"Truckers think automation won’t take their jobs for 40 years. Silicon Valley strongly disagrees."
From Quartz:
As far as most truckers can tell, the danger of losing their jobs to robots is still a long, long way off.
“I don’t have a single member who’s ready to buy a bunch of automated trucks even if they could,” says R. J. Cervantes,
whose California Trucking Association represents fleet owners in the
state. “Everything needs to be sorted out. It’s still in its infancy.”
Comments in online trucker forums point out the myriad difficulties of long-distance transport sure to foil computers.
But Silicon Valley sees these
as mere speed bumps. “Three years, at most,” says one venture investor
in autonomous vehicle technology, estimating the time before such
commercial trucks hit the road, who asked to remain anonyous because of
involvement in several companies.
The disconnect about the
timing for the arrival of such technology, and the political forces it
may unleash, reveals a massive split in how the groups believe the
transport industry will evolve. Viewed from one angle, the
truckers have a point. There are regulatory hurdles to clear. Social
acceptance of autonomous 18-wheelers on highways is not assured. City
streets are tough to navigate. Who pumps the gas?
For engineers and investors in the Valley,
these seem like speed bumps. Market forces make the rapid deployment of
an automated trucking industry almost an inevitability. US truck
transport, says freight company Flexport, can double its output for less than half the cost just with partial automation. The technology is nearly ready for highways. A convoy of self-driving trucks drove themselves across Europe in April, and the first driverless delivery in the US dropped off 21,000 cases of Budweiser in Colorado Springs, Colorado this October.
Even more importantly, the assumption that today’s trucking companies
will be tomorrow’s is probably wrong. The US trucking industry has few
dominant players, and most survive on thin margins, so there is little
appetite for splashing out on new technology. That implies new companies
can enter the market, scale quickly and enjoy steep cost
advantages—think Uber or Airbnb. Incremental automation will pick off
the most profitable (and predictable) routes first, then expand across
the country. Over time, it will reduce demand for drivers and drive down
wages, and steadily displace existing players. The economics of the $700 billion trucking industry may change irrevocably. Once
total automation arrives, the corporate landscape may start to resemble
retail, where two players—Walmart and Amazon—dominate....MORE
