FIRESIDE CHAT TOPIC: Emerging technologies in transportation — autonomous is around the corner
DETAILS: How soon will autonomous trucks be on the highway? Why has freight transportation changed so much in the past few years — and is that change all because of the COVID-19 pandemic? Shanker discusses these questions and more with Danny Gomez, FreightWaves managing director of financial and emerging markets.
SPEAKER: Ravi Shanker, executive director and lead transportation and airlines analyst, Morgan Stanley
BIO: Shanker has been with Morgan Stanley for 17 years and is currently an executive director covering freight transportation and the airlines. He covered the North American automotive sector for 12 years before moving on to freight transportation and eventually the airline industry.
KEY QUOTES FROM SHANKER
“The playbook that the [transportation] industry has used for the two or three decades before now — you can just throw that out.”
“In December 2019, we expected 2020 to be the tightest truck market in history. This was before anyone had heard of the pandemic, and that was because of structural changes that were taking place in the trucking industry. … A lot of this is a function of structural change rather than a near-term temporary thing that is driven by the pandemic. When you layer on bigger trends on top of that, things like ESG [environmental, social and governance], things like demographics and labor shortage, we think that transportation as we know it will fundamentally change over the next decade.”
“Two of the biggest trends that we’re looking at are the automation of the trucking space … and the broad digitization of the supply chain.”
“Autonomous trucking is one of the few areas of disruption anywhere in the world or anywhere in this industry where regulation is actually ahead of the technology.”