At the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas, Daimler Trucks announced it will invest EUR 500 million (about NZ 850 million) over the next few years and create more than 200 new jobs in its global push to bring highly automated trucks (SAE level 4) to the road within a decade. Most of these jobs will be located at the new Daimler Trucks Automated Truck Research & Development Center at DTNA‘s headquarters in Portland, Oregon.

Highly automated driving is characterised as automated travel in defined areas and between defined hubs without any expectation of the system that a user will respond to a request to intervene. In commercial trucking, level 4 is the next step after level 2, increasing efficiency and productivity for customers, and cutting costs per mile significantly. In doing so, Daimler Trucks is skipping the intermediate step of conditionally automated driving (level 3). Level 3 automated driving does not offer truck customers a substantial advantage compared with the current situation, as there are no corresponding benefits to compensate for the technology costs.

“As a leader of our industry, we‘ve been pioneering automated trucking,” said Martin Daum, member of the board of management of Daimler AG with responsibility for Daimler Trucks & Buses. “In 2015, our Freightliner Inspiration Truck got the first road licence ever for an automated commercial vehicle. Now we take automated trucking to the next level: we‘re ready to launch the first partially automated new Freightliner Cascadia in 2019 – and next, we tackle highly automated trucks. Highly automated trucks will improve safety, boost the performance of logistics and offer a great value proposition to our customers – and thus contribute considerably to a sustainable future of transportation.”

Highly automated trucks (level 4) offer enormous advantages in many areas. They enhance safety in traffic thanks to a redundancy of systems and a multitude of sensors and systems that never get tired or lose attention – because today, a great majority of accidents are still due to human error. Level 4 highly automated trucks also improve efficiency and productivity through higher utilisation of the vehicles. They also make it possible to travel during light traffic times, for example at night, and thus avoid traffic jams by intelligent route management. This has positive effects for truck customers and for the entire economy: the competitiveness of an economy is strongly correlated with the efficiency of logistics. This aspect becomes more and more relevant as global road freight volume is expected to more than double between 2015 and 2050.

Daimler Trucks is also reassessing its view on platooning. The company has tested platooning for several years, and results show that fuel savings, even in perfect platooning conditions, are less than expected and that those savings are further diminished when the platoon gets disconnected and the trucks must accelerate to reconnect. At least for US long-distance applications, analysis currently shows no business case for customers driving platoons with new, highly aerodynamic trucks.