Policy implications of truck platooning and electrification

Trucks in North America account for more than 23% of the transportation sector's greenhouse gas emissions. Truck platooning and truck electrification are potential technologies for reducing emissions and operating cost. However, adoption uncertainties result in speculations about their potential impact. Traditional modeling techniques to inform policymaking use large datasets, trained professionals to calibrate complex software, and take hours to run a single scenario. This paper provides a closed-form model that rapidly calculates trends of the potential national petroleum consumption reduction for a range of technology adoption scenarios. The primary finding is that truck electrification would have a substantially larger impact on fuel consumption reduction than platooning. The limitations of platoonable miles create an upper bound in benefits. When calibrated for the base year fuel-efficiency, the model shows that petroleum consumption reduction would be less than 4% at full adoption of platooning. The electrification of single unit trucks results in more than a 13-fold reduction of national petroleum consumption relative to platooning. However, without the electrification of combination unit trucks, petroleum consumption will eventually begin to increase again. Therefore, policies to encourage the reduction of greenhouse gas emissions should not overlook incentives to electrify combination unit trucks.