Scania expert talks autonomous

The transport industry is in for a shake-up as we’ve never seen it, and Alexander Mastrovito is at the forefront of it.

Mastrovito is the project leader for Scania’s deployment of autonomous trucks in Singapore and the architect of Scania’s Hong Kong Fleet Management Centre. The Centre is dedicated to promoting efficient and sustainable heavy-duty road transport.

Asked what he sees as the major impediments to things such as autonomous vehicles, Mastrovito said that contrary to popular opinion, it wasn’t laws that would stop the march to the future: “I think the lawmakers are being quite sensible.
“Because what they realise is that we’ve had all these years of pie-in-the-sky but unbridled enthusiasm about the technology and painting up scenarios about the future which were maybe not as grounded in the technology as they should have been. What we’re seeing right now is that we know more, we’ve worked with the technology and we know the future challenges.

“We see two different tracks here. One is for the passenger car industry and one is for the commercial industry, and now we can see deviation [between the two paths].

“The [autonomous] passenger vehicles, they can’t handle the most complex situations in the cities so they’re not that useful. But for commercial vehicles, the situation is quite different. Since we have such well-defined transport missions, we actually see a place for autonomous technology in the commercial vehicle space much more than with passenger vehicles.”

Mr Mastrovito said that while tests in the US with autonomous vehicles were successful, they were very expensive. “There’s no business case for that. In comparison, what we’re doing with our tests in Singapore and Finland that we’re doing right now, if we can’t create the technology which is commercially feasible, we’re not going to do it.

“We’re not trying to make a vehicle that is fully autonomous for city driving, but we’re trying to achieve an intermediate technology that will improve the economics of trucking while still having a reasonably high level of autonomy and handling reasonably complex environments.
“So how do we achieve that? We have auto follower platooning where the first truck is actually driven normally, and we have X-number of follower trucks. Which then are autonomous to a certain extent.

“That’s the way we can get around a lot of the difficulties [that] people are talking about.”
Asked if the follower trucks would need to manned for the entire journey, Mastrovito was emphatic: “Intermediate technology where the driver can take his eyes off the road and do something else and then take over if something goes wrong… that’s unrealistic because our attention span doesn’t work that way. We can’t switch tasks in a split second and still be able to be aware of what’s going on around us, but a way to get around this is to have a driver in the first truck who can take care of all these challenges that we see.

“And this is something that in certain areas where they have a vision and can see the benefits of this technology, they could be two or three years earlier in autonomous driving than the other guys.

“But eventually the autonomous trucks would be offered off the shelf. And that’s not too far away… maybe the first half of the 2020s.

“And I think that would have a big impact on Australian trucking.”