My father is a truck driver. He made his living driving vehicles and doing heavy lifting and menial work. Truck driving is just the latest evolution in his "career" and I'm ever grateful to him for battering his body in various ways to ensure I had every opportunity available to myself.
We talk a lot about his job. It's not fun. He works long hours, a lot of it is mundane driving, and he sits idle a lot of the time.
I think he would be the first to agree that automation of his job is inevitable and likely necessary, given the dangers of truck driving. Hurling a multi-ton vehicle to and fro is a dangerous task at the best of times.
But therein lies the rub. We are just now reaching the point where we as a society are getting comfortable with automated cars. I think people will be less comfortable with the idea that the truck next to them has no human in it, and could experience some kind of glitch with catastrophic consequences. HN readers will understand that these cars are still a ways away, since the last 10% of the work required for true automation will take a lot longer to develop.
Trucks are way more complicated to drive. Once they're up to cruising speed, they're easy. But it's everything leading up to that point which is hard. Dealing with gear changes, airbrakes, load shifting, other vehicles that will inevitably cut you off, and much more.
And then when you get to your destination, manoeuvring a 50' trailer is no easy task, even for a trained driver like my dad.
It will happen, and it should happen. But it won't be easy, nor soon. Of course, I'd be happy to be wrong, and I'm sure my dad would be too.
RoLa (Rollende Landstraße) as we call this in Germany, or just transporting the flatbed carriages, requires a SHITLOAD of manual work, unlike containers where you don't even need people on the locos in the yard anymore.
Not to mention that long-haul-via-rail is only viable in the US... in Europe, it virtually doesn't exist anymore. It just isn't profitable due to various external conditions:
1) train track pricing is prohibitively expensive
2) freight trains don't get priority over passenger trains - quite the contrary. If you have any time-sensitive stuff, better transport it via road instead.
3) rail tracks are massively overbooked. One single delay and the entire system grinds to a screeching halt.
4) there is no such thing as cross-Europe locomotives/conductors. There might be multi-system-capable locos, but there is not a single loco on the market able to serve the entire fragmented European railroad technology.
There may be "just" 15/25 kV AC + 1k5/3kV DC, but every country needs their own roof collectors because they're NOT compatible (some countries don't even have roof collectors, but 3rd rails or sideway rails for the low-voltage DC stuff, and the DC stuff usually doesn't pack a lot of power so you can't really use them for any heavy load), but the real tech problem is the load of bollocks called signalling/security system, every country has their own, including Germany alone with FOUR popular systems (classic form signals, light-based signals, LZB/PZB and ETCS, in addition to various customizations in Eastern Germany and the S-Bahn tracks).
Not to mention the conductors which have to know all the signalling systems AND all the languages (compared to aviation where English is the standard worldwide), and they need to be expensively re-certified...
Yeah, ETCS, I hear you, but ETCS is a joke that would require literally hundreds of billions to retrofit across the major transit routes in Europe, but that won't happen - we Europeans haven't even managed to get our freight carriages to silent brakes yet!
5) There are still restrictions like maximum train lengths and the plain fact that European freight carriages only carry a pneumatic line for the brakes, but no data lines for controlling middle/back locos - so there's no technical way of extending train lengths because there's simply no loco combo capable of pulling >700m length heavy freight carriages with 3 locos on the front and no way to control a pushing loco in the back of the train. Simple physics, the good old screw coupling just can't support more load. There are alternatives (C-AKv coupling, it's high load AND compatible with the old coupling) but once again a retrofit would cost billions (see #4)...
Trains might be more efficient from an environmental and human-resources POV, but they're fucked up on any economic scale - and politicians all over Europe don't give a single fuck, instead they are all letting their rail systems rot to pieces and squeeze every tiny penny from the rail companies to fix up their even more rotten state budgets!
> 2) freight trains don't get priority over passenger trains
Freight trains get priority here and it still doesn't make sense to ship by train. Rail is pretty limited by the huge size of our country, and they need to be able to ship to tiny random stores all over the place. It makes more sense to send one truck that can stop anywhere there's a road than send it out via train and then transfer to a local truck, which might be sitting unused the rest of the time.
> Rail is pretty limited by the huge size of our country
Quite the contrary, the US is better suited for rail than the rest of the world, at least for cross-country moving of goods (one single area of law, no customs crap to deal with, the only thing I'm not sure is signalling and interoperability of locomotives on rail systems in different states).
Trains are perfect for inter-city travel, the first/last mile should be handled with trucks unless the facility is so large that it can source or sink a huge number of trains (e.g. automobile, steel factories, coal mines, fossil power plants).
How long do you imagine it takes to unload a single car or two cars in a given city and move on to the next city? Once that "last mile" is handled, what else is that truck going to do until the next train shipment arrives? It'll sit doing nothing. If it moved on to another city, it could have just been loaded somewhere else and didn't need to be loaded at last mile.
Trains have several single points of failure for a larger load. When there is a problem, all of the load is affected, it takes longer to repair, and problems with both the rails and the trains happen regularly. And trains have more complex maneuvering than trucks; switching lines is a non-trivial time-consuming matter and operators have a tough job just on the existing lines.
