Colorado to get autonomous crash trucks

Self-driving trucks take a job that nobody wants

In Colorado, USA, road crews who may be repairing roads, painting lines, or cutting roadside grass are shadowed by trucks that are designed to take the impact of reckless or speeding drivers.

The trucks have a big honeycomb rear bumper that is designed to take an impact of a car travelling at up to 120km/h and thus protect the workers in front. The trouble is, some poor driver has to drive the crash truck.

Enter the new world of autonomous trucks. Recently, the road transport industry has been bemoaning the fact that autonomous trucks are going to take jobs from hard-working drivers, but now autonomous trucks are going to take the job of the crash truck driver – the one job that no-one wants.

Between the years 2000 and 2014, there were 21,898 crashes and 171 fatalities in work zones in Colorado.

"People talk about automation and will this displace workers. Here's a case where I think everyone will agree we want to get workers out of these trucks," said Shailen Bhatt, the executive director of the Colorado Department of Transportation.

The new autonomous trucks are built by Kratsos Defense, a company that builds autonomous trucks for the US Defence forces. The new autonomous trucks will cost around $300,000 or twice as much as a regular crash truck.

The way it works is that the autonomous truck follows a normal truck driven by a person – no doubt the person who used to drive the crash truck. All the autonomous truck has to do is follow the lead truck and absorb any impacts from behind as it shadows along.

The hope is that if this initial test in Colorado proves successful, the state will purchase more of these trucks. And so far, Bhatt said, things seem to be going well.

Colorado to get autonomous crash trucks

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