Freightliner Unveils The First Road-Legal Self-Driving Truck

I recently saw a post on a forum where someone claimed that self-driving cars would ruin the economy, citing the number of professions that would become obsolete in the wake of faultless vehicles (insurance agents, traffic lawyers, police officers, etc). It’s that kind of thinking that stifles innovation.

Like it or not, self-driving vehicles are coming. And while I’m a “car guy”, I’m rather excited by the prospect of autonomous vehicles. With the number of careless drivers on the road today who are more focused on their phones than the road, it’ll make the roads a safer place. It’ll also make long road trips much more enjoyable.

But who would benefit from self-driving vehicles more than anyone? Truck drivers. Think about it.. Truckers spend more time behind the wheel than anyone else, and safety is a huge issue for them, especially when it comes to driver fatigue. So why not automate the trucking fleet? That’s exactly what Freightliner is proposing.

At a huge press event yesterday in Las Vegas, Freightliner unveiled the first road-legal self-driving truck. The Inspiration Truck was awarded an official autonomous vehicle license plate by the governor of Nevada, thus making it completely legal to operate on Nevada highways. The truck received a “NHTSA Level 3” rating, which means that it’s fully autonomous, but that the driver still has to be able to take over “with sufficiently comfortable transition time” if the need arises.

Sadly, there was no mention of pricing or commercial availability. The license plate is simply a step towards a lot more testing on the roads of Nevada… and then we’ll see what federal regulators think about fleets of self-driving trucks.

The Inspiration Truck uses Daimler’s “Highway Pilot” autonomous technology, which uses a combination of radar, stereo computer vision, and other sensors to keep the vehicle on the road. According to Freightliner CEO Martin Daum, the only thing the truck needs for its self-driving circuits to kick in is “nice white stripes.”

It should be interesting to see receptive people are to the notion of self-driving trucks. Considering that 90% of truck crashes are due to driver error, and driver fatigue plays a role in 1/8th of those crashes, autonomous trucks seem like a no-brainer. Food for thought.