A stretch of the M6 near Carlisle has been earmarked as a potential test route for the automated juggernauts, which will be able to travel in a tightly packed convoy that improves fuel consumption by reducing drag, the Times reports.
Steering, acceleration and braking of the road train will be controlled by a driver in the lead vehicle, the newspaper said, although the drones will have a driver in each cab as a safety precaution to regain control in the event of an emergency.
There are hopes the technology could improve road safety.
We already have a system like this, it is called a railway and using it for freight reduces the amount of clog-ups on the roads.
Motorists will certainly be very nervous about the prospect and will need considerable reassurance that it will be safe. Motorways are pretty congested in the UK, they are about he most congested in Europe, and there will be problems in how they access and exit the roads.
You don’t say?
The drivers in the drones will need nerves of steel, or better still, no nerves at all. I certainly wouldn’t do it; if something can go wrong eventually it will go wrong. Whoever thought this one up has never tried stopping a 44 tonner going downhill on for instance the M6 anywhere north of Lancaster.
Madness.
We could fill them full of illegals and wait for the inevitable crash?
And we could always stop our motorways being the most congested in Europe by voting to quit Europe 😉
I know, how about linking all these driverless trucks together somehow and giving them their own permanent way? We could call it, I don’t know, how about a railway? I bet in years to come there “rail ways” will spread all across the country possibly even between Manchester and Liverpool! A Revolution in Transport! On a more serious note, the last thing these apocalyptic monsters need is to be closer together and on the same stretch of road as us. Doubtless the idiot responsible for this will not be anywhere near these trucks.
I suppose an upside would be that it puts an end to the elephant racing, which I have to endure on a daily basis. Rolling roadblocks for miles on end.
I wouldn’t bank on it. You will get some twat in a truck doing 1mph more than the convoy and will proceed to pass it, thereby blocking two lanes for aeons without giving a shit about the interminable tailback thereby created.
Alternatively we could have three lanes of motorways, with vehicles doing 75 mph, spaced nine foot apart in pouring rain.
We could call that ‘the M1’.
Or we could have people on wire donkeys riding two foot behind panel vans at 30 mph in our towns and cities.
I would rate the judgement of the ‘google trucks’ a million times better than these cretins!
In earlier times we had ‘bad drivers’ that were perhaps careless or not paying attention. Now we have the deliberately stupid, like the idiot who overtook the van stopped at a red traffic light so as to ‘run the junction’, or the guy who used the reserved right-turn lane and green arrow to turn LEFT across the three lanes to his left. And you worry about ‘google trucks’?
People think. Google trucks don’t. No amount of bad drivers will convince me that driverless vehicles mixing it on the roads with human drivers is a good idea. Because it isn’t.
I think that the problem with trains seems to be that in order to get something from A to B, you have to load it onto a truck, take it to the nearest railway station to A, load it onto a train, take the train to the nearest station to B, load it back onto a truck and take it to B. Even with clever container systems, it tends to be cheaper, quicker and easier just to drive the truck from A to B. Putting the trucks onto specially built guided roadways might work but you are right to say that driverless trucks on the regular roads is insane.
This proposal will STILL require a driver for each truck, who (presumably) will expect to be paid the going rate, and will also (presumably) be bound by the same driving hours regulations. So the trucks door-to-door collecting and delivering advantage stays the same, along with the fixed costs. The ONLY possible gain is a minute fuel consumption improvement. This is clearly just another barmy “CO2 is evil” driven idea…
Yup.
No the multiple driver idea is just to give everyone confidence. The same way that the automatic Victoria tube line has over-paid door watchers and sacrificial meat in the front of their trains ever since the line opened.
The real problem will be that the deliberate cretins, as opposed, the thoughtless/distracted, will rely on the smart trucks to act to save their lives, putting the rest of us at risk.
Smart trucks won’t do that, whereas competent drivers already do and will continue to do so.
From a logistics company’s perspective, roads are provided for free. Railways are not: if you want your logistics centre to be served by rail, you have to pay for it and hope that Network Rail will provide sufficient capacity on their existing network to make it worth the effort. This is a very expensive process and few bother. For road freight haulage, all you need is access to the nearest passable road. The local council and other taxpayer-funded entities take care of road-widening schemes and the like.
On the continent, there are tolls on the motorways of France, Germany, Switzerland, Austria, and many others. (Some, like Germany, only charge for goods vehicles.) In addition, some countries, such as Italy and Switzerland, enforce a ban on HGVs on Sundays, with exceptions only for those carrying perishable goods. Along with the much longer distances involved, all this helps tip the balance in favour of the railways for many long-distance hauls.
The simple fact is that Great Britain’s rail network suffers from a number of problems: the island itself isn’t all that big, and the major population centres are scrunched relatively close together. (Greater London’s massive relative size compared to the UK’s second and third cities also doesn’t help. It heavily skews freight and passenger flows and makes it much harder to balance services so you don’t end up with a bunch of empty trains cluttering up the tracks on the return trip.)
Furthermore, the British railway network was built for relatively small trains – a mistake other nations learned from – so even sending containers across it can be tricky. Some tunnels and bridges are literally too close to the tracks, so the number of available routes is surprisingly limited. (This is also why the only double-decker trains that have ever run on British rails are the very compromised experimental designs seen in this video dating from 1949. Continental-style double-decker trains simply wouldn’t fit under the bridges or in the tunnels found on much of the UK’s rail network.)
So, we have a road train travelling along the inside lane, with only the lead truck having a driver and the following trucks mirroring the actions of the lead truck? Fuck me, but that’s a recipe for disaster. And I say that as one who used to drive articulated trucks for a living, so I have a bit of insight into the actualities of the situation.
Ok, our train of trucks is pootling along at 56 (?) mph, and there are cars in the two lanes to the right of the ‘train’ overtaking. Suddenly, in front of the lead truck, a car has an emergency of some sort, and the lead truck has to take avoiding action. He may be lucky and there are no cars alongside him when he swerves. But where does that leave the rest of the train? Do they mirror his swerving action at the same time ? Do they just slam on the brakes? And in the case of an emergency stop, will all the trucks be carrying the same weight? Because believe you me, if you’re carrying a cubic load, you’ll stop a lot quicker than if you’ve got twenty tons of steel in the back.
There are so many scenarios for potential disaster I can’t even begin to enumerate them.