Gadgetory

(sensor beeping) (driver reacting) (horn honking) - We hear a lot about self-driving technology, pretty much all the time these days, especially at shows like CES. But one place where that technology might actually make a pretty big impact sooner than later, is in trucking. Trucks travel millions of miles every year and carry most of our consumer goods, pretty much everything you have in your home. But they can be dangerous to drive and they can be a risk to other people on the road. So, getting a little bit of that self-driving technology into a truck like this could actually go a really long way. (techno music) Almost 4 years ago, Daimler, the parent company of Mercedes-Benz, made a pretty a pretty big claim. They said they were working on a self-driving big rig, and they pulled out all the stops for the big reveal. They brought the truck out on top of the Hoover Dam, and then they brought us all here to the Las Vegas Motor Speedway to give us all rides in the truck and let us see what it would be like to be inside a self-driving big rig. Those trucks were just prototypes, but they were something of a break-through at the time. They were the first vehicles to get special autonomous-vehicle license plates from the state of Nevada, which has become a pretty big hotbed for testing self-driving cars. This week at CES, we're starting to see that dream from 2015 turn into, kind of, a reality. Daimler's showing off the final production version of those prototype-trucks, and it's announcing a whole bunch of news around this program as well. It's committing 500 million euros to the program, hiring hundreds of workers, and it's promising that these trucks will go into manufacturing this summer, and be on the road later this year. Now to get a full understanding of what this new technology was really like and how different it is, Daimler actually let me drive one of the Cascadia trucks that doesn't have any of this technology in it. - Maybe with your thumb, yeah. There you go. And now, you're ready to go. - [Sean] Alright. I found the one person at CES who let me drive something this year, and it happens to be a gigantic truck (laughs). So, this big boy is the Daimler Cascadia, the newest version of Daimler's, essentially, most popular truck. And we're out here at CES this year to see what Daimler's doing with self-driving technology in these trucks. This is not the version that has that tech inside of it, but this is, sort of, the latest and greatest before we get into the more advanced Cascadia that Daimler's showing off this week. And I've never driven a truck like this before and, I don't know, I got the hang of it pretty quick. But I'm definately really interested to see how much different it feels being inside one of these things when you add all of these self-driving sensors. There are thousands of fatal crashes every year involving big rigs on U.S. roads, and pretty much all of them have something to do with human error. So, getting any kind of self-driving trucks into the trucks to help out the driver, is always gonna be a pretty big deal. More than that, driving a truck is just a grueling job. You're spending 10, 12 hours on the road at a time and doing that day after day after day, driving along what can be really monotonous highways. Drivers get easily distracted, so putting something in the truck that can help out a driver and make that experience, not only easier on them, but safer for everyone around them, is also a really big step forward. One of the most interesting things about what Daimler's done here is that it's accomplishing all of this with just a little bit of technology. There's two radar sensors and one camera, and that's what's making this whole thing possible. That's a far cry from something like Tesla, which has cameras, and radars, and ultrasonics all around the car. Some of the specific things this truck can do using that technology is it will alert the driver if there's a pedestrian, or a bicyclist, or somebody along side the right side of the truck. - [Driver] My following distance is set for about 3.6 seconds, so it's gonna wait for him to get about 3.6 seconds ahead of us and then it's gonna keep that pace as much as we possibly can with that car. And now I don't have hands on the steering wheel, it's basically steering. After about 15 to 20 seconds, I get the caution popup that says, "Put your hands back on the wheel." If I don't do it, it's going to escalate into a red guard here in a minute, and I'm gonna start (sensor beeping) to get an audible chime. It's gonna get more and more annoying (sensor beeping) for about 60 seconds. - [Sean] And what would reset that, just giving a little bit of a tug to the wheel? - [Driver] Yeah, If I just give a little bit of torque on the steering. - If you follow the advancements that have been happening in self-driving technology in the automotive space, a lot of this might now sound very new to you, but the fact that they're coming to trucks is pretty big deal. These trucks are out on the road clocking million of miles, and one of the biggest problems is making sure that a driver whose doing a really long shift is staying aware, able to drive safely, and able to keep the people around themselves safe as well. And so, this truck has been outfitted with a bunch of different features that will make sure that that happens. One thing that's really interesting about what Daimler unveiled today, is that it's really not all that far off from what we saw almost four years ago. The technology is just a slight iteration and a slight refinement over those prototype-trucks. And that actually matches what we're starting to see in the industry at large. We've all these wild promises about self-driving cars over the last couple years, especially here at CES. And none of that has really come to fruition. There was, sort of, an over-promising happening for awhile and now everybody's kind of coming back down to reality. And Daimler is right there with everybody else. They spent a lot of today talking about how they're gonna take a more measured path going forward with this stuff. And while it's nice to think about a future where these trucks might be able to drive themselves and completely reduce crashes, today was all about keeping drivers in the truck, and also using that technology to help those drivers out as opposed to just replacing them completely. That doesn't mean that that won't be where this technology ends up five, 10, 20, or 30 years down the road, but it gives us a better picture of what the transition will look like, and how the world will actually change as this technology matures in the coming years. Thanks everybody for watching. For more self-driving trucks, self-driving cars, and all the other crazy technology we're seeing here this week at CES 2019, got to theverge.com. And make sure you go to YouTube.com/theverge and click subscribe. Thanks for watching.