Companies are stepping up right now and converting factories to make masks, respirators and other obvious needs, but where are the self-driving trucks. Now is the time to get them on the road.
One of the things that is most vulnerable in our lives is the food supply chain. What happens when truck drivers start getting sick or strike, because they don’t want to get sick? How do we get food to stores?
If there was ever a time to get them on the road and tested, it would be now. With almost all the states on stay at home orders that means that the roads are empty. Actually emptier than we’ve ever seen in our lives. The timing is perfect.
Times are tough now, and they are going to get a lot worse, but it will get better. Necessity is the mother of invention, and we need to invent some ways to help us get through this crisis.
We need to find ways to protect different industries, but more importantly we need to find ways to protect people.
Right now, self service lanes in grocery stores should be rolling. Take cashiers off the registers and let people ring up their own food and bag it themselves.
There are a lot of technologies and robotics that our culture has been resistant to, but now is the time to figure these things out. We need these things now, and we might need them for a while.
As long as the CDC is taking its sweet little time figuring out how to test people quickly, we could be dealing with this crisis for a very long time. It is not unreasonable to think that we’ll still be dealing with lockdowns through the rest of 2020.
Having self-driving trucks could really protect our drivers. Having automated systems that load and unload trucks, we can protect our warehouse workers. Without ingenuity, we are going to suffer a lot more than we need to.
Despite the massive challenges facing us all, we are living in a time of great opportunity. We need to take advantage of unique opportunities like no cars on the road. What better time to test self-driving trucks? We just need some smart people to figure it out. The rest of us stay at home, and do whatever we can to help stop the spread.
