The so-called Internet of Things has reached the trucking business:
“It used to be, in our industry, for us to find out what happened with a driver and with a vehicle we had to wait for them to come back to the office,” Brian Balius, Saia VP of transportation, said in an interview. “Now we can see these things happening all day long — as they occur.” In its first year, the program led to a 6% increase in fuel efficiency, which translated to $15 million in savings for Saia. The company said it paid for itself.
Rail cars have been electronically tracked since the early 1990s.
Railroads have also been controlling switches and signals remotely, and observing train progress via track occupancy remotely, since the early 1930s.
The government has been collecting stream-height data and aviation weather data and making it available on the Internet for quite a few years.
A lot of the gee-whiz stuff about the “Internet of Things” fails to consider just how far the remote monitoring and control of physical devices has already progressed.
I think some of the greatest potential is for very cheap sensors that can be added to common machines to predict failure before it happens. For example, I recently had a basement sump pump fail, with unpleasant results. It would have ben nice if the incipient failure had been pre-announced.
It’s only a matter of time before all trucking is automated anyway. With research into self-driving cars continuing (I think Nissan has one out now that can parallel park automatically, and Google is working on automating the roads), living drivers will end up being an actual detriment at some point. If the highway drive can be automated you really only need a driver at the beginning and end of the journey to help with getting the truck hitched up. And that one parking driver can handle a lot more shipments. Efficiency gains abound.
It turns out my speculation above is already starting to be surpassed by reality.