Freight transport : Autonomous trucks put long-distance drivers out of work

 “If driver shortages are common in many places, then a switch to autonomous trucks would make sense. However, millions of jobs will be lost as a result, and critics say it is a false vision of the freight transport of the future.

 

Nine years ago, Oxford scholars Carl Benedikt Frey and Michael Osborne published their famous study The Future of Employment. 47 percent of all jobs in the United States could be replaced by the progressive automation of numerous processes, it says. Frey and Osborne list truck drivers as one of the occupations most at risk. A research team from the University of Michigan has now calculated that certain factors could make up to 500,000 truck drivers redundant in the USA. All long-distance drives were examined, which the authors assume to be at least 240 kilometers long. In principle, 94 percent of these journeys can be automated.

 

"How many driver jobs actually disappear in a country," says Parth Vanishav, first author of the study, "depends on a number of factors. How complex is the route to be driven? What condition are the roads in? Is the cost structure in a country such that the whole thing is worthwhile at all?” Vanishav's study is based on a model in which potentially all long-distance journeys between so-called “hubs” could be automated. The complicated short distances from the junction near the motorway to the city center will continue to be taken over by human drivers. According to the study, long journeys are very monotonous for drivers. In addition, new jobs would inevitably be created in the short-haul segment. So is the proposed “hub” model a boon for the workforce? With newly created jobs, more varied daily routines and the possibility of a permanent residence?

 

The boom will start in 2030

 

Experts around the world see enormous potential. "The leaders in the truck sector," says Maximilian Geißlinger, head of a research group on intelligent vehicles at the Technical University of Munich, "appear to be companies from the USA that have already completed initial test drives." Google subsidiary Waymo and start-up Torc Robotics to launch autonomous trucks within this decade. Daimler is dealing with so-called Level 5 vehicles in which the driver no longer has to be in the car. Level 4 means that a vehicle drives fully automatically, but is monitored by a human throughout the journey.

 

Building a fleet of Level 4 trucks is a declared goal in Germany. In July 2021, the federal government passed a law that allows the use of autonomous vehicles on public roads, subject to human supervision. 

 

The truck manufacturer MAN believes that it can take this development even further: the company announced last week that it intends to develop vehicles together with Knorr-Bremse, Leoni, Bosch, the Fraunhofer Society and the universities of Munich and Braunschweig by the middle of the decade , which enable driverless operation between logistics nodes. In the future, MAN and its parent company Traton Group consider it conceivable that a large part of German truck traffic will be controlled autonomously, Andreas Kammel said on request. "Significant growth of the market seems realistic for this application from about 2030."

 

In the long term, it's about replacing drivers

 

Kammel is working for Traton on a strategy for alternative drives and autonomous driving. On the E4 motorway in Sweden, real transport processes would already be carried out with fully autonomous vehicles, albeit with a safety driver at the current time. "In the long term, it's also about replacing the drivers," says Kammel, "but explicitly only on some of the most uncomfortable journeys, on which we are already experiencing the most acute lack of drivers today. Especially on long-haul routes criss-crossing Europe.”

 

There are still a few steps to go before then. If the technology stays current, Vanishav and his team write in the journal Humanities and Social Sciences Communications, only about ten percent of truck trips in the United States could be automated. "In my view, the use of an autonomous system according to Level 5 - whether truck or car - is still a long way off," adds Maximilian Geißlinger. 

 

Extreme weather plays a major role, especially on long-haul routes: "This is where cameras and lidar sensors reach their limits."

 

More security, fewer jobs

 

Daimler and colleagues from all over the world are working flat out to solve such problems for economic and safety reasons. "By eliminating driving and rest times, the truck can be used much more efficiently," says Geißlinger. "More trips could take place at night and thus relieve traffic." A study by the management consultancy Rudolf Berger showed that the operating costs for freight forwarders could fall by up to 40 percent if the transports were fully automated. Geißlinger sees even more advantages: "We hope that the introduction of autonomous vehicles will bring a clear safety advantage for all road users. The greatest uncertainty factor in road traffic is still the human being.”

 

And the jobs? The new figures from the USA eliminate a problem from the Frey Osborne study: 500,000 are now a concrete number of threatened jobs. The team led by first author Vanishav also considered variations in the degree of automation. If the problems related to weather and extreme conditions cannot be solved, the number of threatened jobs will drop to 30,000. It is important for the authors to state that activities such as loading and unloading, checking and maintaining vehicles or securing loads cannot be performed by a computer given the current state of the art.

 

A blessing - for a small part of the drivers

 

Andreas Kammel from TRATON sees such an organizational change positively. There is currently a shortage of drivers for journeys over short and medium distances, which could be solved by automation and the freed-up workforce. "More drivers would also spend the nights at home with their families." But does that apply to all former long-distance drivers? Probably not, the study from the USA speculates, without giving specific figures. 

 

However, the larger volume of short-distance trips is unlikely to be sufficient to replace the lost jobs on an equal footing. Automation would then only be a blessing for a small proportion of drivers.

 

There is one other group that is extremely critical of current discussions about Level 4 and Level 5 vehicles: people who generally prefer to have freight transport run by rail. Unsurprisingly, the University of Michigan study finds that truck automation and the associated cost savings could lead to an increase in truck traffic. "Such environmental aspects are very rarely addressed by companies working on autonomous vehicles," says Vanishav. The argument is often the opposite: Autonomous vehicles would drive more evenly and therefore produce fewer emissions. Safety, efficiency and climate protection in one go.

 

Dorothee See, head of the transport department at Deutsche Umwelthilfe, does not consider autonomous long-distance transport to be an option. "Freight traffic has to go by rail," she says, "wherever that makes sense, especially on long-distance routes." She considers the potential of autonomous driving to be a diversionary maneuver. "The fuel savings are rather small, so the climate is hardly helped," says Michael Müller-Görnert, spokesman for the Verkehrsclub Deutschland. "In our view, future visions in the field of networked and autonomous driving distract from the urgently needed conversion of truck drives to emission-free alternatives."