Roland Berger: The future of trucking: Autonomous driving, electrification and digital connectivity are set to make smart logistics and up to 40 percent lower operating costs a reality Go back »
2018-09-13 | Beijing
Trucking is the leading mode of freight transportation in the world today. Some 70 percent of goods are shipped by road in Europe and the United States, with the figure in China topping 75 percent. And there will be no let-up in demand in the years to come. But transportation and logistics operators as well as the OEMs themselves already have to face up to significant changes as driverless trucks, electric motors, digitalization and an increasing shortage of drivers place the sector under growing pressure. The experts from Roland Berger put the various industry trends under the microscope in their latest study, Shifting up a gear – Automation, electrification and digitalization in the trucking industry.
"Even though trucking accounts for the bulk of freight transportation, most companies are still working with very inefficient processes and high costs within their vehicle fleets, which prevents them from fully realizing the potential they could be exploiting," said Stephan Keese, Partner at Roland Berger's Automotive Competence Center. "Plus there are growing driver shortages, particularly for long-haul routes across Europe and the US, and ever stricter emissions standards to contend with."
Companies seeking to master the challenges will be able to draw on developments in the fields of automated commercial vehicles, electrification and digitalization. The scale of the transformation will see logistics service providers and truck OEMs alike face many difficulties on the road ahead. The fragmented nature of the industry is an additional complicating factor, given that there is a small number of big freight forwarders with extensive fleets of trucks and a long tail of small companies running just a few vehicles. "Because of this situation in the industry, consolidation is inevitable and companies that fail to respond to the changes will find themselves driven out of the market," explained Walter Rentzsch, Roland Berger expert in the United States.
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Source: Roland Berger
