April 6, 2016 Vol. 13 No. 7

About this time two weeks ago I was being chauffeured down the A52 autobahn in Germany by a guy with no hands on the steering wheel as we sat just 3 or 4 car lengths behind another truck. At speed in a semi-autonomous Mercedes Actros sporting Daimler’s cool Highway Pilot Connect system.

We were platooning, and it was pretty dull, really. While at the same time being damned exciting because it was cutting-edge technology at work.

It’s supposed to be a dull experience, of course. Uneventful. Something’s gone very wrong if there’s any excitement at all.

As I wrote in my last newsletter (link here), there really was a distinct lack of drama in the process. In a platoon of three, I was in the third and last truck and was impressed by how seamless the electronic connecting and disconnecting of the three trucks was. If traffic demanded it, the trucks automatically disengaged and widened the gap, sometimes to allow merging traffic in, once to allow one of those pesky four-wheelers to live a little longer even though he rudely cut in between us and the next truck.

Maybe we need a definition of platooning before going further. We’re talking about technologies that create semi-autonomous road trains, where two or more trucks are controlled by a lead vehicle through wireless communication using about a billion sensors. Actually there are 400 on the Mercedes Actros tractors equipped with Highway Pilot Connect. Trucks in such a convoy are able to drive very close together, reducing aerodynamic drag in a big way and bringing fuel-efficiency of as much as 20%, depending on which test you’re looking at. The smaller the gap between vehicles, the better the fuel economy.

The trucks constantly maintain a communication link which allows them to share data and action. If the lead truck’s collision avoidance system activates its brakes, for example, the following truck or trucks will do the same.

THE PLATOONING IDEA has been around for ages, though you could be excused for thinking it’s a new development, given all the attention it’s been getting lately. It’s not even close to being new.

In a very real way it can be traced back to 1939 when such things were the stuff of science fiction. But, as far as I can tell, that’s when the idea for an automated car was born.