June 3, 2015 Vol. 12 No. 11

Holy moly, where to begin? For a trucking technology junkie like me, these are the best of times. My imagination is very well fuelled.

Just in the last 3-4 weeks, we’ve seen Freightliner’s autonomously driven Inspiration truck, some very interesting presentations by Volvo about truck connectivity and the Internet of things, and a look-see at Peterbilt’s work on the “stepping stone” to its own self-driving — but definitely not driverless — truck, along with other bits of its higher-than-high-tech efforts.

The subject of platooning has come up in each case, which made last week’s publication of a report on its benefits pretty timely. That study (see it here) was conducted by AuburnUniversity’s GPS and Vehicle Dynamics Laboratory, along with partners Peloton Technologies, Peterbilt, Meritor-WABCO, and the American Transportation Research Institute (ATRI). Its key observation: all trucks in a platoon gain fuel efficiencies, with the lead truck scoring as much as a 5% improvement while the trailing truck did up to 10% better.

There’s been another development on the autonomous trucks front that, in a way, is even more interesting. It’s a vision of how this sort of technology can be put in place and bring economic benefit to a region, which is something new. It’s pretty cool thinking but it’s been misrepresented broadly in both the trade and mainstream press.

IT’S ABOUT A CORRIDOR as much as a region, as defined by CNATCA, the Central North American Trade Corridor Association.

The corridor in question runs mostly along Route 83 through North Dakota, South Dakota, Nebraska, Kansas, Oklahoma, and Texas, along with Manitoba to the north and Mexico to the south. But in its entirety it extends from Alaska and the Port of Churchill in Canada through Manitoba, Saskatchewan, Alberta, and British Columbia, then south to Mexico City.