Driverless Trucks in the Oil Sands

Falling oil prices and revenue have gotten oil sands producers interested in driver-less trucks. Suncor is buying 175 of them. The layoffs will be direct.

“It’s not fantasy,” Suncor’s chief financial officer Alister Cowan told investors at an RBC Capital Markets conference in New York last week. He said the company is working to replace its fleet of heavy haulers with automated trucks “by the end of the decade.”

“That will take 800 people off our site,” Cowan said of the trucks. “At an average (salary) of $200,000 per person, you can see the savings we’re going to get from an operations perspective.”

Kudos to Suncor for being honest and not trying to sugarcoat anything.