About The Episode

Over the past several years there has been a significant amount of hype surrounding self-driving cars, more known now as autonomous vehicles, and their adoption in cities and urban areas. And the hype is certainly warranted. The total global investment in autonomous vehicle(AV) technology exceeds $200 billion already, and some estimates put the future market size to be in the area of about 8 trillion dollars when the technology is fully adopted. I’ve covered some of the social impacts that this wide scale adoption could bring to cities in previous podcasts. However, more recently there has been a growing interest in moving beyond just the urban environments. The less well known freight or long haul trucking industry has also gained a lot of focus regarding autonomous vehicle adoption, especially because it might actually be easier to implement, for reasons I’ll get into later. And even with recent headlines such as Tesla’s full self driving beta is launched in Canada, there remains some skepticism towards the adoption of autonomous vehicles in cities and urban areas. This mostly relates to the technological complexities, political and regulatory challenges, and the growing number of publicized fatalities which psychologically push against the ‘more safe than normal vehicles’ narrative.  As such, many have been arguing that long haul trucking might be adopted before urban vehicles. And the numbers seem to be supporting this. Investment in autonomous trucks grew from 1.3 to 6.5 billion in 2021, whereas for robotaxis it dropped from 10.8 to 8.4 billion. So why the new hype surrounding trucks?