“How Autonomous Trucking Will Deliver the Future” - Nationally-recognized expert Lee White reveals how trials of autonomous vehicle trucking on public highways are progressing and the impact driverless trucks are expected to have on the cost of goods, the labor market, and roadway safety before an August 27, 2024 meeting of The Economic Club of Florida.

Show Notes (for complete Show Notes, please visit https://economic-club.com/podcasts-and-summaries/)

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... (for the rest of the Show Notes, please visit https://economic-club.com/podcasts-and-summaries/) A TeleDirections podcast