At last week’s Autonomous Vehicles On Line Conference, Mike Bucala, Vehicle System Engineer, Daimler Trucks, stated that commercial vehicles are well suited for autonomy, as situations are repetitive and repeatable. For same reasons, accidents are more likely to happen because of prolonged boring driving.
L4 vehicles will improve overall efficiency as there is no shift, break, holiday, sickness, or virus limitation. The driver remains essential for first and last mile operation, and if still present, could concentrate on more productive tasks, route planning, customer service, load/unload planning, fuel optimization.
Ashwani Gupta, Alliance Senior Vice President of the Renault-Nissan LCV Business, said “The revolution in commercial vehicles will come first, then passenger cars will follow”.
Automation will allow a 24/7 round the clock service, maximizing use of night with much reduced traffic.
Many other application cases could be developed, such as truck platooning (“Road Trains”), Campus, Construction Works, Postal services, Food/Parcel delivery with drone for first/last mile.
Remaining challenges to make it happen at large scale, is on design safety, as liability of an autonomous system belongs to the automaker, and not anymore on the driver.
