Thus far, most stories about autonomous vehicles have been about self-driving cars mean for the regular consumer. Although there have been some nifty tidbits such as powerslide parallel parking to the more practical autopilot already in Teslas, not many of these applications are game changers to industry.

Europe, however, just succeeded with an autonomous trucking demonstration using vehicles from six different manufacturers together driving in tight formations, over thousands of kilometers, and crossing four borders. The benefits of this demonstration include two mammoth reductions in costs – fuel efficiency goes waaaaay up when vehicles can draft and more vehicles can operate driverless eliminating human jobs (pay, health insurance, retirement, other benefits, etc). This current batch of trucks still had a human on board for emergency situations … but that may not be quite so relevant in the future as statistics are already showing accidents with driverless vehicles tend to be the human’s fault.