Investing in Autonomous Trucks and Driverless Trucking

An interesting article was published by Tech Crunch yesterday which talked about how a convoy of autonomous freight trucks recently drove across Europe and arrived at the Port of Rotterdam. Driverless trucking isn’t coming soon, it’s already here. What struck us about this article were some of the extremely powerful facts presented such as the ones below:

• Labor represents between 33-75% of the cost of trucking
• Driverless trucks could operate nearly 24 hours a day while human drivers are limited to 11 hours per day by law
• There are 1.6 million long-haul truck drivers in the USA
• Driverless trucks can operate at optimal speed to create fuel efficiencies while truck drivers can’t
• Driverless trucks can move in convoys and save even more fuel costs

The only thing preventing driverless trucks from becoming a reality are regulatory hurdles and opposition from truck drivers. Trucking is a $700 billion industry to be disrupted and the jobs lost from driverless trucking are estimated to be around 1% of the U.S. workforce. In fact, truck driving is the most common job in 29 states as seen below:

While there will be strong opposition against driverless trucking at first, it seems inevitable that a technology which is more efficient, costs less, and is safer, will eventually be adopted. The first question we asked after rea