Impacts of Large-Scale Driverless Truck Adoption on the Freight Transport System

Abstract

Driverless trucks could potentially lead to a significant reduction in road freight transport costs and thereby change the freight transport system. In this paper, a method to study the impacts of large-scale adoption of driverless trucks on transport systems is presented and applied to the Swedish freight transport system. An analysis of the impacts on transport patterns and system costs, considering all transport modes, is performed. The method is based on extending the application domain of the Swedish national freight transport model Samgods to two types of driverless truck scenarios. The first scenario represents a full adoption of driverless trucks that can operate the complete road network. The results show that there is an increase in road transport tonne-kilometers on Swedish territory by 22% and vehicle kilometers traveled by trucks increase by 35%, compared to a baseline scenario without driverless trucks. The annual total transport system costs decrease by 1.7 B€. In the second scenario, the current fleet of manually driven trucks is complemented by driverless trucks that can operate between logistics hubs, but not in complex traffic environments like urban areas due to a limited operational design domain. This may be an initial use-case for driverless trucks operating on public roads. In this scenario, road tonne-kilometers increase by 11%, truck vehicle kilometers increase by 15%, and annual total transport system costs decrease by 1.2 B€ compared to the baseline. For both scenarios, the impacts of driverless trucks vary significantly across commodity types and transport distances which suggest heterogeneity of benefits of automated driving between different types of freight flows. A sensitivity analysis is performed for the level of cost reduction of driverless trucks compared to manually driven trucks for both scenarios. For the second scenario, also which sections of the road network that driverless trucks can operate are varied. The magnitude of system impacts are for both scenarios highly dependent on the cost level of driverless trucks and it is crucial to enable driverless trucks for international, cross-border transport to achieve economic benefits on a system-level. Driverless trucks may also have significant societal costs due to potential infrastructure investments and from negative externalities such as increasing CO2 emissions and congestion. These are important topics for future research. Finally, the even more road-dominant transport system resulting from an introduction of driverless trucks strengthens the need to decarbonize road transport to meet non-negotiable climate targets.