Gadgetory

when you're watching two guys talk about the history of trucking in America projected onto the massive Hoover Dam in the middle of the night you kind of wonder what you're doing with your life but when you realize they're revealing the world's first road ready self-driving truck things make a little bit more sense you might think that it's done by plane or you may wish it were done by drones but a lot of the goods in this country are still delivered by trucks the problem is that big rigs are dangerous they kill 4,000 people a year in nearly half-a-million crashes driver fatigue is a leading cause of these accidents but it's a problem that Daimler has a pretty revolutionary solution for it the company basically took an existing version of one of its freightliner Trucks and installed what's called the highway pilot system it's the same thing that powers the Mercedes future truck that we saw debut last year and a technology that guides it is actually pretty simple just radar and cameras once the system becomes active then it's fully autonomous and it's steering braking and accelerating or decelerating as necessary to maintain control we have two cameras that are mounted up into the windshield and they use the white lines to determine the trucks position in the lane of course if you don't have the white lines you can still run in the normal ACC cruise control mode and you can still write from the truck manually it's still safe to run it manually and the truck will let you know when it doesn't see the white lines and when they're supposed to take over that's actually a really important point if the painted lines on a road aren't in good shape the trucks autopilot just won't work you have to make sure that there aren't objects in the way you have to make sure that the roads are actually still well built out it'll tell you when those things might be interrupting your drive but if the white lines aren't painted while on that road the cameras aren't gonna be able to pick it up and it's gonna tell you to take back over it once the driver is warned to take control there's a countdown visual and audible to indicate that he has a specified amount of time to take over the wheel and basically the system goes from active to completely inactive and unavailable Daimler gave us a ride in the truck on the public highways outside of Las Vegas the experience was actually pretty normal there were a few instances where the driver had to take control like getting on and off the highways or getting around construction vehicles but for the most part the drive was pretty autonomous the only thing that was weird about it was you could feel the truck drifting from side to side as it kept itself in the lane and that made me a little bit motion sick but I'd imagine a truck driver wouldn't have that problem I mean I've never been in a big rig before but this is the only moment where you really felt a little blip of fear is just when the gear shift change and that's just because that's the most noticeable thing that happened without you doing this this system is more is very integrated so that it's making choices on what gear to be in and what the optimal speed is and all of that so the benefits of this system there's three that we're that we're focusing on one in the area of safety improves safety chances with the integration of the camera the radar the steering system the other being the connectivity aspect allow the driver to connect to either work or home based type systems with tablets and then finally efficiency the chances for optimization of acceleration deceleration as it impacts the driver and also the vehicle that efficiency translates into better fuel mileage and reduced emissions which are more reasons for Daimler to keep testing this technology in the coming years as we go forward there's a higher expectation for for people and drivers and fleet owners to be more connected to their vehicles and so in turn offering that to them also allows additional efficiency potentials all of this is great in a future where our highways are full of automated vehicles big and small can only mean we're all going to be safer but only two of these trucks are licensed to run on public roads right now and many other states won't allow them so it's gonna be a long time before robot trucks take over the highway