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Opinion: Future direction questions

Tech change is in abundance but some assumptions may need reassessment

 

Who knew the humble gadgets event would prove a thorn in the side of traditional freight transport carnivals? Well, perhaps they haven’t yet but, as ATN has reported, the US’s Mid-West Truck Show is now a shadow of its former self and Australia struggles to manage more than the continually estimable Brisbane Truck Show, when once it could boast two others.

This in the world’s most hotly contested truck market, albeit a modest one numbers-wise.

Back in the States, both Paccar and Daimler were keen to burnish their IT credentials at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES), launching new models at the cutting edge of zero-emission and automation technologies. And they weren’t the only vehicle manufacturers needing to be seen there.

Quite a few carmakers were there, including ZF, fresh from Hannover with its e.Go Mover that looks so awfully like Toyota’s e-Palette Concept Vehicle and it may well have the same attributes.

Toyota used last year’s CES to unveil the e-Palette, an automated platform with the flexibility to transport freight or people, and that experience may well have informed discussions with Kenworth on CES attendance for its hydrogen fuel cell electric Kenworth T680.

After all, truckmaking and, indeed, a lot of transport and logistics, is a technology game, with the emphasis increasingly on IT. And if a firm is to attract the best and brightest that it can, such exposure is priceless. How else are talented new-school Tesla Generation-types to know about such old-school pursuits?

There may be a certain ignorance but it’s not as if they actually won’t care – especially as some of the shine has rubbed off the disruptors, with the likes of Otto’s self-driving tilt assuming places reserved for industry artefacts.


Read the previous column looking ahead to 2019, here


Speaking of the pivot of history, spare a thought for the concept of platooning.

Daimler’s intervention at the CES should have sent a shudder through those of a futuristic bent, not least those still in the hunt.

Even as European ‘Truck of the Year’ manufacturer Ford Otosan linked with Austria’s AVL to get amongst it, Daimler North America’s somewhat cursory rejection of platooning as not being worth the effort could yet be chilling. Especially if the drawbacks it has discovered are being replicated elsewhere.

Still, the announcement raised more questions than the details cover. It’s all very well having all these SAE level 4 cabs by 2030 but if no one wants to be in them, who is going to warm their seats?

Wasn’t that part of the attraction of platooning, eventually, in the first place?

The other issue that may yet be a pebble in the boot of progress is how the advances in battery technology are tracking.

The question here is whether hydrogen fuel cells will end up the VHS of truck propulsion, be beaten into Beta by lithium ion batteries or even somehow find a happy coexistence.

The present wisdom is that advances in battery technology have been almost exponential. The hope for those seeking to make exhaust stacks another trucking artefact is that they will continue to be. But there is a suspicion that physics may yet stand in the way.

The Holy Grail is said to be the fast-charging solid state battery – time being money and those minutes more than it takes to fill a diesel tank being cash down the drain – with longer range. 

But it isn’t with us yet. And if the strain on materials involved is too much, new ones or workarounds will need to be found and that takes time. One, perhaps, for the 2030s.

 

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