Mr. White told the Club that autonomous vehicles (AVs) are already on the road. Out west, Waymo operates driverless taxis with more than 100,000 paid rides a week. The company will be expanding to 20 more states.
In Florida, trucking will be a huge user of these driverless vehicles. Currently in the state:
- 130,000 trucking companies operate in Florida
- 1 in 18 people are employed in the industry
- 95% of all manufactured tonnage is brought to you by truck
- Trucking is the harbinger of the economy
The U.S. trucking industry represents $900-billion worth of transactions in interstate commerce across 140,000 terminals. Plus, we already see autonomous vehicles and machines working in other areas, especially since the COVID pandemic changed the supply chain.
“One of the things that helped these e-commerce companies, the Amazons, the UPS, DHL, Walmart, Target get through that is a lot of automation in their warehouses,” White said. “We have more million square-foot warehouses in our supply chain now than we ever had, and there’s a lot of automation. Amazon has over 14 different robots that are doing things, picking and unloading. We’ve got automated forklifts that are loading and unloading trucks. There’s a lot of automation that’s taking place inside the four walls, inside these facilities.”
He also pointed to the ways agriculture uses AVs.
“With John Deere, I believe there’s 12 locations that they’re testing right now for farming where the tractor has 24-hour capability to be able to farm. All the farmer needs to do is transport their tractor to the field, get it set up, get out of the cab, use their mobile phone and swipe to farm.”
In New York there are autonomous airport shuttles to take you to the terminal and then back to your car. They use autonomous machines as baggage carts and to load and unload cargo.
The military is also interested.
“In the last 10 years, they’ve had some military vehicles in some of our areas and supply chains that are running without drivers,” White said. “It’s going to keep our men and women, our soldiers out of harm’s way. You know, if there’s a convoy of 20 trucks, there may be truck number 15 that’s got a driver in it, and everything else is being autonomously driven.”
The trucking industry is still suffering a recession. There was an additional 4-5% reduction in business last May and June. The industry is also dealing with cost increases.
“If you look at the past three years, the wage cost has gone up from 56 cents per mile for a driver to 78 cents, a 38% increase in wages,” said White, a truck delivery driver earlier in his career. “That’s been a substantial increase in the total cost. If you look at the total cost, we’re up from $1.64 to $2.27 and that’s a tremendous impact as far as the cost per mile increase. One of the biggest limiters in trucking is the eleven hours rule. DOT regulates how many hours a driver can actually be driving a truck. They have about 15 minutes once they hit that eleventh hour to find a parking place. We have a parking challenge in Florida, and that’s why you see trucks parked on the ramps.”
Autonomous trucks will help with that and other inefficiencies.
“An autonomously driven truck is a much more efficiently driven truck. Driving from Phoenix to Tucson, a typical driver may touch the brakes 40-50 times. But an autonomous truck, because it’s constantly proceeding around them, it just lets off the gas and then it accelerates. There’re studies that show somewhere between a 13% and 20% improvement in miles per gallon.”
Two companies, Aurora and Kodiak, are already testing AVs and say they will be on the road with driverless trucks by the end of the year. In Florida, autonomous mail runs have been made into Jacksonville.
The companies have also been testing safety. Aurora investigated 30 truck accidents with human drivers that occurred between Dallas and Houston from 2018-2022. White says that if there had been autonomous drivers, 29 of those crashes would not have occurred.
White began his career as a UPS driver and understands the need for safety.
“I was trained as a driver. I love drivers, and they’re great, but I can’t look 360-degrees around my truck all the time,” he said. “It would take me 1.5 seconds to be able to see a safety issue and react. It takes that computer point-one seconds.”
White said that AVs will keep truck drivers employed, but the drivers will change what they do. He said they will switch from long-haul over the road jobs to more local deliveries and the number of driving jobs may increase as a result.
“We will restructure what people do and actually maybe turn it into a force multiplier. If I’m a trucking company, and I can only move 20 loads a day between Dallas and Jacksonville, with autonomy, I can move 60 loads a day. Now I’ve got more local work that I’ve got to go deliver.”
Florida can take advantage of AV trucks. For one thing, all of the states along Interstate 10 from Florida to Arizona have state rules that allow the AV trucks. White told the Club that is a good start, but we need federal rules, too.
“Florida is really uniquely positioned with the blue water, the ports, and with the ability to integrate that with corridors I-95, I-75, and I-10, there are huge opportunities and huge trade lanes. Every large trucking company operates here in Florida and we’re prepared. We just need to get ready.”
(You can also view the entire Club meeting on YouTube.)
