Article content continued

Read on

[/np_storybar]

“But we also know there will be job losses,” said Julia Markovich, senior research associate at the Conference Board’s Centre for Transportation and Infrastructure. “Not just in the most obvious way in terms of driving-based occupations that will be threatened, but also wider ripple effects that are expected throughout the labour market. This is something we’re still trying to get a handle on.”

David Bradley, CEO of the Canadian Trucking Alliance, said there are about 300,000 truck drivers in Canada, and that doesn’t include all the other driving-based professions — cabbies, bus drivers, even valets — who will find themselves unemployed if vehicles can pilot themselves.

There’s a tragedy there in the making and there will be social unrest

Job losses are already happening in some industries. For example, Suncor Energy Inc. last year announced that it would buy autonomous trucks from Komatsu Ltd. for its oilsands operations. Chief financial officer Alister Cowan said the trucks would allow the company to cut 800 truck-operator jobs “by the end of the decade.”

But even though self-driving trucks are already used in some industrial applications, it will be a while longer before they become the norm on our highways. Estimates of when widespread adoption of self-driving vehicles will occur range from a few years to several decades, but everyone agrees it will have a considerable impact on the economy when that time comes.

“It’s often being likened to when the motorcar itself was first created and the effect it had on the economy,” Markovich said. “But the magnitude of change that people are expecting as a result of this technology is so much greater than what we saw with the advent of the motorcar.”