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Europe

In a world-first, dozens of autonomous trucks from some of the biggest truck manufacturers in the world just joined together and drove themselves to the Netherlands.

Set up by the Dutch government, the European Truck Platooning Challenge was taken up by Volvo, Daimler, DAF Trucks, IVECO, Scania, and MAN. The manufacturers all contributed semi-autonomous trucks which took advantage of their sensors and wireless connection to each other to efficiently platoon from all over Europe to meet up in Rotterdam.

Starting from as far away as Stockholm (a journey of about 1,000 miles), trucks bearing slogans like “The Future Is Ahead Of You” made the journey in twos, threes, and fours before joining together for the last leg of the event. Since it didn’t drive a straight route there, a Scania truck had the longest route with over 2,000 miles and crossed four national borders.


Platooning is when two or more trucks join up to allow the follow trucks more fuel efficiency. It has the added bonus of reducing the amount of space on a highway that the trucks take up. Platooning can be very dangerous for manually driven trucks as the space between the vehicles is too small to be safe, but truck manufacturers claim that autonomous trucks which are wirelessly connected to each other have an instantaneous reaction time. When the lead truck brakes, the follow truck brakes at the same time. The same is true for acceleration, so the trucks are always traveling the same speed.

The challenge was issued by the Netherlands and took place in Europe, but will have a very real impact here in the United States. According to Navistar International Corp., platooning with semi-autonomous trucks is only a few years away.

“I think realistically, we’re four to five years out before we could see platooning on [U.S.] highways,” said Darren Gosbee, director of engineering at Navistar. “The thing about platooning is it’s like having a cell phone, it’s only when everyone else has one that other trucks can enter and exit the platoon.”

Yeah, the industry is pushing hard for this for obvious reasons- fuel efficiency and the like.

One thing that most people don't really know from the outside is how much trucking hates truckdrivers.

(To paraphrase Garvin from a different subject, in all fairness drivers can be difficult people to like. I'd occasionally meet people who were all "I like truckdrivers" and my unspoken question was "Why? Most truckdrivers don't actually like truckdrivers.")

It constitutes a foot in the door for eventual full automation, which not only eliminates the cost of drivers, but results in massive downsizing of the entire support infrastructure for drivers. It's a big loss of employment that ultimately I find myself in favor of for safety reasons, as well as the fact that overall the working conditions in American trucking fucking suck in comparison to the labor standards of most other work.

That said, it's sad on the level that it takes out a job that requires minimal education while paying people for the chance to see pretty much the entire country and even Canada if you draw the short straw.

(Nothing against Canada, just a pain in the ass sometimes to get across the border- paperwork, strip searches and stuff.)

My dad drove 18-wheelers for a while. For a time I considered it as a possible vocation. But alas, things like these are going to come.

Like I said, good for a short term thing. You'll rack up a lot of new locations in a hurry, though you won't get to really explore anything. You see the country out the window, but you only touch ground mostly at warehouses and truckstops.

There were aspects I enjoyed, always waking up to new scenery and so on. I used to go to some places, nasty miserable warehouses where they delighted in treating you like crap. I'd look at something like that and think "Yeah, you can asshole me around right now. But tomorrow I'm going to be four states away and you'll still be coming in here."

But it's a nasty, corrosive business. Go to a big truckstop, you'll often see an old driver or two hanging around the lounge bullshitting about the old days. That's because after a while, you start losing the ability to communicate with non-drivers due to the social isolation of the work. I don't even want to think about what it's like for the guys who do it for forty odd years. My trainer was a thirty year guy, and he was a pretty weird dude.

On the ground level, drivers are stupid competitive over the smallest of things- my truck is governed three miles an hour faster than yours! It's weird, but understandable because the job basically involves a series of adversarial relationships and the only ones they can vent on are each other.

That said, you'll meet really fascinating people. The industry is a lot like the Foreign Legion, people from all walks of life end up in there, like retiring scientists (I met a former nuclear physicist, my parents met a rocket scientist and a biochemist.) Sad part of that was that you'd meet somebody totally fascinating, maybe talk to them for a couple of hours at best, and then you'd never see them again.

