inclement weather.
Driverless trucks are stupid. We are talking about a life size remote control truck with our internet holding the controls. What happens when you need gas. What happens in a snowstorm and snow covers the cameras the internet is using to navigate this truck? Whats to stop people from robbing the cargo on these trucks. Can this trucks system be hacked.. Is it true our phone company increased their use of radiation 70 times higher then it was , created mini cell towers and are installing them every couples of blocks or so to get the connection they need to make these driverless vehicles available to the public and wont you have to do this on every single road, street, and highway across our entire country to make these vehicles go everywhere our current vehicles go. I rather not have the driverless vehicle if it means hanging these mini cell towers so close to our homes that our families and children are now exposed to this massive increase of radiation you are using 24 hrs a day 7 days a week. What the hell do you think started this pandemic. Over a million people have died already. Dude your technology is cursed. Only bad will come of this driverless technology. Everyone be sure to thank our phone industry and government. We officially have more Coronavirus cases then any other nation in the world.
O just wait we can use just as soon as they get to the snow and ice
Once again I’m sure you will all be in denial. We are going to be replaced if your lucky enough retire now, if not start finding other work we all have 10 yrs tops before the industry moves to paying hourly to sit there and monitor a computer as it drives you down the road.
Actually no drivers will be in those trucks. The point of Autonomy is to completely get rid of the driver. The FMCSA has also confirmed this is their goal.
Try running a truck in 60 plus winds on I80 in a blizzard without wrecking. Over 10 years of DEF systems going haywire, electronics nightmare. Can’t wait for crashed trucks when GPS quits working. Too many variables. But let’s get auto on the road.
Can’t wait to see an autonomous truck chain itself up and pull hazmat doubles through a snow storm, I’m sure that will end wonderfully.
Just give the FMCSA 5 minutes of your time to song-and-dance you into believing that integrating autonomous trucks into your fleet is going to improve your safety and productivity, after all the e-log mandate sure delivered on its promises, right? LOL
LOL 👍
The industry response to this will be to pay you to chain up, and hook up the trailers, and that’s all. There will likely be one guy doing this for 50 trucks, at near-minimum wage, in a yard somewhere.
In fairness, the trucks will probably park in foul weather. Since they can run 24 hours a day, with no log restrictions, there is no particular reason that they can’t catch up the backlog whenever the weather clears up. Perishable freight probably won’t get shipped out at all, if the weather is even questionable.
Chaining happens on the road, not at a center. 25 to 30 mph until you can get somewhere safe.
One major thing these dummies are failing to look at, The economy. They bring out the autonomous truck, if it is instantaneous like they want. They will all of a sudden have more than 2 million men and women without jobs, those are just the truck drivers. They’re forgetting also the truck stop staff, the waitresses in truck stop restaurants who also will lose their jobs. So that puts the number of unemployed over 3 million. How are they going to fix that?
One wonders what’s the incentive to roll them out “as quickly as possible”….
They aren’t. None of the people who are making these decisions are drivers or waitresses. The unemployed drivers will still need to eat, so there will likely still be some jobs for people to get them fed, but this doesn’t matter to regulators or trucking executives. If the economy tanks, it doesn’t hurt regulators or executives – and if it did, they have the resources to move somewhere else. When the auto industry tanked, nobody cared except the people whose jobs went overseas. When the dot-com crash happened, it was programmers and technogeeks that were affected – truck drivers didn’t give two “shots”. Nobody with influence is going to care about lost truck driver jobs.
Don’t count on broad concerns about “the economy” to save your job. If safety isn’t a big enough concern to do it, the financial health of the proletariat surely won’t. Good advice would be to find a new hustle before it happens. Bad news is that any training necessary to do so will likely be at your own expense, and you may not be able to recover those costs through increased earnings, in the time that you have left in the workforce before forced retirement. A lot depends on your age at the time. Worse, people care almost as little about old people, as they do about poor people, so we’re screwed on both fronts.
I recommend going into the field of geriatric care. It has a low cost of entry, it gives you some insight into your own future, nobody wants the job so it’s easy to get (like trucking), and it’s hard to export overseas or automate, so it likely has a future. It doesn’t pay very well or provide much of a path to promotion, but neither does trucking, so we should all be used to that, by now, and it does still pay slightly better than fast-food work.
It’s not a good future, but it’s the future that we have. Adapt or die.
Economic war is being waged against Americans… plain and simple.
Think of all the buggy and wagon makers, all the horse breeders, even the carpenters who would make the wheels & replacement parts – all gone. They had to adjust to the times or get left behind.
American Express (yes, the present Credit Card company) used to make Covered Wagons until those damn horseless carriages (cars) were invented and ruined everything.
I will take a wild guess and say you’ve never driven a truck a single minute of your life. Otherwise, you would realize the dynamic environment that various types of trucking operate in and come to terms that it’s not as simple as some sensors and cameras and lidar.
Don’t forget office and warehouse personnel along with diesel mechanics and those poor DOT officers. They all have to eat and survive too.
