Are self-driving trucks a good idea

Are self-driving trucks a good idea?

Are self-driving trucks a good idea?

In the past few years a new technology was reintroduced to the media, which was self-driving trucks, which made a lot of people talking about it and its ability to replace drivers in the future; that’s why we had to write about this technology in this article to clarify how this technology works, its benefits and its flaws.

How self-driving trucks work?

Self-driving trucks are a special kind of trucks which uses sensors, cameras and radars to visualize the surrounding area to help the processors in the truck  to drive it by making correct orders to the actuators to either accelerate the speed of the car if the road is empty and there's no obstacles in the way, or slows down if there are other cars, or stops immediately if the car is about to crush into another car or obstacle in the way, all of these decisions are made by the processors in few parts of seconds without any sort of delay, so the processors, sensors and cameras must be highly efficient to assure zero accidents. So, we could say that self-driving trucks don’t need any human interfere during driving.

The benefits self-driving trucks provide

The new technology provides a lot of benefits if it’s applied in the streets such as:

     ·       Much lower accident ratios are related to self-driving trucks than the normal cars driven by humans, which helps reducing the number of car accidents, and save so many lives, as car accidents takes 1.5 million soul every year, about a person every 24 seconds!

     ·       Avoid the need to pay the huge amounts of money which is paid to the insurance companies or the mechanics, as the manufacturers of the self-driving trucks would hold the full responsibility of their product, which include maintenance, repairs and insurance.

     ·       Saves the costs required to employ drivers to drive trucks, as the owners of big companies could save a lot of money by employing fewer drivers besides keeping their deliveries safe.

Flaws of self-driving trucks

This new technology have many disadvantages such as:

       ·       It can’t do the human tasks such as delivering packages and such things, as they will need human help to complete the job, so at the end, many companies will need to have human employment.

      ·       What if an error occurred while driving what will happen? In case of human driving there will be penalties on him but if a computer is driving who will be punished?

       ·       Self-driving trucks are most efficient when the roads are paved and colored with white or yellow colors to clarify the road, but when the roads are not paved or the lines aren’t clear to the cameras or sensors there would be a problem during the driving process.

      ·       When the weather is clear there would be no problem while driving but what would happen when it’s raining heavily or snowing or hitting by thunder storms? Definitely there would be a huge problem.

 These points which we have clarified make us wonder if self-driving trucks are really a good idea!+