Trucking Seeks a Seat at the Autonomous Table
The American Trucking Association is none-too-pleased about how autonomous vehicle policy is being developed with zero input from truckers.
The ongoing effort to develop self-driving trucks is starting to involve a very heavy dose of irony, for the very industry being targeted for automation currently has no input intodesigning the rules that will govern how said automation is ultimately deployed.
Chris Spear, the newly-installed president and CEO of the American Trucking Associations (ATA), brought this subject up at the trade group’s annual convention in Las Vegas this week [go here, here and here for more on that gathering] and it’s not a pretty issue by any stretch of the imagination.
“Autonomous vehicle technology is real, folks, and it’s here whether we like it or not,” he said during his inaugural speech at the conference. “If properly developed, it has the potential to dramatically improve safety and reduce [traffic] congestion – and as an industry, trucking loses $49.6 billion a year to congestion.”
All well and good, but Spear and ATA are none-too-pleased about how autonomous vehicle policy is being developed with zero input from truckers.
“The playbook for how autonomous technology will be regulated is currently being written by automotive OEMs and their federal and state regulators,” Spear stressed. “The trucking industry cannot afford to concede and entire regulatory framework to another mode of transportation, especially one that we’ll ultimately inherit.”
And while all the benefits of autonomous vehicles may “sound appealing,” in Spear’s words, “they won’t happen if we’re not at the table.”
In an interesting twist, ATA invited John Bozzello, president and CEO of the Global Automakers trade group (someone Spear worked closely with while in a prior stint as vice president of government affairs for Hyundai Motor Co.) to its yearly gathering to discuss autonomous vehicle trends.
Bozzello sought to illuminate just two of the many reasons why there’s been a big push to make autonomous vehicles a reality:
Highway deaths due to vehicle crashes are on the rise