Although the full integration of self-driving cars is still many years away, it is not as far as people may believe. Autonomous vehicles are being tested more and more day by day, and companies are already projecting their effects. For instance, a new report revealed by Goldman Sachs states that self-driving cars and trucks could withdraw a total of 25,000 jobs per month or 300,000 per year in the United States.
Truck drivers are expected to experience the brunt of the effects from driverless technology. According to research conducted by Goldman Sachs, there were 4 million U.S. driver jobs in 2014, of which 3.1 million were truck driver jobs.
The report also estimates that semi and fully autonomous vehicle sales will consume about 20 percent of all car sale shares by 2030.
This new study comes at a time when autonomous technology is on the path toward becoming mainstream. Companies like Uber, Waymo and Tesla are hard at work, attempting to make self-driving vehicles common across U.S. roadways.
Uber is directly targeting the truck-driving market with its recent launch of Uber Freight, a new smartphone application that is designed to match trucking companies with loads to haul.
Jumping on the autonomous truck bandwagon, Elon Musk, the chief executive of Tesla, announced just last month that the electric car company is set to launch an electric semi-truck in September.
On a similar note, transportation and material movers are the fourth-largest employment group in the U.S., according to the data released by the Bureau of Labor Statistics in May 2016. With the rise of technological automation, these jobs are in grave danger as well.
Electric vehicles are set to make up around one percent of the entire trucking market by 2020, according to research conducted by the IHS Markit firm. Analysts also expect this number to grow by 10 percent in a little over a decade. Overseas, electric trucks are expected to make even more of a splash by consuming up to 10 percent of the markets in the European Union and Japan, and over 12 percent of the markets in China. However, there are still some doubters.
“The overall technology acceptance and cost barriers are expected to represent a constraint for many commercial trucking applications,” Tom de Vleesschauwer, a London-based trucking industry analyst at IHS Markit said. “Pure e-trucks, like Tesla proposes, will be incompatible with the required usage characteristics, barring any major breakthrough in battery and other related technology such as electric motors.”
In any case, due to the demanding nature of truck-driving jobs and the extra long commutes, the industry might be persuaded to switch over to autonomous technology sooner than later.
Terry D. Kramer of the UCLA Anderson School of Management believes the transition is bound to happen due to the decrease in risk of being involved in accidents and the increase in overall productivity.
“When you have an autonomous vehicle, it can go 24 hours a day,” Kramer said.