Productivity always wins: driver shortages versus driverless solutions

If the basic tenet of freight autonomy is keeping shelves stocked and absorbing any sort of disruptions or disturbances to the supply chain, automating the way in which goods get from their point of entry to a warehouse and onwards to their commercial destination certainly makes a lot of sense if the technology is ready. What this also does is address the global issue of driver shortages. It’s estimated that across the continents the commercial freight logistics sector is one million drivers short and the situation is only getting worse.

“We all remember the empty shelves during COVID,” said Einride’s Nourie Boraie as the opening gambit of a fascinating Intertraffic Summit session in Theatre 3. The theme: “Driver Shortages v Driverless Solutions”, which also featured her colleague Zeljko Jeftic, autonomous truck expert Richard Bishop of Next Generation Mobility and Randy Iwaski, founder of Iwasaki Consulting Services.  

“With drivers retiring and young people choosing other paths, we're expecting the commercial driver shortage to increase exponentially in the coming years and with geopolitical shifts I think everybody's holding their collective breath for what may come,” she said. “Freight autonomy will help to fill that space and fortify European supply chains. Governments are acutely focused on balancing regulation with innovation.”

Richard Bishop, a leading light in the autonomous vehicle sector for well over 30 years, added that one of the benefits of autonomous trucks was their ability to work around the clock, and their subsequently improved fuel economy, noting that running a driverless truck is, on average, $0.08 per hour cheaper for operators, which is a huge cost saving spread over a fleet of trucks each calendar year. The goal, he says, is that there will be no human intervention in the logistics chain in the future, which in the US at least, is helped by the fact that there are no regulations prohibiting the use of autonomous of trucks.

“If it’s not prohibited, it’s permitted,” he added, wryly, before concluding that the US was the epicentre of autonomous mobility.

Nourie Boraie was quick to disagree.

“I take issue with that,” she retorted. “It’s not the epicentre of autonomous mobility. It’s the epicentre of autonomous mobility chaos.”

For Zeljko Jeftic, the idea of a humanless supply chain didn’t sit easily.

“I think there will always be humans in the loop,” he said. “Just not driving. It’s a question of what can we automate first? There are companies who employ drivers to move trucks 300m from the factory to the warehouse and they do this several times a day and it’s their only job. Where is their motivation? Automating this process, taking the human out of these tasks, is what we can automate first.”

On the subject of regulation, following on from Richard Bishop’s description of the US as a regulatory “Wild West”, Jeftic concluded with a simple plea.

“We need clear, and fair, regulation,” he said. “One incident can negatively impact the whole sector.”