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Autonomous Vehicles Have Ability to Transform Society, Panelists Say

It’s not just hands-free driving that self-guided cars may bring into reality. Autonomous vehicles could unleash new technological and economic development on a level not seen since the dawn of the space age.

“Self-driving cars represents the moonshot for artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning,” said U.S. Sen. Gary Peters, (D-Mich.), a top proponent of the AV Start Act, legislation that could help to encourage a more rapid deployment of self-driving cars. (The bill is in the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science and Transportation.)

“As it’s been described to me, from folks in Silicon Valley and others, when AVs can pilot through a city like Washington, D.C., using AI, that means AI is ready for prime time in every single industry in America. It will change everything in this country,” said Peters, speaking June 13 with officials from Securing America’s Future Energy, a Washington-based advocacy organization charged with reducing America’s dependency on oil and the growth of alternative fuel mobility.

Volvo, FedEx Team on Live Platooning in North Carolina

Volvo Trucks North America and FedEx Corp. demonstrated on June 27 a platooning system with three twin trucks on a stretch of Route 540 in North Carolina, one of 10 official test sites for driverless cars designated in 2017 by the U.S. Department of Transportation.

The three trucks traveled for 18 miles in the demonstration, moving in and out of traffic as vehicles cut between the platoon and using ramps to enter and exit the highway.

Professional truck drivers in Volvo VNL tractors were used in the demonstration, each pulling double 28-foot trailers. The tractors communicated using what Volvo calls Cooperative Adaptive Cruise Control, a wireless vehicle-to-vehicle communication technology.

Investors Bet on the Uber of Brazilian Trucking

Brazilian truckers still get much of their business off of handwritten placards.

The antiquated and inefficient system was ripe, low-hanging fruit to Federico Vega. While cycling from Patagonia to Brazil, he met truckers who complained of spending most of their time looking for freight, receiving low wages and dealing with disorganized transportation companies that sometimes reneged on payment.

So Vega built CargoX, an Uber-like enterprise that links truckers and companies requiring their services. It also guarantees payment and maximizes logistics so cargo holds don’t go empty.

Federico Vega, founder and chief executive officer of CargoX Transportes, speaks during the Milken Institute Global Conference in Beverly Hills, Calif., May 2, 2017. (Patrick T. Fallon/Bloomberg News)

“We have the chance to have a massive impact in Brazil,” Vega said in an interview. “We’re starting a revolution more than a company, getting top investors to explore this market.”

Some of those “top investors” Vega refers to include Goldman Sachs, its biggest backer, and George Soros, who holds a small stake. And the Uber comparison isn’t just talk.

Oscar Salazar, the ride-hailing unicorn’s founding chief technology officer, was an early CargoX investor. Its clients include Unilever NV and Ambev SA, and it has about 7,000 drivers registered. Ambev and Unilever declined to comment.

“CargoX showed impressive growth since it launched in 2016 and we believe that it has great potential to continue expanding,” Hillel Moerman, co-head of Goldman Sachs Private Capital Investing Group, said. “The business has solid proprietary technology infrastructure that gives them the opportunity to reduce the cost of moving freight while improving the level of service.” Soros Fund Management declined to comment.

Vega is tackling an industry that’s fractured and overbuilt, according to one advocacy group. It’s also disgruntled, if the recent country-crippling strike is any indication.

The Dallas freight market is leading the country

Last week our market analyst Zach Strickland wrote a piece called “Los Angeles freight market gets a wake up call off inflow from China” that correlated spiking outbound turndowns from the LA market with the surge in port activity in Los Angeles and Long Beach that occurs every May. Now we’re seeing data in SONAR suggesting that freight is working its way through the nation’s transportation network, and right on schedule, Dallas is heating up.

The ‘container freight working its way through the network’ thesis is supported by SONAR’s Trucks in Market heat map. Capacity has left southern California and is moving through a southern corridor across Texas and into the Southeast: San Diego is at 90% of its average trucks in market, while Ontario and Los Angeles have dropped to 91% and 92%, respectively. Meanwhile, Dallas is being crowded by 106% of its average trucks in market, Laredo is experiencing 110%, Houston is at 107%, Shreveport is bustling with 109% of its average trucks in market, and Texarkana is absolutely overflowing with 111% of its average trucks in market.

As Shipping Costs Soar, Supply Chains Get a Makeover

Retailers and manufacturers are taking stock of their transportation costs and exploring alternatives as a capacity crunch in freight is driving up prices and causing shipping delays.

A variety of companies, including food producer Hormel Foods Corp. and retailer Dollar General Corp., have reconfigured their supply chains, including building out their own truck fleets, reducing the frequency of pickups and deliveries, and shopping around for better rates.

Trucking And Rail

When consumer products companies, retailers, oil & gas drillers, manufacturers, and other companies complain that shipping goods within the US is confronting them with soaring costs, capacity constraints, and delays, they’re not making this up. Trucking companies and railroads – an infamously cyclical industry that suffered through the “transportation recession” from 2015 through much of 2016 – are jacking up their prices with gusto.

The total amount that shippers spent on freight by truck, rail, barge, and air is skyrocketing, according to the Cass Freight Expenditure Index, which tracks the amounts spent by shippers on all modes of transportation. This spending is a function of price and volume. In May, soaring prices and shipping volume pushed spending up by 17.3% compared to a year ago, the 8th double-digit year-over-year increase in a row:

“May’s 17.3% increase clearly signals that capacity is tight, demand is strong, and shippers are willing to pay up for services to get goods delivered in all major modes throughout the transportation industry,” the Cass report said.

