Now on Nevada highways Daimler AG

The next big thing in autonomous vehicles really is big. At a ceremony at the Hoover Dam last Wednesday, automotive manufacturer Daimler unveiled a self-driving truck – the first to be cleared to drive on US roads.

For the freight industry, the Inspiration Truck holds the promise of a future with fewer accidents, lower fuel costs and well-rested drivers.

Over the past few years, autonomous trucks have drawn the attention of companies that repeatedly use the same routes or encounter few people or other vehicles. Some farms use autonomous grain harvesters or planters. Mining company Rio Tinto has more than 50 self-driving vehicles hauling iron ore at a remote site in Western Australia. In Texas, the US military has been working on trucks that can navigate battle zones.


The Inspiration is different, designed to travel on the highway alongside regular cars and trucks. With clearance to drive on Nevada’s highways, this could be big news for the trucking industry, which struggles to find drivers to do the exhausting work. If successful, other big self-driving vehicles could follow, such as garbage trucks or city buses.

Autonomous convoy

Autonomous trucks have a few potential advantages over their hands-on counterparts. For one, they could help cut fuel use, as they accelerate and decelerate more gently than a human driver might. Programming multiple trucks to travel in convoys would be beneficial, too: one truck could draft behind another, reducing air resistance and so using less fuel. The trucks would communicate, telling each other when to slow down or to speed up.

And the trucks could slot easily into an industry that has already embraced robotic help. In the port of Rotterdam in the Netherlands, containers are lifted off ships by robotic cranes and slotted into the right stacks with the help of automated trolleys. Last year, the Netherlands announced a five-year plan to prepare the country for vehicles like the Inspiration.

“A car never gets tired. It doesn’t get drunk or old and slow.”

Proponents of self-driving vehicles also tout their safety benefits. According to one study, about 90 per cent of road accidents are caused by human error. Artificial intelligence takes those mistakes out of the equation.

“A car never gets tired. It doesn’t have any emotions when it’s driving home from a break-up with its girlfriend. It doesn’t get drunk or old and slow,” says Patrick Vogel at the Free University of Berlin in Germany.

The Inspiration trucks know how to stay in lane, change speed and avoid collisions. A camera mounted above the dashboard has a range of 100 metres which can recognize pavement markings and keeps the truck in its lane. Radar monitors the road up to 250 metres ahead to spot other vehicles and the truck also automatically complies with any speed limits.

Not totally driverless

But they are not totally driverless. A human driver still sits behind the wheel, ready to take over in case of a lane change or unexpected hazard.

With vehicles that are only partially autonomous, the safety benefits may not be so clear-cut, says Steven Shladover of the University of California at Berkeley.

“There is a risk that drivers will become overly dependent on the system, or that drivers may try to cheat a little bit and try to use the system in situations in which it was not intended to be used,” he says. “If that happens, there could actually be safety problems.”

Like other self-driving vehicles, the Inspiration truck is still years away from commercial release. Now that they’re licensed, Daimler plans to conduct tests on Nevada’s roads, collecting real-world data to help improve the truck further.

In the meantime, several issues still need to be addressed. It is not yet clear how insurance companies might cover self-driving vehicles, for instance, or where blame would be attributed in a road accident.

And the long-term implications of swapping out low-tech trucks for those using artificial intelligence are not yet clear – like what effect this will have on truckers’ jobs or roadside businesses like motels and truck stops.

“Before it became clear that the technical issues could be addressed, these were academic exercises,” says Peter Stone, a computer scientist at the University of Texas at Austin. “Now, they’ve become very real questions.”

Read: “A new wave of tech will test our automatic faith in machines“