Truck Manufacturers Show Off Future of Trucking at CES 2024
Touting itself as the “most powerful tech event in the world”, CES took place in Las Vegas from January 7th to the 10th. All sorts of industries attend to show off the latest and greatest gadgets, but what we are interested in is the transportation industry, namely, the autonomous trucking and green trucking revolutions, both of which appeared at CES in spades.
Kodiak Makes a Strong Claim
How long until autonomous trucks start becoming normal on the road? According to Don Burnette, CEO and Founder of Kodiak Robotics, right now.
“It’s not some distant goal. It’s not some distant future,” he said. “It will be this year, which is really exciting.”
At CES, Kodiak announced its plans to start doing its first full-blown automation commercial trips on Interstate 45 between Dallas and Houston.
Even if highway travel proves to be flawless on Kodiak’s machines, with its 2.5 million miles of testing on America’s highways, it will still take many years of rigorous testing for autonomous trucks to replace the human driver on smaller roads, and as such we are not too worried about this technology completely upending the industry for the next few decades.
Nikola Shows Its Cells
Nikola Motor Corporation spent its time at CES showing off the Tre, a combination hydrogen and electric truck that attempts to combine the best features of the two alternative fuels, providing ride-along trips to select attendees.
Nikola says that the refueling time for the hybrid Tre is approximately 20 minutes for 500 miles in range, enough for a trucker to stop for lunch and use the restroom before getting back on the road.
Conclusion
It is exciting to see the leaps and bounds the technology in the trucking industry is making as newer companies emerge to upend industry leaders such as PACCAR and Daimler.
Regardless, both forms of technology still have quite a journey to travel before they become the norm: autonomous trucking is still susceptible to misidentifying street art as signage and the total number of zero-emission heavy-duty trucks currently used commercially in the United States is fewer than one thousand.
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