Soren Skou, the CEO of Maersk, doesn’t believe that self-sailing container vessels will become operational within his lifetime.
The company has already reduced the number of people it has working on its vessels as a result of developments in automation, but Skou believes that the workforce has now hit a floor and that there’s no more room to remove people from working on the ship boxes.
“Even if technology advances, I don’t expect we will be allowed to sail around with 400-meter long container ships, weighing 200,000 tonnes without any human beings onboard,” he told Bloomberg.
Both regulation and lack of a return on investment are therefore an inhibitor for this kind of sophisticated automation in Skou’s opinion.