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Driverless Lorry Trials

(31 Posts)
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Luckygirl Fri 11-Mar-16 08:55:49

How right you are about the trains railman - all this money going into the development of driverless lorries when it could have paid for improvements in the rail system.

I suspect that our GC will be travelling in driverless cars one day.

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Indinana Fri 11-Mar-16 08:55:48

Forgive me for being a bit dense here, but how does it save fuel by driving in groups? If one lorry uses X amount of fuel, then surely 10 lorries will use 10 x X confused

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Greyduster Fri 11-Mar-16 08:47:26

Sorry, downtoearth! A bit early for me yet!

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Greyduster Fri 11-Mar-16 08:46:33

Groups of how many? And would they not need a lane of their own? At the moment, if you overtake a lorry, you can slot yourself back into the next available gap once you've done so, but how many driverless lorries would you have to overtake before you could use the slow lane again? Like Alea, the thought frightens the life out of me - I can see all sorts of difficulties with it. The only good thing is it would stop them sitting side by side blocking two lanes, trying to overtake each other!

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downtoearth Fri 11-Mar-16 08:28:32

The thought of a driverless lorry/ies scares the pants off me,think of the carnage if all where to go wrong.

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railman Thu 10-Mar-16 11:37:58

A few days ago, the BBC covered the Dept. Of Transport planned trial of driverless lorries travelling in "groups" on the M6 in Cumbria later in 2016.

The Government made the following statement: The technology enables vehicles to move in a group, using less fuel, it said.

It may be just me, but we developed this technology in the UK many years ago - we called it a train! Surely it would be much better if we took these long-haul lorries off the roads, and invested in the inter-modal services planned in the 1990s, with distribution centres near major population centres.

We could save more fuel, and reduce pollution - if that's the only reason - that way surely.

Just because you have the technology doesn't mean it's either good or useful to deploy it in this way.

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