Truck platooning has long been pitched as one of the more achievable wins in commercial vehicle automation: link a convoy of trucks electronically, let them travel in tight, aerodynamically efficient formation, and capture meaningful fuel savings and road capacity gains without needing a fully driverless truck. For global logistics firms watching fuel costs and highway congestion climb together, the appeal is obvious.
But new commentary from South Africa’s road and transport authorities makes clear that translating the concept onto the N1, N3 and N4, the country’s three busiest freight corridors, is not simply a matter of installing the right software.
A Corridor Built for Freight Volume, Not Automation
The South African National Roads Agency (SANRAL) has floated the N1, N3 and N4 as the most plausible starting points for platooning, citing their freight volumes and strategic importance to the economy. But that endorsement comes heavily qualified. According to SANRAL’s media relations manager, Lwando Mahlasela, successful deployment would depend on a fundamentally more predictable and connected road environment: reliable communications, real time monitoring, clear lane markings, and infrastructure capable of supporting automated vehicle operations. None of that exists at scale on these corridors today, and SANRAL itself says further research, pilot testing and corridor specific analysis are needed before anything moves beyond concept.
Van Reenen’s Pass and the Problem of Terrain
The clearest physical obstacle sits on the N3 between Durban and Johannesburg, one of the continent’s most heavily trafficked freight arteries. Road Freight Association CEO Gavin Kelly points to steep gradients, Van Reenen’s Pass chief among them, as a serious complication for maintaining synchronised platoons. Heavily laden trucks climbing and descending steep grades don’t behave uniformly; a formation that holds together on flat highway can stretch, bunch or destabilise on a mountain pass, undermining the precise spacing that makes platooning efficient, and safe, in the first place.
Layered onto that is the corridor’s traffic mix. The N3 isn’t a controlled freight only route; it carries a dense blend of trucks, private vehicles and minibus taxis. Kelly notes that vehicles cutting into a platoon’s formation, a routine occurrence on South African highways, could disrupt the convoy and erode the efficiency gains platooning is meant to deliver.
The Security Dimension
Perhaps the most South Africa specific challenge is security. Platooning configurations that reduce the number of drivers, or eliminate them entirely in following vehicles, create a distinct vulnerability profile. Kelly warns that minimally staffed or unmanned following trucks could be exposed to hijackings, forced stops and roadside attacks, threats that are already a persistent cost to the country’s road freight sector. Toll plazas and other natural congestion points compound the risk: they’re precisely the kind of forced stop location where a platoon could be broken apart, whatever the traffic conditions look like elsewhere on the route.
Infrastructure Before Automation
The Council for Scientific and Industrial Research’s Mathetha Mokonyama frames the challenge in structural terms. South Africa’s road network, he argues, wasn’t designed with autonomous vehicle technology in mind, making it unrealistic to expect platooning to function well within the current operating environment. Tellingly, he singles out telecommunications as one of the easier problems to solve; the harder obstacle, in his view, is physical infrastructure design itself, which can’t be patched with a connectivity upgrade alone.
A Test Case Already Underway
None of this has stalled experimentation with automation adjacent freight technology more broadly. The Mzansi EV Truck Super Test, launched in Boksburg on 23 September, is sending two SANY electric trucks, a 35 ton 4×2 tractor and an 8 ton rigid, on a roughly 4,000km loop through Cape Town, Gqeberha, East London and Durban, fitted with GoMetro’s ZAPPP telematics logging data every second. It’s a different technology than platooning, but the same underlying question applies: can South Africa’s highway infrastructure, much of it built for a different era of freight, support the next generation of commercial vehicle operations?
Platooning’s fuel efficiency and capacity arguments remain compelling on paper, and SANRAL’s willingness to name specific corridors signals real institutional interest rather than dismissal. But the consensus emerging from SANRAL, the RFA and CSIR is consistent: this is an infrastructure and security problem before it’s a technology problem. Route specific testing, targeted intelligent transport system upgrades and, ultimately, a harder look at how South Africa polices its high value freight corridors will need to come before any convoy of automated trucks takes to the N3.
