With awe-inspiring videos filling news outlets, truck platooning is something of a media darling right now—even though it’s been around in various forms for decades.
Most of the earlier takes revolved around the Intelligent Transportation System initiatives that sprang up in the 1980s. But for me, platooning began evolving from theory to reality with a European project in 2010 called
SARTRE, a tortured acronym I still hold was a sly joke by its developers referring to the Existentialist Jean-Paul Sartre’s most famous work, the play No Exit. That project demonstrated the state of platooning technology by having a tractor-trailer lead a platoon of three automobiles down a highway in Spain.
Late last year, a California company called Peloton Technologies demonstrated its platooning technology over the road in Nevada. Founded by Stanford University engineers who have worked on, among other projects, Tesla’s electric car powertrain, the company has received investment support from major trucking industry players including Volvo, Denso, and UPS. That pedigree bodes well for Peloton’s eventual success in creating a marketable platooning technology in the not-too-distant future.
Back in Europe, truck platooning really began to heat up this spring. In March, Daimler Trucks held a splashy press event to show off Highway Pilot Connect on a public highway. Incorporating the company’s autonomous truck technology, its version allows a three-truck formation to navigate midday traffic not only in a platoon, but in semi-autonomous operation with drivers neither steering nor controlling the brakes and throttles.
Then last month, the Dutch government organized the 2016 European Truck Platooning Challenge.
With DAF, Daimler, Iveco, Man, Scania, and Volvo each providing multi-tractor platoons, the six groups crossed six countries in total as they all made their way to Rotterdam and the waiting cameras. Here, the point wasn’t just to demonstrate the capability of the technology but to also highlight the ability of various government and roadway authorities to provide the support needed to cross national boundaries and navigate different highway networks.
So enthusiasm for truck platooning is running high at the moment, but there is at least one skeptic out there—and given his credentials in this area, that skepticism carries some weight. Alain Kornhauser might be a familiar name to you; he created the truck mapping and routing software company ALK Technologies. But that was just a part-time job.
Kornhauser is also a professor of operations engineering and director of the transportation program at Princeton University. He once led a group of undergraduates through a successful entry in the DARPA autonomous vehicle challenge, doing better than most of the other entrants who were drawing on graduate engineering programs and millions of research dollars from the major automakers. In short, you’d be hard-pressed to find anyone more knowledgeable about the issues surrounding platooning.
“I still don’t get it,” he says in response to the Dutch event, calling it little more than a photo-op.
Since potential platoon members have to be traveling the same routes at the same time and fitted with the same technology, he sees the potential benefits as “infinitesimal” and the downside of “freaking out” others on the roadways large. “I still contend that pushing platooning at such an early stage when we haven’t even begun to promote and to capture the benefits of the underlying intelligent cruise control… is a substantive liability,” Kornhauser says.
Sometimes we can use a bit of skepticism before jumping on a flashy new bandwagon.
