(Otto's self-driving truck.Otto)
Self-driving cars are coming.
Tesla is aiming to have a fully driverless car ready by 2018, and Uber recently kicked off a pilot in Pittsburgh where select users can hail a ride in a self-driving car. And many other companies have plans to roll out some form of self-driving cars by 2020.
But chances are, you're more likely to see a driverless truck in practice before a self-driving car.
There's two reasons for this, the first being the tech itself.
It's a lot easier to build autonomous tech for highway driving than city maneuvering. On highways, there are fewer obstacles for the vehicles to worry about. Cities are a mess of pedestrians, cars, potholes, traffic cones — you get the point. All of those obstacles mean driverless cars have a lot to keep track of, and it can be easy to miss something.
We've already seen real world examples of this playing out. Uber's self-driving cars still need a safety driver behind the wheel because urban driving is so difficult. There were actually several times the driver had to take over when we got a ride in one.
(A depiction of Tesla's Autopilot in use on a highway,Tesla)
But there are already vehicles on the road today that can handle highway driving with relative ease. Tesla's Autopilot comes with the ability to merge on and off highways, detect when another car is entering your lane, and drive in highway traffic.
It's not just Tesla, either. Most cars today come with semi-autonomous features for highway driving, like the Volvo XC90, which comes with Cruise Control and Pilot Assist so the car can drive itself even on traffic-heavy highways.
That's not to say vehicles are completely able to tackle highway driving on their own yet. Otto, a self-driving truck startup that Uber bought for an estimated $680 million, still needs someone behind the wheel in case something happens.
(YouTube/Otto)
But Business Insider's Biz Carson got a ride in an Otto truck and wrote that it handled the highway so well it "for the most part, felt normal — relaxing, even." There were no chimes indicating the need for a driver to take over during her ride as was the case with Uber's self-driving cars — but again, it's much easier to handle an open highway than a chaotic city.
But it's not just the tech itself — it also makes more economic sense to pursue driverless trucks.
The Center for Technology Innovation at Brookings put together a report noting that delivery vehicles and trucks are poised to see "quick adoption of autonomous vehicles" because e-commerce is booming. People are increasingly likely to order food and goods online with the promise of same-day delivery, which has served as a boon to the trucking industry.