Nine years ago, Oxford scholars Carl Benedikt Frey and Michael Osborne published their famous study The Future of Employment.

47 percent of all jobs in the United States could be replaced by the progressive automation of numerous processes, it says.

Frey and Osborne list truck drivers as one of the most vulnerable occupational groups.

A research team from the University of Michigan has now calculated that certain factors could make up to 500,000 truck drivers redundant in the USA.

All long-distance drives were examined, which the authors assume to be at least 240 kilometers long.

In principle, 94 percent of these journeys can be automated.

"How many driver jobs actually disappear in a country," says Parth Vanishav, first author of the study, "depends on a number of factors.

How complex is the route to be driven?

What condition are the roads in?

Is the cost structure in a country such that the whole thing is worthwhile at all?” Vanishav's study is based on a model in which potentially all long-distance journeys between so-called “hubs” could be automated.

The complicated short distances from the junction near the motorway to the city center will continue to be taken over by human drivers.

According to the study, long journeys are very monotonous for drivers.

New jobs would also inevitably be created in the short-haul segment.

So is the proposed “hub” model a boon for the workforce?

With new jobs

The boom will start in 2030

Experts around the world see enormous potential.

"The leaders in the truck sector," says Maximilian Geißlinger, head of a research group on intelligent vehicles at the Technical University of Munich, "appear to be companies from the USA that have already completed initial test drives." Google subsidiary Waymo and start-up Torc Robotics to launch autonomous trucks within this decade.

Daimler is concerned with so-called Level 5 vehicles in which the driver no longer has to be in the car.

Level 4 means that a vehicle drives fully automatically, but is monitored by a human throughout the journey.

Building a fleet of Level 4 trucks is a declared goal in Germany.

In July 2021, the federal government passed a law that allows the use of autonomous vehicles on public roads, subject to human supervision.

The truck manufacturer MAN believes that it can take this development even further: the company announced last week that it intends to develop vehicles together with Knorr-Bremse, Leoni, Bosch, the Fraunhofer Society and the universities of Munich and Braunschweig by the middle of the decade , which enable driverless operation between logistics nodes.

In the future, MAN and its parent company Traton Group consider it conceivable that a large part of German truck traffic will be controlled autonomously, Andreas Kammel said on request.

In the long term, it's about replacing drivers

Kammel is working for Traton on a strategy for alternative drives and autonomous driving.

On the E4 motorway in Sweden, real transport processes would already be carried out with fully autonomous vehicles, albeit with a safety driver at the current time.

"In the long term, it's also about replacing the drivers," says Kammel, "but explicitly only on some of the most uncomfortable journeys, on which we are already experiencing the most acute lack of drivers today.

Especially on long-haul routes criss-crossing Europe.”