FedEx Freight CEO John Smith said self-driving tractor-trailers can already complete highway freight runs with almost no human intervention, but the regulatory framework needed to remove safety drivers from the cab remains years away. Smith made the remarks in an interview with the Wall Street Journal published Sunday, shortly after FedEx Freight began trading as a standalone company on the New York Stock Exchange.
FedEx Freight was spun off from FedEx and now operates independently as the largest less-than-truckload carrier in North America, combining multiple smaller shipments into single trailers. The Memphis, Tennessee-based company reports $8.7 billion in annual revenue.
Smith, who was named CEO of FedEx Freight last May after serving as chief operating officer of FedEx Ground operations in the United States and Canada, described the results of FedEx’s two-year autonomous truck testing program as striking. The company has been running retail freight loads on routes from Dallas to Houston and from Dallas to El Paso, with safety drivers seated behind the wheel throughout.
“These tractors are able to leave the yard, navigate from the yard to the interstate, run the interstate, go to the next facility. 99.9% of the time the driver never touches one thing,” Smith said. “Our belief is that the technology is there.”
Smith immediately qualified that assessment. “The regulatory piece is going to be the biggest hurdle,” he said. “It’s nowhere close to being where the general public will allow an 80,000-pound vehicle running 65 miles an hour with no human in the cab.”
He described the remaining challenge as primarily political rather than technical. “I think the work is going to be in the political arena from here forward,” Smith said.
Smith pointed to safety benefits that have already emerged from the autonomous testing program as evidence of its broader value, regardless of the regulatory timeline. Collision-avoidance systems, lane-departure warnings and rollover-stability controls developed through the autonomous program have been deployed across FedEx Freight’s conventional fleet. “It’s made all the other tractors safer,” Smith said.
On electrification, Smith said the company’s Class 8 tractor fleet — the heavy-duty trucks that haul freight on long-haul routes — cannot yet be served by battery-electric vehicles. “Right now, there is no solution in the business world for a Class 8 truck that needs to run 600 miles on a trip,” he said. The company is instead focused on compressed natural gas for its long-haul tractors, while using electric equipment for shorter-range vehicles such as forklifts and hostlers at its facilities.
FedEx Freight runs 1.3 billion miles annually, and fuel is one of its largest cost components. Smith said the company will continue to apply fuel surcharges to its contracts as fuel prices fluctuate.
The interview also touched on recent federal regulatory changes affecting the trucking industry, including enforcement of English-language proficiency rules for commercial drivers and other measures that reduce the pool of available drivers. Smith said those changes are tightening capacity in the truckload market, which he described as beneficial for the less-than-truckload sector. “When we see capacity go out of the truckload market, it actually helps the LTL market,” Smith said. He also noted that the number of trucking companies going out of business appears to have increased over the past three months.