The companies are largely terrible and the biggest part of why the whole thing is such a mess. They were largely founded by the old-school outlaw drivers, and those attitudes soaked into the corporate culture.

So yeah, it's okay for a bit. See the country, meet people, then get the fuck out and get a real job before it eats your soul. I got no regrets, but the older I get, the less I miss it.

When the CB radio was big thing in the '70s-80s, there were regular truckers that my Mom would talk to as she drive the 40miles to work midnights for the Post Office. They were just a buncha lonely guys, happy to hear a friendly voice as they took a shortcut from I-79 to I-77.

When I started driving, instead of the friendly guys, all I was hearing were younger men who spend more time "talking filth" as Mom put it. Then came the news that some of those younger drivers were talking caffeine pills or stronger stuff to stay awake and do longer hauls. They were getting paid by mileage and time, or something like that, and if they could stay awake and keep truckin', they'd make more money than if they stopped for a bite to eat and a nap.

Now, I worry that there's not a trucker on the road who isn't driving under the influence of something, just so they can get a few more miles and pay their bills. :(

Actually, that's a ton better than it used to be, at least with the national fleets.

Pay is by mileage, and worse yet it's by HHG mileage which chops four to ten percent off the distance you actually drive. That's one of the great problems of the industry.

But in the real era of outlaw trucking, speed was just part of the business. There were companies that would issue them, one was notorious both for the fact that they issued amphetamines with trip packs, but also for the fact that the owner promised to personally cut the check to pay a speeding ticket for a driver so long as it was at least 25mph over the limit.

A lot of stuff that used to be just business as usual got killed in the nineties, when the DOT took a company apart and arrested a bunch of the management. Prior to that, all misconduct was kicked back onto the drivers no matter that the company would blatantly teach people how to cheat their logs and so on. Afterward, companies had to at least put a veneer of enforcement on. National carriers are also half-decent with their drug testing programs, too.

(I sure as shit got pulled up a half dozen or so randoms while I was in.)

Another big change was the nationalization of the CDLs. Prior to the states linking their databases, a lot of drivers had multiple licenses. Rack up too many points on a license, toss it out the window and go to the next one.

If y'all are old enough to recall, in the mid-nineties there were a rash of 'truck gone crazy' stories in the headlines. What happened was that when the databases were all linked, a bunch of guys had a bunch of tickets catch up to them all at once and flat out lost their ability to operate commercial vehicles. A raft of the old outlaws from the sixties onwards suddenly had no career at all, and like I said the job sort of eats your ability to function in normal society. It also does shit-all for finding any sort of work other than driving a truck. So these guys basically pulled blaze of glory routines all over the country.

(That's why police departments now all have those slow-deflating spike tire strips, incidentally.)

That said, there are a ton of fly by night small fleet operations, and with those guys all bets are off on the chemical front as well as everything else.

The problem with the big carriers is the shit shit state of their training programs, their shit treatment of drivers, and their insanely high turnover because for carriers like Werner and Swift the federal programs intended to make more drivers actually incentivizes hiring rookies, so they tend to roll their rosters every year.

(Swift used to put a guy fresh out of school, which is to say completely untrained for actual road operation, out with a trainer for two weeks before declaring him finished, then turn around and assign him to train somebody else. Shit is insane, yo. Don't know if they still do that.)

I hope not.

But back to the OP: I don't think the robotic trucks will do that well along the East Coast, and I worry about them on any route that goes over the Appalachians. A major east-west corridor, I-64, has stretches with 9% to 11% grades on it. It's also a toll road, and while they do have an Autopay option, all the trucks in the convoy would have to stop long enough for the antennas to pick up the signal before they're allowed through. Also, a robot convoy wouldn't be able to take the shortcut from I-79 to I-77, because while it's 4-lane all the way, there's stoplights and side roads that come right out onto the road. That's why US-19 "Corridor G" between Sutton and Beckley WV got the moniker "Deadliest Highway" for well over a decade. I'm sure there's hundreds of other little roads in other states that would have the same problems.

