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Automating the trucking industry will be more efficient because it will cut labour costs by 40 per cent trucks can operate for longer hours, said Paul Godsmark, chief technology officer at the Canadian Automated Vehicles Centre of Excellence.

Godsmark said a similar transport revolution occurred a century ago when cars replaced horse and carriage.

“When something better comes along we adjust pretty quick and if it only took 13 years to adjust 100 years ago, how much quicker will be adapt this time around?”

Automation advocates argue that removing human drivers from the road will increase safety.

Currently, about 10 per cent of all crashes the Ontario Provincial Police get called to involve a commercial vehicle.

While driver error is typically responsible for about one-third of incidents, a spike this year pushed that up to 65 per cent, Ontario Provincial Police Sgt. Kerry Schmidt of the highway safety division said after a fiery crash killed three people on the Highway 400 north of Toronto in early November.

However, confirming the efficacy of self-driving vehicles across many different driving conditions could be a challenge because autonomous systems don’t respond the same way as human drivers.

They react to patterns they’ve seen in the past and can’t make the choice between avoiding a small child or wild animal crossing the road on their own.

A group at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology is gathering human input into the type of ethical dilemma such machines will face.

Participants are asked decide, for instance, whether a self-driving vehicle with brake failure should continue straight killing a woman, a baby, a criminal and a cat; or swerve, resulting in the death of a girl, a pregnant woman, a dog and a baby.

While autonomous trucks will never be totally safe, such “live or die choices” are very rare, said Godsmark.

Rapid advancements in self-driving technology will allow the system to react more quickly than the best human driver, he added.

“The expectation is if we get all of that right there will be a lot fewer crashes.”