Last week, the House passed a bill that would establish the first national law governing self-driving cars in the United States. It would also allow thousands of new autonomous cars to be tested on public roads every year. This week the Senate held a hearing to see if autonomous trucks should get the same treatment.
While certain states already have regulations in place, since autonomous vehicles are still a relatively new concept, most states do not. Even those who have them often have huge gaps in regulations where there are legal gray areas. Some companies, including and especially companies like Uber, have been accused of deliberately operating in those gray areas in order to gain a competitive edge in developing new technologies.
The House bill would give the whole country a universal guideline for developing and testing autonomous vehicles, but it deliberately excludes vehicles over 10,000 pounds.
Now that the bill has passed to the Senate for deliberation, the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science and Transportation has held a hearing to see if they should expand the bill to large trucks as well. Doing so could greatly increase the ease with which companies would be able to test vehicles – and the number of vehicles that can be tested at once. The House version would increase the number of autonomous cars allowed on the road by 100,000 per year within three years.
Senator John Thune (R-SD), the chairman of the subcommittee, opened the hearing with a resounding endorsement for autonomous trucks. He touched on the two things that were brought up most frequently in the hearing: Safety and economic growth.
“Trucks share our roads, deliver our goods, and keep our economy moving,” Thune said in his opening statement. “Including trucks in the conversation about automated vehicles is important as we seek to improve safety; it also puts our economy on a level playing field as other countries around the world deploy automated freight trucks.”
Others to testify in favor of adding autonomous trucks to the bill were ATA president Chris Spear, National Safety Council President and CEO Deborah Hersman, and Navistar International CEO Troy Clarke.
Clarke noted the importance of having one “predictable legislative and regulatory environment” in which Navistar and other manufacturers can develop and test their technology instead of dealing with a patchwork of rules that vary from state to state.
Spear meanwhile had a lengthy statement which you can read here, where he echoed the need for cohesive nationwide regulation. He went on to claim that autonomous vehicles would help solve the driver shortage, but also that “ATA believes that the driver will retain an important role in trucking, even with automated trucks.” In his statement, Spear listed the duties that truckers would still need to perform:
“In addition to monitoring the automated driving systems and manually driving in the cityscape and at loading docks, drivers will retain their current responsibilities for securing the cargo,” says Spear’s statement. “Particularly hazardous cargo, as well as for customer interaction with the shipper and receiver.”
But not everyone was so enthusiastic. Sen. Gary Peters (D-MI) cautioned that not enough is yet known about autonomous trucks to clear thousands of them for testing on public roads. He also challenged the claim from others that autonomous trucks would automatically make the roads safer, saying “we cannot allow such premature conclusions to stand in this Committee’s way of talking specifics – and getting the answers, we need to have a more complete understanding of the safety, workforce, and policy implications of highly automated trucks.”
Similarly cautious about autonomous trucks’ inclusion in the bill was General Secretary Treasurer of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters, Ken Hall. Hall stated what most professional drivers would consider obvious, that cars and large trucks are “fundamentally different.” While he did agree that having some sort of regulation in place governing autonomous trucks was prudent, “taking a cookie cutter approach in dealing with those issues and applying it to heavy vehicles is reckless.”
Most importantly for Hall though is “the largest issue of them all, the potential impact on the livelihoods and wages of millions [of truckers].”
Source: gobytrucknews, ATA, truckinginfo, fleetowner, overdrive
Thank you for screwing us truck drivers government! It is very kind of you! I hope you all rot in hell!
Hell would be too good for them. What do they care, at the end of the day they go home to their house, hot meals and showers. Not to mention nice comfortable bed and possibly companionship of their significant other. Paper pushers don’t understand.
I agree. I been hauling America freight for 25yrs. We need more $$ money out here. and truck lanes just for truck only. No freaking 4 wheelers. And ohio needs to ease up on the truckers. They pull more trucks over then cars. Wtf is going on?
I don’t see the good in this! We truckers will lose our lively hood. As companies won’t need the drivers anymore. Yes you won’t have a fatigued driver from driving but one from riding. If the system failed while the truck is going lots of people can be hurt or even killed.
Not only that but with a computer doing the driving they won’t need to pay us as they currently do. Companies could charge the same rates and pay us less.
Just looking for trouble on many cases. I hope one of those trucks doesn’t get hacked and cause worse damage then a trucker alone would do
If they don’t connect it to the internet it can’t be hacked. Simple, take the approach the gov’t took on our missile silo’s. No internet=no possibility of hacking.
This is IRobot and Bakersfield all over again..
Can somebody start working on automated law makers? Maybe replace congress with a computer? Seriously right now the Navy is investigating if hackers might have caused the collision of a warship. If they can hack a military computer what are the chances someone might decide to take a bite out of our economy by knocking out a bunch of automated trucks?
I love this. We are getting closer to autonomy, UBI, RBE, the end of money.
But we can’t let government keep making decisions in the name of economy and profits.
It must be about better lives for humans.
When accident happens I hope the right people take responsibility it sounds good to whom getting money under the table they just don’t care need to vote out those politicians who is talking for this
When I think about what terrorists could do with an entire platoon of hacked trucks doing their bidding, it makes my skin crawl. Drive them over a protest demonstration. Crash the gate at the Pentagon or the White House. Park them on railroad tracks. Park them to shut down the beltways in every major US city simultaneously. I can go on and on with ideas how to cause serious problems using a collection of 80,000 pound LEGO blocks. I’m also a programmer, and I have a real idea how hard it would be to keep all the holes plugged in these systems.
We’re facing a potential apocalypse here, just so companies don’t have to pay drivers living wages or give them home time.
I think you missed something. Auto drive like airplanes. Not fully automated. Driver still has to talk to shipper/receiver, fuel the truck, dock the truck. Still need a driver. Maybe in 50 years fully AI but the reason automated trucks work now in early testing is because it’s interstate only.
If nobody has a job who’s going to buy the goods the truck delivers?
Self driving vehicles are clearly disasters waiting to happen. They will never be able to make judgements seeing who or what is going on in front, behind, or a few cars away. Condition of the vehicle, spotting a drunk driver, or staying clear of an angry punk driver. I just don’t have any enthusiasm for the idea of anything driving itself.