August 4, 2023
To start with, there is the idea of autonomous driving vehicles. Some see the idea as absurd, at least on a large scale, given the ever-changing conditions we face as we drive. Can sensors recognize every danger, and will a computer make the correct decision to deal with a massive pothole, a child running into the street, or a patch of black ice? The response to that concern is that human drivers themselves don’t do a particularly good job behind the wheel, which accounts for so many deaths on our highways and countless accidents which keep fleets of tow trucks busy.
In some situations, autonomous vehicles, once fine-tuned, will be better. The computer won’t get behind the wheel intoxicated and won’t fall asleep after a long day. Conversely, there will be times a human driver would likely do better. The bottom line in my mind, though, is autonomous vehicles are a thing and, a decade from now, will be in broader use.
Something of more interest to farmers and to Western Canada is what fuel will be powering our vehicles. In Saskatchewan and Alberta, many are still going to rally to the cause of oil, and given the wealth of big oil companies to lobby, gasoline and diesel are going to be around for far longer than a decade. But, there is a government push, fuelled at least in part by a broader consumer demand than you find from people on the Prairies, to move away from fossil fuels.
Farmers aren’t totally opposed to that idea since blending renewable fuel into gasoline and diesel can be one way to achieve a reduction. Ethanol from grain and canola-based bio-diesel can be a huge boon as an alternate market for farmers, although it does come with a caveat of worrying whether grain for cars is a good thing when too many still starve in this world. There are also those who see electricity as the way to leave fossil fuels to the history books. Like much of the likely changes to what we drive, electric vehicles have holes to patch, from sources of resources such as lithium, the environmental impact of disposing of old cars/batteries, how far a battery charge takes you, and can the power grid deal with hundreds of thousands of electric cars charging? But think back ten years, and electric cars were pretty much the stuff of science fiction, and today most dealerships have them in their lots.
Imagine where ten more years could take the technology, and might farming have a role to play in what will be a decidedly different vehicular future.
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Disclaimer: opinions expressed are those of the writer.
