It’s not easy for driverless cars to navigate tiny side streets that are barely mapped. Autos will have to communicate with one another, sharing information about unplanned detours and such. But that’s something corporate trucking need not worry about, its vehicles transporting via highways. As Scott Santens points out at Quartz, many of the nearly nine million workers in the sector could be unemployed as soon as it’s legally allowed. The technology is already there. An excerpt:

Any realistic time horizon for self-driving trucks needs to look at horizons for cars and shift those even further towards the present. Trucks only need to be self-driven on highways. They do not need warehouse-to-store autonomy to be disruptive. City-to-city is sufficient. At the same time, trucks are almost entirely corporate driven. There are market forces above and beyond private cars operating for trucks. If there are savings to be found in eliminating truckers from drivers seats—which there are—these savings will be sought. It’s actually really easy to find these savings right now.

Wirelessly linked truck platoons are as simple as having a human driver drive a truck, with multiple trucks without drivers following closely behind. This not only saves on gas money (7% for only two trucks together), but can immediately eliminate half of all truckers if, for example, two-truck convoys became the norm. There’s no real technical obstacles to this option. It’s a very simple use of present technology.

Basically, the only real barrier to the immediate adoption of self-driven trucks is purely legal in nature, not technical or economic. With self-driving vehicles currently only road legal in a few states, many more states need to follow suit unless autonomous vehicles are made legal at the national level. And Sergey Brin of Google has estimated this could happen as soon as 2017. Therefore…

The answer to the big question of “When?” for self-driving trucks is that they can essentially hit our economy at any time.•