How soon will we see self-driving trucks?

CHATTANOOGA (WDEF) – This week, we’ve seen tests for autonomous trucking in Florida and by the U.S. Postal Service.

So Ashley Henderson asked a local industry watcher how soon we’ll actually see them on the roads.

Craig Fuller, founder and CEO of Freightwaves, a shipping data and analytics company in Chattanooga , keeps his finger on the pulse of everything related to the shipping industry. He says that although several companies are investing in driverless technologies, we’re still going to need truck drivers for the short term.

“You cannot today take a load from one city, in a dock in one city to another city and have it completely driverless, we are not there yet at the technology, that can do that, and that’s probably a couple of years out.”

A company called Starsky Robotics is currently testing driverless trucks on a section of highway in Florida. But, Fuller says we’re still a few years away from seeing them everywhere.

“So we’re still a couple of, at least a decade out – where autonomous really starts to impact the availability of trucks in the market, but when that takes place it’s going to have a profound impact to both the national economy as well as the local economy.”

He says that when the technology is perfected, although it will be disruptive to the economy for awhile, and some jobs will be changed, hundreds of thousands of lives will be saved.

“One of the astounding facts is, with mobility, they’re projecting over 565,000 lives being saved, once you – per year, once you eliminate the human driver, which is roughly the equivalent of curing breast cancer. ”

Fuller says automation is projected to change not only the trucking industry, but insurance, automobile ownership and many other sectors of the economy.

“Once we reach the autonomous, or what we call the mobility revolution, it changes everything.”

In Chattanooga, Ashley Henderson, News 12 Now.