Driverless Vehicles May Someday Transform the Trucking Industry, But Platooning Can Do That Today

While the promise of a future filled with self-driving vehicles gets tremendous attention, autonomous systems are very much a technology of the future.

But vehicle-to-vehicle communication that connects the acceleration and braking between two trucks, reducing fuel costs by a total of 7% while improving safety and reducing the possibility of accidents?  You’ll see that happen on the highways later this year.

Peloton Technology’s “platooning” platform is designed to help fleets of trucks address major challenges like safety, and fuel and and operational efficiency. (“Platooning” occurs when trucks drive in close proximity at a constant speed, which creates an aerodynamic advantage for both.)

Intel Capital made it possible for me to speak with co-founder and CEO Dr. Josh Switkes about how platooning will help transform the trucking industry – and dramatically improve highway safety.

In auto racing or cycling terms, like your company's name implies, platooning is like drafting. Even without data, the fuel savings are obvious… but it’s also actually safer.

You’re right. We’re also connecting to the cloud to get information to the trucks that ensures they can platoon safely. They get information about the road they’re traveling, the weather, traffic… say there’s traffic stopped ahead. There’s no sensor on board the vehicle for that, but the cloud can give that intelligence to the truck.

Truck-to-truck communication does enable them to draft as you describe, but the trucks are also safer as a result.  They’re much safer than a single truck out on the highway today. With the right systems in place, putting them closer actually makes them safer.

With that kind of data flow, trucks should be safer even when they’re not platooning.

That’s true. Access to information about potential hazards well in advance does make a single truck safer. But our goal is for them to platoon most of the time.

Beyond more general information, platooning also increases safety by allowing for nearly instantaneous reactions by the rear truck.

Take braking. In an emergency, the average person takes about one second to react and apply the brakes, and that’s a best-case scenario. Even a perfect sensor can only react to the motion of the vehicle ahead. With vehicle to vehicle communication in our platooning system, we react to the application of the brakes in the front truck. This means that in most cases we are applying the brakes in the rear truck before the front truck has started to actually slow down.

How do you make it safe to be so close?

Even the best radar and LIDAR (Light Detection and Ranging, a remote sensing method that uses a pulsed laser to measure distance) cannot achieve the kind of reaction we can. Although those systems detect speed changes much faster than a human can, they are still reacting to the slowing down of the leading vehicle.

With vehicle to vehicle communication, Peloton communicates the actions of the front truck, not just motion. When brakes are applied it generally takes about .3 seconds for a vehicle to start slowing down. With truck-to-truck communication we can slow the following truck immediately.

Add it all up and when the front truck brakes, the following truck will brake even before the front truck has started to slow down. It’s nearly synchronized. When you ride in the rear truck, it really does feel like synchronized braking.

When anti-lock brakes first came out, lots of people were skeptical. (Including me.) Has it been hard to get truck drivers to embrace this new technology?

Statistically, good truck drivers are safer per mile than the average driver. So yes, they have reason to be nervous the first time they platoon. They know that without a platoon system, it’s not safe to drive at a following distance of 40 to 50 feet.

But we put a tremendous amount of work into the system to make it smooth and predictable. When drivers see the distance stay constant, when drivers see how smoothly the system works…. they very quickly gain confidence in the system.

The first time we apply the brakes in the front truck and a following driver feels how simultaneous the braking is in the following truck, they say, “Now I get it.” They quickly understand the power of vehicle to vehicle communication.

If two trucks platooning is good… wouldn’t three or four trucks platooning be even better?

Yes, but we’re starting with just pairs of trucks. The goal is to make sure we’re interacting well with surrounding traffic. When people hear about platooning, they’re concerned about how they’ll interact with a long line of trucks.

If a car needs to cut in, we automatically detect that, alert the driver of the rear truck, and automatically increase the space between the trucks. It actually works really well. There are no issues interacting with surrounding traffic. But there is plenty of benefit to the fleets with two truck platooning, so we are starting there.

That’s the thing about technological advances. The reality of benefits comes first, but perception tends to lag. (Now no one questions the benefits of anti-lock brakes.)

Both are very important.

First, empirical safety is absolutely critical. We take safety very seriously. Most of our engineering efforts focus on safety. We want to help the trucking industry save fuel, but that starts with making a safe system.

Then, when we talk to people that are skeptical, once we explain the safety approach, once we explain how vehicle to vehicle communication works… they quickly get it. The problem is just when people are not familiar with what platooning really is.

