I read an interesting piece in the Guardian today on how truck drivers at a truck stop in Iowa view the threat of driverless trucks to their livelihood. Some accept it will happen. Some think (hope) it won’t happen in their lifetimes. And some believe it will never happen.
The article quotes Ryan Peters, the founder of Flexport: “Labor accounts for 75% of the cost of transporting shipments by truck, so adopters can begin to realize those savings. Beyond that, while truckers are prohibited from driving more than 11 hours per day without taking an eight-hour break, a driverless truck can drive for the entire day. This effectively doubles the output of the trucking network at a quarter of the cost. That’s an eight-times increase in productivity, without taking into account other benefits gained by automation.”
As a procurement person, I don’t need to have too much of a think about how attractive those sorts of numbers are to anyone running vehicles regularly.
I worked at Rio Tinto when they kicked off the autonomous haul truck project so I witnessed first-hand the business logic, on many non-cost fronts as well, especially on safety, of not having drivers. That was over a decade ago. McKinsey is of the view this sort of industry adoption will be the first wave of change we see on the roads and I agree. The attractions are safety, predictability, 24-hour operations, and, of course, total cost of ownership.
Trials today aren’t just happening in Silicon Valley or the bottom of a mine pit: the UK is trialling taxis, in Australia, trials have been run by groups responsible for road maintenance to prepare them for autonomous vehicles, and buses are being tested in Switzerland. How long before the supply chain efficiencies become too attractive to ignore for the likes of DHL, Fedex, and Amazon to ignore? The sheer volume of these trials in industry suggest not very.
The voices of these truck-drivers are very much how I think we often react as humans: it will never happen to me. Unfortunately, while we dally with wishful thinking, the world is moving on. With no driver behind the wheel.