I was standing in an Arby's after fueling when a question about my beeping pup trailers led to one of the strangest claims I have heard on the road: terminals were supposedly testing self-driving trailers. My first question was simple. Did he mean self-driving trucks? No, the FedEx driver told me. He meant trailers. That presented an immediate mechanical problem. How does a trailer drive itself when it has no engine or transmission and is designed to be pulled by something that does?
How does a trailer drive itself when it has no engine or transmission and is designed to be pulled by something that does?
A beeping pup trailer started the strangest truck-stop claim
I normally haul containers from the rail yard between Kansas City and St. Louis, but that night I was pulling doubles. I stopped for fuel, left the truck running as instructed, pulled forward, and set the brakes. One of the pup trailers began beeping again. Some of those trailers do that while the truck is parked and supplying power, even if I turn off the lights. The company tells me not to shut down the truck because it might not restart, forcing them to send a tow truck. Mine has restarted when I have shut it off before, but the instruction is to leave it running, so that is what I do.
Another driver, from what sounded like Hirsch Truck Lines, heard the noise and asked whether it was my transmission. He had noticed that the beeping stopped when I pulled away from the fuel island, then resumed after I set the brakes. I told him it was one of the trailers. He had never encountered that before, which made sense. Equipment can make an alarming noise until someone familiar with it explains what is happening.
The scene became stranger because three men there were named Chris: the FedEx driver, the Arby's worker, and me. I called to the worker, and the FedEx driver turned around as though I knew him. That broke the ice. While we waited for food, we talked about FedEx loads, the equipment we hauled, and the beeping trailers outside. The FedEx driver had ordered a nine piece steak bites, a steak and potato bowl, something else, and two sliders. I had a chicken cheesesteak, which I later ate during the final 50 mile stretch to St. Louis.
During that ordinary truck-stop conversation, the FedEx driver said he had visited a terminal with a cordoned-off section. When he asked what was happening there, somebody supposedly told him they were experimenting with self-driving trailers. That was all I had to work with: no demonstration, no name for the equipment, no mechanic's explanation, and nothing I could verify. It was a story passed along beside an Arby's counter while our trucks idled outside.
He said trailer, but everything he described needed a truck
I asked again whether he meant self-driving trucks. I had heard about those. A self-driving trailer was new to me. He insisted that he meant trailers, then described a system in which the trailer would sit inside the dock while workers loaded it. It would then be placed or slid onto a trailer or chassis, programmed with its destination, sent down the road, and moved onto another chassis after reaching a terminal.
The longer he explained it, the harder it became to identify the equipment. Was the loaded object a trailer, a container, or something carried on a chassis? Those terms do not describe the same thing. If workers transfer the loaded unit from one chassis to another, what part is self-driving? If the chassis provides the movement, calling the cargo unit a self-driving trailer does not answer the question. If the trailer provides its own movement, where is the necessary equipment, and how does it work?
He described the process as a conveyor belt: load it, program it, send it to the next terminal, transfer it, and keep it moving. The description sounds tidy as long as it remains inside the dock and terminal. It skips the entire journey between them. A normal trailer is built to be pulled. It does not ordinarily have the engine or transmission required to drive itself down the road.
The claim went further. He said carriers expected these self-driving trailers to save billions and that Elon Musk would regret developing electric trucks because the trailers would make those trucks obsolete. I could not follow that leap. Before a machine makes a truck obsolete, somebody must identify what provides propulsion, steering, braking, power, and control. Repeating "self-driving trailer" does not provide those answers.
Before a machine makes a truck obsolete, somebody must identify what provides propulsion, steering, braking, power, and control.
The road does not behave like a programmed conveyor belt
Programming a destination is the easy part. The road between the dock and terminal is where the plan becomes difficult. I see drivers cross four lanes without warning. Cars move into spaces that do not exist. A neat terminal-to-terminal system assumes everyone around the unmanned unit behaves properly. That is not how traffic works out here.
