For my tech
briefing I wanted to research and present to you all about autonomous vehicles
with a specific focus on Uber and their new trucking service.
To begin, Uber has recently debuted its Uber Freight division at the end of December this past year. This new launch comes off of Uber’s recent acquisition of Otto, a leader in the self-driving trucking industry, which was bought in July 2016 for $650 million. Otto’s focus was to develop self-driving truck tools that could be sold to trucking companies and ultimately have them install it themselves. Otto was looking to reinvent the trucking industry and perhaps become its own “Uber for trucking” company.
The first product under this new Uber Freight division is a market where shippers can connect with trucks just like the Uber app connects passengers with drivers. Uber Freight will essentially take out the middleman of the brokerage shipping firms and offer real-time pricing of shipping your goods somewhere based off of supply and demand. In theory this service can offer surge prices similar to what is already implemented in the Uber app. However, the market details are still being worked out, as this is a new service.
Uber Freight
has the ability to eventually put truck drivers out of business, but for the
foreseeable future their jobs are safe. Otto’s present technology still
requires a human driver to be present as the trucks are only fully self-driving
on the highway. It could be years or decades for fully autonomous trucks to be
taking over the roads. Cities are already cautious of allowing self-driving
passenger cars roaming the streets, and the obstacles needed to hurdle for
allowing the same for 18-wheelers would seem to be even higher. The more
immediate threat with Uber entering the shipping market is the operations workers’
jobs that would be cut out if shippers adopt Uber’s platform.
If Uber is able to prove to be successful in the trucking company than it could become an opening for autonomous vehicles. The approach that Uber has in plan for its Freight division is similar to how it wants to bring in autonomous vehicles to its original passenger car service. Self-driving cars will become apart of the market as soon as they become available in certain areas and will not initially substitute human drivers. Uber’s self driving trucks and cars will constantly be training as more and more data is collected on events such as how frequently someone is braking and accelerating. Autonomous vehicles will revolutionize the shipping industry as well as many others, and Uber is at the forefront of this transformation.
I think this is very interesting, and it would be awesome if freight trucking could be made totally autonomous. There are definitely tons of benefits that could come from this, and it would be cool to see it happen in our lifetime. MY biggest concern with the autonomous movement is loss of jobs. According to alltrucking.com, there are approximately 3.5 million truck drivers in the US, roughly 1% of our population. If freight moves 100% autonomous, how will jobs be made for those 3.5 million truck drivers? It's more of a rhetorical question, but I feel like thats a huge amount of people that would be jobless by this.
ReplyDeleteAutonomous vehicle technology looks very achievable and beneficial. This is despite the fact that it is still controversial since it will affect a large part of the job market. I was wondering more on the effects this will have on road safety. Most people talk about the benefits autonomous vehicles can have on road safety. I think making a large portion of commercial vehicle autonomous will be our first steps into getting safer roads. I would assume that most fatal automobile accidents usually involves large semi trucks. Having no truck drivers might help prevent the risky behaviors associated with truck drivers trying to meet their schedules. Its interesting to see the future benefits this will have on society.
ReplyDeleteAutonomous cars will never stop growing and I agree with Uber being a huge player in how freight is going to be delivered all of the country as well as the world. We will see huge benefits and possibly downturns of freight being automated for shipments and deliveries.
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