And the rising price of fuel and the related fuel surcharges added to the amounts spent: the price of diesel was up 27% at the end of May from a year ago.

The Cass Truckload Linehaul Index, which tracks per-mile full-truckload pricing but does not include fuel or fuel surcharges and is not impacted by rising diesel prices, jumped 9.0% in May compared to a year ago, the largest year-over-year increase in the data going back to 2005. And “the strength is continuing to accelerate,” Cass said in its Linehaul report.

Diesel Price Drops Again to $3.244 a Gallon

The U.S. average retail price of diesel fuel fell 2.2 cents to $3.244 a gallon, the third week in a row of moderate declines, according to the weekly report June 18 from the U.S. Department of Energy’s Energy Information Administration. On June 11 a gallon of diesel averaged $3.266 a gallon nationally.

Diesel remains more expensive than a year ago, up 75.5 cents per gallon compared with the same period in 2017.

The average price of diesel also fell in all regions nationwide. It dropped 1.4 cents a gallon to $3.976 in California, but that state remains the most expensive place in the country to buy the fuel. Diesel in California has gone up $1.092 in the last year.

The Gulf Coast had the lowest price nationally at $3.016 a gallon, down 2.1 cents a gallon for the week but up 68.7 cents in the past year, EIA reported.

The U.S. average price of a gallon of regular gasoline at the pump fell 3.2 cents to $2.879, a rise of 56.1 cents from a year ago, EIA reported. Gasoline prices also fell in all regions of the country.

Going global and staying local

With globalisation businesses have opened themselves up to new areas of growth.

As UPS and other carriers work closely with different small and medium size enterprises, they understand that global brands can adopt a local and vice versa approach.

Understanding the balance of you industry

To understand the balance of local an global, companies need to focus on Industrial context and firms overall strategic direction. If we take the automotive market as an example, we can see that it is a force to be reckoned with, accounting for more than £71.6bn turnover and with 160 countries importing UK vehicles.

A company which has made clear inroads into this market has been Ubisense – a world-leader in Enterprise Location Intelligence solutions.

Not only have they improved decision making but they have also automated processes for many companies working in the automotive sector. Estimates from Ubisense have recently pointed to how around 4% of the world’s passenger vehicles are now built with an Ubisense solution.

Ubisense is a prime example of a company which understands its market. It has achieved a global presence, with 500 customers across 50 countries, and its service is underpinned by research and development through local specialist knowledge in Cambridge.

Collaboration is key

Companies benefit when there are a range of views brought forward to the table. When managers identify best practices and insights and distill this across the company, all employees gain access to a shared pool of knowledge.

Many businesses are established by a group of co-founders as genuine peers can help to challenge insights and support the business in equal measure. One founder for example may have in-depth global knowledge, whilst another has built up a career through specialising locally first.

Location is everything

Not all businesses are established in global metropolises like London. They can also tap into more regional locations like Cambridge where they can access infrastructure founded by generations of entrepreneurs. One of the world’s leading universities means that the city is global in its own right but its relatively small scale means that it can also be considered as a local community with a variety of local businesses.

Even locations like London are testament to local being global. Where a quarter of residents are foreign born, the metropolis is buoyed by a healthy cultural mix, with an employee base which is multi-dimensional and multi-disciplined.

Businesses are opening up to local and global needs and knowledge

Whilst globalisation has undoubtedly led to a more interconnected world, it can also lead to business change coming too hard and too fast. Finding the right balance between global and local could be the exact change that a company needs. As well as those factors listed above, businesses can also shift the company structure so that global players now work local. These tips can show the interplay between global and local forces and foster a culture of “change from within (and indeed) outside the organisation”.

How Drivers and Autonomous Trucks Could Work Together to Move Freight

The advent of automated driving technology is poised to transform the trucking industry in the years and decades to come, but it is clear that autonomous trucks will not be ready to handle all driving tasks and conditions anytime soon.

Instead, the developers of this technology are working to build a future where drivers and automation work hand in hand to transport freight more safely and efficiently.

Exactly how that combination of human labor and automated systems will take shape remains an open question, but a number of competing concepts have been proposed.

Several technology firms and startups hope to introduce fully autonomous trucks in the near future by limiting the scope of where they can operate, leaving much of the work to drivers in conventional vehicles.

Trump Says He’ll Quit NAFTA If New Deal Can’t Be Reached

U.S. President Donald Trump is renewing his threat to quit NAFTA, after his economic adviser earlier this week said he wouldn’t.

Trump, speaking at the White House before departing for the Group of Seven, again complained about trade with Canada and Mexico, the two other nations that make up the North American Free Trade Agreement with the United States.

“If we’re unable to make a deal we’ll terminate NAFTA,” Trump said. “With that being said, I think we’ll probably easily make a deal.”

NAFTA talks began in August but have slowed and now are on the back burner, with a key senator saying the window to pass a deal in the current Congress has closed.

White House Economic Adviser Larry Kudlow said earlier this week that Trump would prefer to negotiate NAFTA separately with each country but that “the president’s not going to leave NAFTA.”