Suppose one of these units becomes involved in a pileup after a car makes a bad move. Suppose the container or trailer strikes another vehicle and kills people. The carrier may have expected to save billions, but the company now faces lawsuits and settlements involving however many people were hurt. Taking away the driver does not eliminate responsibility for what the equipment does on a public road.
Taking away the driver does not eliminate responsibility for what the equipment does on a public road.
That is why a machine performing correctly under normal conditions does not impress me much. I saw a video of a self-driving rideshare car with a passenger in the back and nobody in front. The car reached an intersection, stopped at the stop sign, used its signal, waited for a large gap in traffic, and turned. Fine. It handled a stop sign and a clear opening.
The harder test begins when something breaks that clean sequence. What does the system do when a driver unexpectedly crosses its path, debris falls from another vehicle, or traffic ahead becomes a pileup? Can it distinguish a temporary obstruction from damage that makes the unit unsafe to move? The FedEx driver's conveyor-belt description never addressed those questions. It jumped from one terminal to the next as though the road between them were empty.
A blown tire exposes every missing piece in the story
Consider a common road failure. The unmanned unit is passing another vehicle when that vehicle has a tire blowout. The tread flies sideways and strikes the self-driving trailer hard enough to damage it or destroy one of its tires. Does the unit recognize the impact? Can it tell the difference between a noise against its side and damage that requires an immediate stop?
If the system detects the fault, it must pull over without causing another accident. It needs to activate its flashers and report that it requires road service. Nobody is aboard to walk around the unit, look underneath it, inspect the tires, or tell road service what happened. A remote warning might identify a fault, but the story I heard included no communication system or procedure for securing a disabled unmanned unit beside moving traffic.
A human mechanic would still need to arrive and make the repair. Once the work was finished, how would the mechanic release the unit? Would there be a button to confirm that the repair was complete and the vehicle was safe to move? Would the self-driving trailer then leave the shoulder and merge into traffic by itself? These are central parts of operating the equipment. It must detect the damage, stop safely, request help, undergo repairs, and return to traffic.
My mind went to Demolition Man with Sylvester Stallone and Wesley Snipes, where the tire could "auto inflate." Even that idea leaves a basic distinction unresolved. A flat tire might be aired up again. A tire blowout can mean that rubber or tread is gone. Air cannot replace missing material. The further I followed the idea, the more unanswered steps appeared. Programming the unit with a destination did not resolve any of them.
Air cannot replace missing material.
Self-driving trucks already raise a simpler question: why?
My Raw Chat co-host Dave Goldberg and I have discussed the more familiar claim that self-driving trucks will take truck-driving jobs. His answer is that it will not happen because those trucks still need an actual driver inside. That leaves a simpler question for me: if the carrier must still pay somebody to sit in the truck, what is the point?
I would also want to know how that driver gets paid. If the truck is supposedly doing the driving, does the person supervising it still earn mileage? Does the carrier use the system to justify paying less because the driver is sitting there instead of physically controlling every mile? I do not think I would take that job. The driver would still be present when equipment failed or traffic became unpredictable, but the company might consider the position less valuable.
The self-driving-trailer claim is stranger because it removes the cab and driver while leaving every mechanical and emergency question unanswered. I cannot say it is impossible because I did not see the cordoned-off area or the equipment inside it. But I cannot accept the story as told, either. The FedEx driver may have misunderstood what he saw. He may have repeated a loose explanation from somebody at the terminal. Somebody may even have been messing with him and given him a made-up story.
Until somebody clearly identifies the moving unit as a trailer, container, chassis, or truck, I am calling bullshit on this version. I want to give other truckers, possibly Dave and the Raw Chat group, the exact description: loaded inside the dock, placed on a chassis, programmed for a terminal, transferred to another chassis, and sent onward like a conveyor belt. If anybody else has heard "self-driving trailers" described that way, I want to know what piece of equipment was doing the driving.
