Here come the truck platoons! By increasing asset utilization and decreasing fuel consumption and labour costs, platooning is going to be a boon for the trucking industry, but a massive threat to the rail industry. If customers only save 15% compared to trucks with domestic intermodal but they have to deal with the bad customer service of railroads and long transit times, what are they going to do when platooning drops trucking’s cost to be at parity or below intermodal? Seems pretty obvious. Railroads don’t exactly have a lot of room on pricing either since domestic intermodal is low margin business. It is quite a shame too. A lot of companies invested in new fleets of domestic 53s over the last year or so, especially reefers. Oh well, better luck next time, that is if there is a next time.
You didn’t even read the article, did you? It talks about a test run of sorts- 68 trucks moved last year, without any safety problems! It’s not a platoon, it’s a test of two trucks, one following the other. You’re still just dreaming about a big pie in the big sky at this point.
“The driver in the second truck only has to steer”. You still have two drivers for two trucks- no labor savings, no fuel savings. It looks to be technology in it’s infancy. It looks like this is a ways from being a real threat to railroads in any big way. And the 15% figure? You seem to have simply pulled that out of the air.
I’m starting to think that you’re a no more than a PR man for
I’m not sure that I understand the OP’s premise. The biggest trucking companies are investing more and more in domestic intermodal and yet they’re making a mistake? I’m sure they know what their business is. That’s how they got as big as they are.
He certainly seems to have understood it better than you. Remember there is almost nothing particularly new here: the “V2V” was defined as part of TEA-21, over 2 decades ago, and better defined by 2006: it has been a component of Federal ITS and codified in the CFR a very long time, wagging its tail waiting for a use. Carnegie-Mellon alone worked out the infrastructure and methods for predictive cruise, including coarse guidance (it’s limited by GPS differential precision and jitter, which can be dramatically improved on major highways with not-too-difficult beaconing) and while the future involves true automatic ‘best’ coordination of throttle trim and predictive shift, it is not rocket science to provide upshift and downshift indicators with engine coordination to eliminate drivetrain mismatch as a foreground-attention issue for drivers. Radar following is likewise a very old technology; I have not looked at the Platoon1 actual following distance but I would be very disappointed if it were not solidly in the effective drafting range. Something that appears to be missing (perhaps by intent) is predictive lanekeeping (which ought to involve some combination of trailer following, lane awareness, and predictive input from steering, kingpin angle, and some accelerometer data to let the following driver judge when to follow and when to take a safe line… and when to drop back or break platoon, e.g. in variable crosswinds.
It should occur to anyone who thinks about this that there are no restrictions in this system to just ‘two’ vehicles – that is just a reasonable test condition. As noted the test volume of actual freight carried so far is minuscule, but that is because it is a test: there needs to be a ‘more ubiquitous’ use of the various standardized technologies, harmonization of the proprietary ones, and buildout of the GPS/GIS infrastructur
Since OP never seems too interested in answering questions, maybe you can provide some insight. How do you picture things like this work: A platoon of 2 or more trucks is heading down the interstate between Omaha and Des Moines. That corridor is solid trucks changing lanes taking miles to pass other trucks. How do trucks #2 through #100 do this withour a set of eyes in the cab? How does the platoon handle icy road conditions, or other conditions that would require action form someone in the driver’s seat?
The article mentions that trucks sometimes follow unusually close in order to prevent cars from getting in line between them, and with automated trucks, they can follow even closer together to keep cars out from between them. But what happens if a car driver does enter the short gap made possible by automatic trucks? The car driver won’t know that there is a special reason why two trucks are driving so close together. From the car driver’s point of view, one truck is following too close, and should back off to make room for the car entering the gap between two trucks.
So the car driver will signal intent and begin entering the short gap between the two trucks. When this happens, the automatic system will slow the second truck to let the car driver into the gap.
Then when the car enters the gap, the length of the gap may have to increase by several times because the trucks can no longer follow close as if being one truck made possible by the fact that both trucks are automatically driven. And the addition of the car between the two trucks will force the car to slow in order to increase its gap to the lead truck, while that forces the second truck to slow down and give space to the car.
So, when a car merges into the small gap between automatic trucks in a platoon, it will require significant braking and slowing of the second truck. This will exaggerate the danger to traffic following the second truck. What if
Fully automated passenger vehicles are the only way to do this. (well not ONLY, but the only safe way).
This strikes me as yet another thing to throw into the growing pile that is “automated vehicles only gain their described advantages once the entire operational fleet is automated.”
