Sep 232018
 

Volvo has themselves an autonomous robo-truck similar to those in the surprisingly good “Logan.”

 

This particular vehicle is meant to drag trailers around relatively short and repetitive courses… around ports and the like, perhaps around town. Seems like a practical item for such purposes. For long haul I’d expect robotrucks to be a little further away, especially electric ones; the ability to put in a thousand miles a day by driving 24 hours would be countered by the need to stop every 200 miles to spend hours recharging (caveat: battery swapout centers built into truck stops).

Eventually long haul robotrucks will be practical. i do wonder if there will still be drivers in them, though, for much the same reason there are still pilots in modern jetliners. And that might make for quite an attractive job: see the country, get paid, work on other stuff while you are driven across the boring bits like Nebraska or Texas or Los Angeles. Driver-owned robotrucks with good-sized “sleepers” could be durned interesting.

 Posted by at 12:15 am