Have you ever finished watching a sci-fi movie and thought “Hey, could a self-driving tow truck operate on it’s own without a human?” Because, wouldn’t it be cool if a robot tow truck arrived and beeped like R2D2 before hitching up your car and towing it away? I think that would be cool. But is it possible? And if it is possible in the near future, is it practical. These are the questions I want to answer today.
Electric tow trucks are already on the horizon, and so are self-driving trucks. But what about a self-driving electric tow truck? That’s something completely different! It wouldn’t be a big deal to have an autonomous mail delivery truck, because delivering mail typically isn’t an emergency service. But tow truck operators do more than just tow your car. When responding to collisions, they must stay wary of road hazards, and make impactful moral decisions like should they call an ambulance for someone even if they ask you not to. Therefore, the first concern with having autonomous tow trucks for me is that the AI inside the truck might do fine with hitching up your vehicle and towing it, but when it comes to the hard ethical decisions that a tow truck operator must make the AI might not do so well.
An example would be this: In order to tow your car out of a ditch the AI tow truck must rev the gas to get tire grip in the mud which results in spraying mud all over the side of a nearby house. The AI tow truck might not even know that it’s spraying mud all over the place. A human would step out of the vehicle and assess the situation with reason, whereas a tow truck powered by AI might have some damaging and dangerous limitations in using reason to make rash decisions.
What is cool to consider though is that if a government was going to eventually replace even their police, ambulance drivers and firefighters with fleets of robots, then they might want to practice by starting with something like tow trucks first. So in another sense, if we do see autonomous tow trucks we can expect to see automatous firetrucks, ambulances and police vehicles in the future too!
With todays technology it’s certainly possible to make an autonomous tow truck. A humanoid robot could even sit in the cab when it’s needed for mechanical tasks. But it wouldn’t be practical because the expenses would be outrages and towing companies wouldn’t be able to make a profit. To understand this better, I asked a real tow truck Victoria BC company about this, asked them that, if it was free, would they adopt the first autonomous tow truck into their company? Their answer shed a ton of light on my current opinion.
They basically said that they’d feel sorry for whichever towing company was the first to experiment with AI tow trucks. Eventually, sure, they saw how such technology could make a towing company a lot easier to operate. But to begin with it would make their job a lot harder. Because the tow truck business model has been around for nearly a century, it’s pretty straightforward. People who drive tow trucks like their lifestyle and chose this business for a reason. They don’t want to have their job taken away by a robot. When they get to work every day, they know what to do. By inviting a new complex machine into the equation it wouldn’t make their lives easier. Whoever the first automatous tow truck company is, they theorized that the first few years would be a headache full of hard days. The automatous tow trucks could get stuck during off road winch outs like a robot vacuum on a rug. They imagined that more often than not they’d be called out for a human to ironically tow the AI tow truck out of a hole. From the AI tow truck accidently scratching other vehicles to it it having problems with quick roadside repairs and hooking up the winch properly, not to mention double checking safety precautions, there are so many things that could go wrong. The technology, in other words, would need to be experimented with by a company willing to try it for the first time before it could be used profitably and adopted by other companies. I thought that answer was really thoughtful and I now share the same opinion.
So now you know it would be possible to have autonomous tow trucks, but it definitely wouldn’t be practical. Thanks for reading!