(sensor beeping)
(driver reacting)
(horn honking)
- We hear a lot about self-driving technology,
pretty much all the time these days,
especially at shows like CES.
But one place where that technology might actually
make a pretty big impact sooner than later, is in trucking.
Trucks travel millions of miles every year
and carry most of our consumer goods,
pretty much everything you have in your home.
But they can be dangerous to drive and they can be
a risk to other people on the road.
So, getting a little bit of that self-driving technology
into a truck like this could actually go a really long way.
(techno music)
Almost 4 years ago, Daimler, the parent company
of Mercedes-Benz, made a pretty a pretty big claim.
They said they were working on a self-driving big rig,
and they pulled out all the stops for the big reveal.
They brought the truck out on top of the Hoover Dam,
and then they brought us all here
to the Las Vegas Motor Speedway to give us all rides
in the truck and let us see what it would be like
to be inside a self-driving big rig.
Those trucks were just prototypes, but they were something
of a break-through at the time.
They were the first vehicles to get
special autonomous-vehicle license plates
from the state of Nevada, which has become
a pretty big hotbed for testing self-driving cars.
This week at CES, we're starting to see that dream
from 2015 turn into, kind of, a reality.
Daimler's showing off the final production version
of those prototype-trucks, and it's announcing
a whole bunch of news around this program as well.
It's committing 500 million euros to the program,
hiring hundreds of workers, and it's promising
that these trucks will go into manufacturing this summer,
and be on the road later this year.
Now to get a full understanding of what this new technology
was really like and how different it is, Daimler actually
let me drive one of the Cascadia trucks that doesn't
have any of this technology in it.
- Maybe with your thumb, yeah.
There you go.
And now, you're ready to go.
- [Sean] Alright.
I found the one person at CES who let me drive something
this year, and it happens to be a gigantic truck (laughs).
So, this big boy is the Daimler Cascadia, the newest version
of Daimler's, essentially, most popular truck.
And we're out here at CES this year to see what Daimler's
doing with self-driving technology in these trucks.
This is not the version that has that tech inside of it,
but this is, sort of, the latest and greatest before
we get into the more advanced Cascadia that Daimler's
showing off this week.
And I've never driven a truck like this before
and, I don't know, I got the hang of it pretty quick.
But I'm definately really interested to see
how much different it feels being inside one of these things
when you add all of these self-driving sensors.
There are thousands of fatal crashes every year
involving big rigs on U.S. roads, and pretty much
all of them have something to do with human error.
So, getting any kind of self-driving trucks into
the trucks to help out the driver,
is always gonna be a pretty big deal.
More than that, driving a truck is just a grueling job.
You're spending 10, 12 hours on the road at a time
and doing that day after day after day, driving along
what can be really monotonous highways.
Drivers get easily distracted, so putting something
in the truck that can help out a driver and make
that experience, not only easier on them, but safer
for everyone around them, is also a really big step forward.
One of the most interesting things about
what Daimler's done here is that it's accomplishing
all of this with just a little bit of technology.
There's two radar sensors and one camera, and that's
what's making this whole thing possible.
That's a far cry from something like Tesla,
which has cameras, and radars, and ultrasonics
all around the car.
Some of the specific things this truck can do
using that technology is it will alert the driver if there's
a pedestrian, or a bicyclist, or somebody along side
the right side of the truck.
- [Driver] My following distance is set
for about 3.6 seconds, so it's gonna wait for him
to get about 3.6 seconds ahead of us and then it's gonna
keep that pace as much as we possibly can with that car.
And now I don't have hands on the steering wheel,
it's basically steering.
After about 15 to 20 seconds, I get the caution popup
that says, "Put your hands back on the wheel."
If I don't do it, it's going to escalate
into a red guard here in a minute, and I'm gonna start
(sensor beeping) to get an audible chime.
It's gonna get more and more annoying
(sensor beeping) for about 60 seconds.
- [Sean] And what would reset that, just giving a little bit
of a tug to the wheel? - [Driver] Yeah,
If I just give a little bit of torque on the steering.
- If you follow the advancements that have been happening
in self-driving technology in the automotive space,
a lot of this might now sound very new to you, but the fact
that they're coming to trucks is pretty big deal.
These trucks are out on the road clocking million of miles,
and one of the biggest problems is making sure that a driver
whose doing a really long shift is staying aware,
able to drive safely, and able to keep the people
around themselves safe as well.
And so, this truck has been outfitted with a bunch
of different features that will make sure that that happens.
One thing that's really interesting about
what Daimler unveiled today, is that it's really not all
that far off from what we saw almost four years ago.
The technology is just a slight iteration and
a slight refinement over those prototype-trucks.
And that actually matches what we're starting to see
in the industry at large.
We've all these wild promises about self-driving cars
over the last couple years, especially here at CES.
And none of that has really come to fruition.
There was, sort of, an over-promising happening for awhile
and now everybody's kind of coming back down to reality.
And Daimler is right there with everybody else.
They spent a lot of today talking about
how they're gonna take a more measured path
going forward with this stuff.
And while it's nice to think about a future where
these trucks might be able to drive themselves
and completely reduce crashes, today was all about
keeping drivers in the truck, and also using
that technology to help those drivers out as opposed
to just replacing them completely.
That doesn't mean that that won't be where
this technology ends up five, 10, 20, or 30 years
down the road, but it gives us a better picture of what
the transition will look like, and how the world
will actually change as this technology matures
in the coming years.
Thanks everybody for watching.
For more self-driving trucks, self-driving cars,
and all the other crazy technology we're seeing here
this week at CES 2019, got to theverge.com.
And make sure you go to YouTube.com/theverge
and click subscribe.
Thanks for watching.