OTR drivers are on the short list.

I wrote my thesis about autonomous trucks to get my B.A. That was in 2017. I talked with many people, engineers, programmers, logistics experts. Most predicted that within 5 years, we would have autonomous trucks. I thought I did good research, but I forgot one profession. The one that runs the World, lawyers. The issue is that OTR means 48 states plus Canada. Currently, the law on autonomous vehicles is a patchwork. Determining liability is another complex legal question. Those alone will take years to get sorted if ever.

Next problem, maintenance. Now some will argue that without having to pay a driver companies will up their maintenance. They won't, they will just drop the rates to undercut other firms. The margins will stay the same. These trucks work, but only when they are kept up.

Still another issue is ethics. There are some accidents that simply cannot be prevented. Do you turn the wheel left and hit the school bus full of kids, or right and hit the bus carrying people back to the old folks home? A human has humanity, a computer only has logic.

Yet another issue is security. With these trucks running millions of miles they will inevitably be operating on rural, desolate stretches of road. A thief need only stand in front of a vehicle to get it to stop, disable it and loot the cargo.

The prediction of when or if these trucks will ever be mainstream is complex. Look at the EV predictions. We were all supposed to be driving those by now. Companies invested billions, and are now realizing that was a mistake. It seemed like such a sure thing too.

Are they coming? I would say yes, eventually. But I think that day is still a way off. Politically, they are going to be a nightmare. Truck driving is the single most popular job for men in America. It (usually) offers men and their families a middle class lifestyle, including the income taxes that go with it. Truck drivers are also the reason hundreds of thousands of people have jobs. Think truck stops. Taking the income of millions of men, men who really are not trained to do anything else would create a massive headache for politicians. They may very well decide to keep men in the trucks even if technically it is possible to remove them.

 

Another problem that I have heard about is A.I being used to hack basically whatever it wants. As these tools increase in power and usage, you could very well see criminal elements using those tools to simply have the truck drive to a specified location. Do that with 30 or 40 trucks to cover the one that you want and law enforcement cannot keep up.

Or how about this. Right now, the trucker is responsible for the truck and cargo. What happens when cartels start using them to run drugs and people? Who are you going to prosecute? The owner has plausible deniability, so does the warehouse or wherever it was loaded. They may very well have known nothing about it. All that I have stated are real world problems that people are going to have to figure out. Can these driverless fleets really fully scale to the level that a truck driver becomes a thing of the past? We simply do not know.

What I do know, is that putting over 3 million men out of work is going to result in massive amounts of desperation and anger. That will not be good.