Sounds like the good folks at FMCSA might have some investments in ADS.
Now is the time for all the company drivers to start looking at getting your own truck and authority and stop accepting the pennys per mile the fleets are offering and start getting paid what you are worth.
Con-ops. What an apropos name… :-/
My “smart” phone doesn’t work properly half the time but they’re going to send 80-100,000lb rigs down the road by themselves? “Chuckles to self in fear”:-/
Kinda hoping an fmcsa official gets rear ended by an autonomous truck on the interstate,its all about safety,huh!?
There’s only one employment line coming. It’s called controlling the driverless truck. I know people being trained for that position and they have never stepped foot in a big rig.
I wonder who gets ticketed when inspected at the ports or roadside
Truck stops won’t have to be around for us Truckers anymore. After all there’s no one in those trucks that require fuel, showers, food or any supplies of any kind. We have no place to sit in those places anyway.
FMCSA are also people who know nothing about driving a truck, so yes, let trust every word they say
I hope it’s one of those pieces of junk kill somebody they Sue the manufacturer out of existence. And the trucking company that bought it and put it out on the road
The long and short is that they will integrate the path of least resistance first. That’s using only interstates and lots for drops and havehuman drivers finish the last mile, which is usually in a city. The most dangerous. That will be the start. But flat bedders won’t have to worry for quite a while since there is no way to secure loads autonomously.
Box drivers, 10 years max and they will be doing as I stated above, lot to lot 24 /7. With humans on the last mile……to take to location.
Justmy opinion
after running over a small girl with his car, Musolini replied “what is one life in the affairs of the state?”
Created your own problem with treatment of drivers
And this is why I’ll keep hauling ass down the road and bully 4 wheelers out the way…because safety ain’t even a thing.
Who says flatbed drivers have nothing to worry about? Lol you guys crack me up…I’m against autonomous trucks but please tell me who will stop shippers and receivers from hiring poor mules to do that work? Exactly…designated staff just for securement at all facilities where they needed. Maybe at carriers expense too.
I’m sure that many of you vets can cite episodes on the road wherein a computer would not comprise enough info to make a safe decision. One of mine involved being 100-150 yards behind an entire pickup-roofrack (6-8) of untethered aluminum extension ladders when they dumped into my boxed-in right (Interstate) lane, with exploding shards flying/bouncing everywhere! Because I knew the weather had recently been without rain, I was able to veer the entire right-side deep into the dry grass, right of the breakdown-lane, and kept the left-side tires on the pavement, thus entirely avoiding all the flying “razors”… I cannot help but wonder if a computer would have been able to calculate ANY safe solution, other than “apply brakes asap!”
Love you guys, my uncle was a long haul trucker.
1) Are truckers going to throw their shoes into the machinery in protest? (Sabot-tage.. Google it..). It won’t work for you either.
2) if a politician says he will save your industry even when the market has already spoken (we’re looking at you coal).. do you vote for him or for the other guys that says “..and let’s talk re-training money..”. Only one actually has your future success on their mind. Good luck.
The lobbyists & greedy Trucking executives who are about the money & truly do not care for the drivers…. Greed is America not growth of the working drivers
National implementation will never happen without an extra dedicated lane on all interstates. in the ’70’s, 55 mph imposed speed limits nationally didn’t work because car drivers ignored it. also likely soon-to-be retired truck drivers will T-bone a robot truck on their way out, saving countless motoring lives and livelihoods.
It is the inevitable future,what I be saying for years.until people are actually affected by this nothing will be done jobs being lost to technology no one works in the future. Be ready
So we get rid of drivers, truck stops won’t be needed, only fuel points, no more employees at trucking companies ,just basic crews of mechanics. We get rid if everyone that services the truck stops including the restaurants…. this all sounds like a great plan. So we will all live on the communist agenda where the Government gives us absolutely everything ? But at what price ??
When they screw it all up permanently and see what they’ve done it will be too late.
This is a plot by the large carriers to cut out all the expenses and keep everything for themselves, it’s not all about safety …. it’s about greed.
Exactly you hit the nail on the head there. Also with this plandemic that’s happened it’s not all about safety, my mask protects you BS, it’s all an orchestrated plan to control people. They had to use the corona virus as an excuse to sneak in this control.
I currently drive a new Cascadia with all of the gizmos on it, forward facing radar, lane departure alert and so on. I’m constantly getting collision alerts when a vehicle exits onto a ramp in front of me. This causes my breaks to slam on jolting me in my seatbelts, and a loud alarm on my dash, even though the vehicle in no longer in my lane of travel. I also get lane departure warnings although I’m perfectly centered in my lane. I’m there to keep the truck in control, what happens when there is no driver in these circumstance? They are nowhere ready enough for driverless vehicles yet! Also, no one has said yet, who is responsible for accidents when a driverless vehicle is involved and at fault?
Yet I still loose cell service for miles and miles on 80 in Pennsylvania. Fix the cell phone towers first.
So how safe are these things going through tunnels or on the 185 miles of my daily route that have no phone/internet?