Autonomous vehicles and freight traffic: towards better efficiency of road, rail or urban logistics?

Abstract The freight transport sector is a low profit and high competition business and therefore has less ability to invest in research and development in the field of autonomous vehicles (AV) than the private car industry. There are already different levels of automation technologies in the transport industry, but most of these are serving niche demands and answers have yet to be found about whether it would be worthwhile to industrialise these technologies. New innovations from different fields are constantly changing the freight traffic industry but these are less disruptive than on other markets. The aim of this article is to show the current state of development of freight traffic with regards to AVs and analyse which future directions of development might be viable. The level of automation is very different in the case of different transport modes and most probably the technology will favour road transport over other, less environmentally harmful traffic modes.