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Companies are already testing driverless trucks on America’s roads. The technology will bring untold profits, but it may cost thousands of truckers their livelihoods.
VIDEO from 60min

You know that universal sign we give truckers, hoping they’ll sound their air horns? Well, you’re gonna be hearing a lot less honking in the future. And with good reason. The absence of an actual driver in the cab. We may focus on the self-driving car, but autonomous trucking is not an if, it’s a when. And the when is coming sooner than you might expect. As we first reported last year, companies have been quietly testing their prototypes on public roads. Right now there’s a high-stakes, high-speed race pitting the usual suspects – Google and Tesla and other global tech firms – against start-ups smelling opportunity. The driverless-semi will convulse the trucking sector and the two million American drivers who turn a key and maneuver their big rig every day. And the winners of this derby, they may be poised to make untold billions; they’ll change the U.S. transportation grid; and they will emerge as the new kings of the road.

It’s one of the great touchstones of Americana: the romance and possibility of the open road. All hail the 18-wheeler hugging those asphalt ribbons, transporting all of our stuff across the fruited plains, from sea to shining sea. Though we may not give it a second thought when we click that free shipping icon, truckers move 70% of the nation’s goods. But trucking cut a considerably different figure in the summer of 2019 on the Florida Turnpike. Starsky Robotics, then a tech startup, may have been driving in the right lane, but they passed the competition with 35,000 pounds of steel thundering down a busy highway with nobody behind the wheel. The test was a milestone. Starsky was the first company to put a truck on an open highway without a human on board. Everyone else in the game with the know-how keeps a warm body in the cab as backup. For now, anyway. If you didn’t hear about this, you’re not alone; in Jacksonville, we talked to Jeff Widdows, his son Tanner, Linda Allen and Eric Richardson – all truckers; and all astonished to learn how far this technology has come.

Linda Allen: I wasn’t aware ’til I ran across one on the Florida Turnpike and that just– it just scares me. I can’t imagine. But I didn’t know anything about it.

Jon Wertheim: No one’s talkin’ about it at work.

Jeff Widdows: Nobody, never, never.

Eric Richardson: I didn’t know that it’d come so far. And I’m thinking, “Wow. It’s here.”

Truckers speak with correspondent Jon Wertheim CBS NEWS

He’s right. The autonomous truck revolution is here. It just isn’t much discussed – not on CB radios; and not in statehouses. And transportation agencies are not inclined to pump the brakes. From Florida, hang a left and drive 2000 miles west on I-10 and you’ll hit the proving grounds of a company with a fleet of 50 autonomous rigs.

Jon Wertheim: This is a shop floor? Or this is a laboratory

Chuck Price: It’s both.

In the guts of the Sonoran Desert, outside Tucson, Chuck Price is chief product officer at TuSimple, a global autonomous trucking outfit valued at more than a billion dollars with operations in the U.S. and China. At this depot, $12 million worth of gleaming self-driving semis are on the move.

Jon Wertheim: Right now we’ve got safety operators in the cab. How far away are we from runs without drivers?

Chuck Price: We believe we’ll be able to do our first driver-out demonstration runs on public highways in 2021.

That’s the when. As for the how…

Chuck Price: Our primary sensor system is our array of cameras that you see along the top of the vehicle–

Jon Wertheim: Heard about souping up vehicles. This takes it to a new level.

Chuck Price: It’s a little bit different… yeah.

The competition is fierce, so much so their technology is akin to a state secret. But Price points us to a network of sensors, cameras and radar devices strapped to the outside of the rig, all of it hardwired to an internal AI supercomputer that drives the truck. It’s self-contained — so a bad WiFi signal won’t wreak havoc on the road.

Chuck Price: Our system can see farther than any other autonomous system in the world. We can see forward over a half mile.

Jon Wertheim: You can drive autonomously at night?

Chuck Price: We can. Day, night. And in the rain. And in the rain at night.

Chuck Price shows correspondent Jon Wertheim the automated trucks. CBS NEWS

And they’re working on driving in the snow. Chuck Price has unshakable confidence in the reliability of the technology; as do some of the biggest names in shipping: UPS, Amazon and the U.S. Postal Service ship freight with TuSimple trucks. All in, each unit costs more than a quarter million dollars. Not a great expense, considering it’s designed to eliminate the annual salary of a driver; currently around $45,000. Another savings: the driverless truck can get coast-to-coast in two days, not four, stopping only to refuel—though a human still has to do that.

We wanted to hop in and experience automated trucking firsthand.

Jon Wertheim: I feel like it’s our turn on Space Mountain.

Chuck Price was happy to oblige. We didn’t know what to expect, so we fashioned more cameras to the rig than NASA glued to the Apollo rockets…

Maureen Fitzgerald: Is everybody buckled in?

ALL: Buckled in.

Maureen Fitzgerald: Three, Two, One….

…and we hit go.

TRUCK COMPUTER: Autonomous driving started.

We sat in the back alongside the computer. In the front seat: Maureen Fitzgerald, a trucker’s trucker with 30 years experience. She was our safety driver, babysitting with no intention of gripping the wheel, but there just in case. Riding shotgun: an engineer, John Panttila, there to monitor the software. The driverless truck was attempting a 65-mile loop in weekday traffic through Tucson.

CONTINUED:
Automated trucking, a technical milestone that could disrupt hundreds of thousands of jobs, hits the road – 60 Minutes – CBS News

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