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by SixSigma
3910 days ago
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Truck drivers are in short supply. There is also a trend in mainand Europe to schedule more freight into the hinterland from ports on trains and waterways - so called Synchromodal Transport [1] The new APM automated continer port in Rotterdam [2] is set to handle 4m containers per year using automated vehicles and cranes - with few operators on the dockside (just for the two train cranes and one barge crane) - the other 8 cranes are operated by remote control. [1] http://www.dinalog.nl/en/themes/synchromodal_transport/ [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cHVF6xEjArA |
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http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3258829/Driverless-t...
Everybody's missing the really bad thing about these trucks and self-driving cars though. Everything is patent encumbered. So they will transform a bottom up industry (dependant on people to drive the trucks, trucks which can be produced by any of a 1000 companies) into a top-down patent-encumbered capital-intensive industry (because only one company will get self-driving cars thanks to our patent system). There will be one company driving these trucks, not many like today.
This will destroy truck drivers, yes, absolutely. However something it will also do is sink every KMO that has trucks driving, which is a a lot of them here in Germany.
So give it another 10 years and "oh no hell no to self driving trucks/cars" will be one of the few things socialists and capitalists/liberalists agree on, because it will destroy the constituency of both parties. I also seriously doubt they can reliably deliver cargo in the central streets of Germany's cities. The ones built in the 14th century which are about wide enough for a single horse carriage (very tight for a car, and truck drivers actually manage to squeeze in (you -often- have to forgive some damage of course))