It’s not that bad. And you need to do a LOT of reading in ITS and control theory before you ‘conclude’ anything judgmental in this field.
The architecture of the V2V used here allows sufficient distance to assure all the ‘following’ vehicles would slow as commanded, and of course this rate is for any likely preceding emergency stop that cannot be ‘avoided’. That is a concern, but it was adequately discussed before 1998 and is well understood by actual designers (rather than constructors of straw hypotheticals) today. (For the sake of completeness you may want to consider this letter and its context
but anyone not born yesterday will recognize this does not concern channel 172 or any interference that might cause loss of integrity on that channel. It’s cute to extrapolate current massive-data approaches to autonomous guiding to a requirement to broadcast that data in the ITS bands… but I don’t think that is an efficient necessity (and stuff like Qualcomm’s cutely-named C-V2X tech, which would use a great deal of the ‘released’ spectrum, certainly would love to be able to exploit it ‘free’…)
The systems of machine vision that assist lanekeeping can be easily fused to detect turn-signal (and in emergencies predicted vehicle trajectory). The net result will be no worse than what human truck-driver reactions would be… and remember there is still a human, paying reasonable attention to road conditions, in each cab who can ‘take over’ as effective platoon leader of any following vehicles by reacting to
I think you’re missing the major points of platooning, perhaps by accepting ttrraaffiicc’s trollogic a bit too credulously. Saving money is less of a point than reducing congestion and driver-related issues.
Mhch of the problem with truck operation on ‘mixed-traffic’ roadways is in the exaggerated following distance and slow recovery acceleration when trucks are distributed across lanes; it is reasonably unsafe to ‘draft’ at effective aerodynamic following distance for a variety of reaction-time and foreground-attention reasons. Platooning reduces these, if done right almost to the point of practical elimination; when you add predictive cruise to hold the engine (on a combustion-engined Class 8 tractor) reasonably in its power-band “automatically” with few ‘excursions’ and need to recover rotational speed against compression, the advantages become even more worthwhile.
I would add that the ability to run at reasonably constant ‘speed limit’ speed may have the same benefits for ‘precision scheduled trucking’ that can be observed in railroading; given the ability to platoon at off-peak times this promises to reduce the need to tolerate truck-induced congestion at many current points (specifically including I-40 and I-81 East of the Mississippi) even net of fixed bottlenecks (there is still a point in the city of Memphis that the most direct I-40 route from west to East gies down to one lane!).
If for some reason we come to tolerate higher speed for ‘priority’ platoons capable of reliably holding higher speed (with appropriate ‘compensation’ for the geometrically increased infrastructure wear and damage) you again compress faster and inherently more dangerous traffic into a shorter length of exposure to other traffic, passing in a shorter time. T
What hasn’t been brought up is that very few trucks of one company are going for any appreciable distance on the same route. Think of how many trucks you may see on I-80 (Ohio Turnpike) and then break them down by company. There are only a few of the biggest companies find it worthwhile to use Turnpike doubles (2x53) or triples (3x28). Also, a large percentage of trucks don’t spend a lot of time on the Interstates. You are taught to take the most direct route, not always the fastest. Miles on equipment costs money.
I used to drive for a Top 10 carrier who wouldn’t pay for turnpike tolls unless it was a plate glass or other fragile load. I’ve driven across the entire state of Ohio on US30, back when it was all two lane.
Observations from when I worked in conjunction with the intermodal ramp in the mid-late 70’s - trailers that the railroads got to haul were too heavy to haul over the road. Sometimes they were too heavy for the hydraulic 5th wheels on the yard tractors to pick them up.
I still can’t see where platooning trucks as you describe does a lot for either of these problems. What am I missing?
The worst traffic I’ve seen in my part of the world is on I-80 near Des Moines. It’s bad day and night with solid trucks. I really don’t think there is an off-peak time to drive there. I can’t see a platoon of trucks doing any better there than individual trucks and drivers, maybe worse. Most truck drivers we deal with don’t work on a peak/ non-peak schedule. They pick up the load when they are able and drive when they are able.
How does a platoon of trucks deal with passing or being passed by other trucks? It’s not uncommon for a truck going 66 mph to take about 5 minutes to pass atruck doing 65 mph. What happens when platoon A going 66 overtakes platoon B going 65?
What about the beginning and end of the trip? Presuming, as trafficc does, that the platoon starts and ends at the same points, how does that work? Or, 16 platooned trucks pull into a Pilot truckstop and do what?
Are you suggesting there would still be a human in the cab? I’m not seeing any labor problems being solved.