Could Autonomous Vehicles Fix Broken Supply Chains?

Driverless Vehicles can’t arrive soon enough, really?

Why it matters: Ports are backed up and there aren’t enough truck drivers to get all the containers where they need to be, leading to product shortages, inflation, and stressed retailers.

Driverless vehicles could theoretically be operating 24/7, moving freight from clogged ports to retailers’ shelves more quickly and safely, while cutting delivery costs and carbon emissions too. 

It’ll be two or three years before autonomous vehicles are ready for commercial deployment on U.S. highways. But the first data-driven studies from early pilot programs suggest they’ll be substantially more efficient. 

TuSimple and UPS, for example, say their self-driving test vehicles achieved 13% fuel savings while racking up 160,000 autonomous highway miles in Arizona.

• “To get 13% fuel savings is unheard of,” TuSimple CEO Cheng Lu said recently that the gain would be worth billions of dollars for the U.S. trucking industry.
• Fuel accounts for 24% of the cost per mile for heavy-duty trucks, second to labour, at 42%, per the American transportation institute.
• TuSimple’s system drives more smoothly and efficiently than a human driver, Lu explains. “How you operate the truck has a very big impact on fuel economy. It’s a great validation of the maturity of our technology.” 

Another study by Georgia Tech found that Ryder Systems’ new autonomous transfer hub networks — combining self-driving trucks on highways with conventional trucking operations for the first and last miles — could save shippers up to 40%. 

• “Today I have to wait to get another driver. There’s a lot of lost time in the transfer of goods,” says Ryder executive vice president Karen Jones, who heads up new product development. “This has the promise to keep everything moving around the clock.” 

Reduced labour costs account for much of the savings, of course. But optimising routes to reduce miles driven with an empty trailer is another big factor, the study found. 

What they’re saying: “The reality is that America like the UK simply does not have enough truck drivers.

The U.S. driver shortage stands at 80,000 today and is on track to double by 2030, according to the American trucking association while the UK’s most recently published shortfall was circa 100,000.

• The shortage leaped during the pandemic, when demand for shipped goods soared just as the industry saw a surge in early retirements.
• Einride, a Swedish company, says its technology could make truck driving a more attractive desk job.

Where it stands: A handful of autonomous trucking firms continue to make progress toward highway deployment, including Waymo, Aurora, Embark and Kodiak. 

• One company, Gatik, has begun making short driverless runs for Walmart on a fixed urban route in Bentonville, Arkansas. 

What to watch: TuSimple’s signalled it is close to testing its trucks without a human safety operator on public highways before the end of this year.

This notion would have been dismissed only a couple of years ago but given the shortage of people to fulfil roles, nothing is off the cards now and it will be fascinating to see if distribution networks this side of the Atlantic commence meaningful trials.

One thing for sure, distribution will simply not contract back to how it operated pre-covid.