Out West, where there's miles of highway and nothing else, that's where I think the robot convoy would do best

This reminds me of my mother telling me that of how she used to safely and reliably go way over the speed limit in American highways by the simple expedient of following the truckers. They would tend to use their CB radios to alert each other of speed trap locations and the like, so they knew when they could get away with speeding and when they could not.

Also from the golden age of outlaw trucking:

[youtube][/youtube]

"Ever seen a duck that can't swim?"

I'm amused you found a video for it in German LOL! You miss out on a lot of the jokes that way, I think. The song came before the movie, but the song-writer added some extra lyrics (and asides) for the film with much coarser language. Somewhere in Mom's basement is a 45 single. Probably near the 45 record of "Snoopy vs the Red Baron".

LadyTevar wrote:I hope not.

But back to the OP: I don't think the robotic trucks will do that well along the East Coast, and I worry about them on any route that goes over the Appalachians. A major east-west corridor, I-64, has stretches with 9% to 11% grades on it. It's also a toll road, and while they do have an Autopay option, all the trucks in the convoy would have to stop long enough for the antennas to pick up the signal before they're allowed through. Also, a robot convoy wouldn't be able to take the shortcut from I-79 to I-77, because while it's 4-lane all the way, there's stoplights and side roads that come right out onto the road. That's why US-19 "Corridor G" between Sutton and Beckley WV got the moniker "Deadliest Highway" for well over a decade. I'm sure there's hundreds of other little roads in other states that would have the same problems.

Out West, where there's miles of highway and nothing else, that's where I think the robot convoy would do best

That's why they're doing the testing in Nevada and staying strictly to the interstate beyond pickup/fuel/delivery.

Of course I expect that inside of fifty years human-piloted cars/trucks will be a relic on a par with the horse-driven carriage. It may take a bit for the transition to occur, but there are major economic drivers behind it in terms of urban construction/land utilization.

LadyTevar wrote:"Ever seen a duck that can't swim?"

I'm amused you found a video for it in German LOL! You miss out on a lot of the jokes that way, I think. The song came before the movie, but the song-writer added some extra lyrics (and asides) for the film with much coarser language. Somewhere in Mom's basement is a 45 single. Probably near the 45 record of "Snoopy vs the Red Baron".

It's the one with the best video quality. And yeah, the movie version alters a lot of the lyrics to reflect the plot of the movie. Here's one completely in English but with worse quality:

[youtube][/youtube]

When Marina first showed me this song, she said that if i wanted a way to refer to the police that city cops wouldn't know, "bears" and "smokies" works. Though highway patrols and staties would tend to know it, since it's trucker slang. Personally i don't think i want to shit-talk the police in their presence at all even if it's in slang.

'Smokie' had pretty much fallen out of use by 2000 or so, except for some old-timers. 'Bear' was was the main one, though there were variations like 'Barney Fife' (local cop) and 'County Mountie' (sheriff). The most infamous Barney Fife I knew of was over in Hugo, Colorado. It's a little nothing of a town on US 287 that's literally like a mile long, and Barney was quick to snag any truck that didn't step down for the speed limit on the way through.

(For anybody traveling that route, the steakhouse in Kit Carson used to be daaaaaaaaaamn good.)

That said, never buy the line that drivers know where the best food is. Drivers know where there are places to eat that have truck parking, which may or may not have good food, but just as likely may have waitresses in provocative clothing.

Marina is wrong. Most cops, city, county, or state know the terms "city kitty", "county mountie", and "Full Grown Bear" aka "Smokies".

The term "smokies" has stuck around longer in WV, because our State Cops dress in OD green and wear The Hat. They're also called "Blue&Golds" because the state cars are painted WV Blue and Gold.

LadyTevar wrote:Marina is wrong. Most cops, city, county, or state know the terms "city kitty", "county mountie", and "Full Grown Bear" aka "Smokies".

Like i said, shit talking the cops where they can hear you strikes me as a bad idea in general, even if you think they won't understand what you're saying.