So how do you roll this out? The system obviously works, but you still need plenty of platoon-ready trucks for companies to start to benefit from the efficiencies.

A number of fleets already run multiple trucks together. Companies like UPS and FedEx run multiple trucks from hub to hub. The same is true for major retailers and grocery chains; they already tend to have high density going from distribution centers to stores.

And some fleets run in pairs or larger groups as a matter of course.

Infra-fleet platooning is our first application. But trucking is an $800 billion-dollar industry, so while a huge chunk is intra-fleet, the majority is not.

That’s why our longer-term strategy is inter-operability across different truck types, different truck makers, different shippers… inter-operability will enable cross-fleet platooning. That’s key to addressing the entire industry.

In a way, it’s like satellite radio; once automakers started installing Sirius-ready radios in cars, satellite radio really took off.

Absolutely.

The first version of our product ships later this year. We’re calling it a retrofittable up-fit system. (“Up-fit” means you buy a new truck and include a dealer-installed option. Up-fits are installed before delivery. Retrofits are bolted on later.)

And we’re working with several major truck manufacturers to have our wiring harness installed in the factory, and then the hardware later. Or we can retrofit. And for 2019, we’re looking at complete factory installations.

Most of the companies we’re working with want to start with new trucks. While that might sound like limited deployment, since trucks last a really long time, typically a truck stays in a given fleet for 3 to 4 years. Then they sell them. That means, with major fleets especially, there’s a pretty rapid turnover in trucks, so it’s not a huge limitation if we only installed on new trucks.

But we will also provide retrofittable options.

If I run a trucking company, choosing your system comes down to a dollars and cents decision: An ROI based on efficiency and safety.

With automobile purchasers, the decision is largely emotional: The car you choose makes you feel good. While there are certainly individual owner-operators, the trucking industry is largely driven by end customers like fleets, and their decisions are totally analytical and numbers-based. They operate on 1 to 2% net margins, and fuel is 30% of their operating expenses.

If they can save 5 to 10% on fuel costs, it transforms their profit margins.

So yes, the fleets are excited, and because they drive large enterprise sales, the manufacturers listen closely to them, listen to the customers a lot. Even if you run a medium-size fleet that buys 1,000 trucks a year… that’s $140 million a year. You can get people’s attention really fast with those kinds of numbers.  

It’s an odd question, but I have to ask. The lead truck saves around 4.5% on fuel and the following truck saves 10%. I would always try to be the following truck.

Peloton decides (which is) the following truck. We put them in order based on their relative mass and resulting braking ability.

To ensure that the immediate reaction time is sufficient to avoid a collision, the rear truck must brake at least close to as well as the front truck. And that means we only let them platoon in the correct order. If you’re in the wrong order, the display tells you to switch.

Efficiency is great, but safety comes first.

What impact will the eventual roll-out of 5G have on platooning?

Connectivity in general is obviously important. Transferring data, having those data pipes, is definitely important: Cell connection to the cloud, using Wi-Fi to offload large amounts of data when the truck is stationary, then vehicle to vehicle for real-time control between the vehicles.

A large amount of our engineering work deals with what data we send from front to rear to allow control to be safe and efficient, to make that connection secure, and to make the connection to the cloud secure. We also put tremendous effort into determining what data we send to the cloud to determine with whom the truck should platoon, determining how we send that authorization down to the trucks… all of those things are proprietary and a major portion of our technology.

As for 5G, we’re excited about 5G, but we don’t need to wait for it. But it will only make our systems better.

Everything pre-5G has a lot of latency. So, 5G will provide two major areas of benefit: It can dramatically expand the data between the trucks, like video, sensor info, and increased data regarding the operation of each truck. The other interesting aspect of 5G is because it has the potential to be very low latency though cell towers, some of the things we currently do through vehicle to vehicle communication we could instead do through cellular towers.

All of that means we’re really excited about 5G.

One last issue: You’re putting trucks 40 to 50 feet apart. Is that an issue where government regulations are concerned?

The basic laws that apply are following-distance laws. In most states, those laws say you must maintain a “reasonable and prudent” following distance. Platooning changes that equation where following distances and human reaction times are concerned.

Overall, the states are extremely supportive of platooning. They know that trucking, for every state in this country and in most countries around world… trucking is the core of the economy. Trucks move almost everything. When you make trucking more efficient in your state, you attract business.

That’s true even without platooning: If you’re deciding where to open a business, trucking efficiency is a major factor. Add in the benefits of platooning, and the efficiency of trucking becomes even more of a factor.