Ladies and gentlemen, may I present to you modern technological progress:
Umm, yeah, I think we just reinvented trains.
For years, self-driving trucks have been seen as the wave of the future. Instead of having long-haul truckers, we'd just set the trucks on the road to make the deliveries on their own.
But that hasn't really worked. Part of the problem is the complexity of navigating the freeway system. Part of it is that companies want electric vehicles, which require massive batteries to haul an 18-wheeler only a few hundred miles.
But someone working on these trucks had the brilliant thought: "Why don't we put these trucks on some kind of track, off the highway, where they can travel together in sort of a train ..."
And, thus, we've invented the railroad system. This time without the conductor, I guess.
Platoons of driverless cargo trucks cruising across highways is one of those tempting technocrat ideas that doesn't look like it will pan out. As autonomous driving technology matured in the middle of the last decade, we saw trials of the concept, but human truck drivers do more than just throttle, steer, and brake, and they aren't likely to be replaced soon.
A better idea would be to shift some of that cargo to our underutilized railways — here, the idea of platooning is an old one, better known as a "train."
Parallel Systems hopes to do just that with its second-generation autonomous battery-electric freight railcar.
In actuality, it's an attempt to modernize the rail service. And if it means getting more of these 18-wheelers off the highways, I'm all for it.
Another thought: For decades, engineers have talked about electrifying roads - a concept that would allow energy to be transmitted to batteries inside cars so they never have to stop to recharge.
On a track, that concept would be a lot easier to design (get to work, engineers!).
While the plan is to have individual, autonomous train cars that can just be stacked on and off at different destinations, streamlining the process and massively reducing traffic, that's not the only advantage.
"When you're looking at a terminal, a traditional freight train is about three miles long, which means you need a place to park three miles of a rolling stock. You need a buffer of about 300 containers. You have trucks going back and forth. It's a big operation with a lot of real estate and a lot of cost. Our vehicles can interface like a semi truck to go directly where they need to go, load and unload you to get out of the way," Howard told me.
Individual train cars can leave the tracks and complete the deliveries. It's actually pretty inventive and useful technology.
Better than automated trucks, if you ask me!
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