The fact remains we don't have enough rail to service most of the country, and nobody is paying for new rail, not to mention the issue of fitting more track on the existing land and bridges used for rail. Demand has been increasing steadily on rail, and only so much traffic can possibly run on the rails - which are shared with passenger trains, btw. To switch to trains you'd be adding 230% more traffic to the rails.
> Once that "last mile" is handled, what else is that truck going to do until the next train shipment arrives? It'll sit doing nothing
If you're a responsible freight truck company, you want to avoid this situation at all costs. There's always cargo that wants to be shipped - the only scarce resources are drivers and tractor units, and some companies even let multiple drivers share the tractors to maximize the usage of their tractors (that really depends on the company though, there are also companies where every driver "owns" his tractor).
> The fact remains we don't have enough rail to service most of the country, and nobody is paying for new rail
Yes, indeed. The beginnings of the stock markets actually were railroad construction companies, but these days the financial markets only care about the next big unicorn and not about creating something with real long term value, which a train track certainly is given that, once the track is laid, the land belongs to the company and the only major investments required are 50-year overhauls and regular maintenance. It's a shame.
> RoLa (Rollende Landstraße) as we call this in Germany, or just transporting the flatbed carriages, requires a SHITLOAD of manual work, unlike containers where you don't even need people on the locos in the yard anymore.
Isn't using containers much more efficient anyway, instead of moving the whole truck?
> Isn't using containers much more efficient anyway, instead of moving the whole truck?
The core problem is that freight companies in Europe standardized on the Euro Pool Palette (EPAL) but ISO containers worldwide use the non-metric US measurement system - thus leading to waste of space and potential safety issues (sliding palettes due to slack space on the floor).
Trucks, however, are fitted to the metric system and can safely transport EPALs, so you've got next to no alternative.
ETCS is coming - it may take twenty years to be rolled out everywhere but it will happen. In the meantime they're focusing on the strategic routes first. These things take time, but it is happening.
> 2) freight trains don't get priority over passenger trains
Interestingly in the northwestern u.s. (and I suspect throughout the western u.s.) the main rail corridors prioritize freight.
Discovered this while, as a regular Seattle - Portland traveler, I found myself stationary while lumber rolled by. Amtrak's leases are subordinate to the freight lines.
Actually you can't, for a lot of goods. Reason is that the railroad won't give you the same guarantees and trackability a truck will.
Example: you have refrigerated items (let's say a shipment of fresh fruit) that has to be maintained at a constant temperature and you want it delivered to your customer on Thursday when you ship Sunday night.
Truck: not a problem, and you can easily get updates all the time from dispatch (or if there is a GPS unit on the truck, immediately).
Railroad: maybe they will get it there, maybe they won't.
If the railroad puts a refrigerator unit on your boxcar and it breaks down, too bad - they won't reimburse you. A trucking company will.
> Railroad: maybe they will get it there, maybe they won't.
> If the railroad puts a refrigerator unit on your boxcar and it breaks down, too bad - they won't reimburse you. A trucking company will.
Sounds like both of those are more to do with shit rail companies than inherent downsides of rail (or upsides of trucking)?
Just in time delivery by rail works in Europe, perhaps because the track is maintained to a high standard and can be relied upon, and the timetable adhered to to avoid delaying passenger trains.
> Now retired after more than 30 years in the produce business, Wolf noted that farmers began growing iceberg lettuce in the region just prior to the 1930s. The demand for the hearty lettuce variety soon took off through the use of refrigerated rail cars.
IIRC because more of the highway cost is subsidized by the taxpayer, not necessarily because the cost is actually lower...
In the US, especially outside of the northeast, most interstate highways are not tolled, so users of the road don't pay any more for its maintenance than non-users do. But someone is still paying for it. Taxpayers who don't use the roads are effectively subsidizing those who do.
By contrast, railways usually own their rails and are obliged to maintain them themselves, and thus have to fold those costs into the price.
But here’s the question: Do these ‘last mile’ drivers sit in the cab? Or operate the rigs from thousands of miles away, like drone pilots, with displays showing 360 degrees around the rig and access to all of its sensors?
Last mile driving may not look anything like truck driving.
Or, alternatively, do they wait at truck stops on the edge of town and meet the trucks as they come in (much like harbor pilots meet container ships at port entrances)?
I don’t think so. Once you’ve already automates a truck, you have a lot more information to convey than what’s out the windshield, and you are liberated from needing to turn a steering wheel or push foot pedals.
There’s no reason to build a cab into the truck that is only used for the last mile. Telepresence will do just fine.
If that's the case, then why aren't cargo ships already automated to this extent? It seems like automating a container vessel would be even easier - there are far fewer things to run into on the water (even in a busy port) than there are on a busy highway.
Crews generally aren't armed to begin with and with no humans to capture and ransom or threaten to change the ships course the amount of booty they could make off with is really limited. Most pirate attacks target hostages anyways. For engineering you could have small crews fly out to any one ship that's experienced engine trouble.
I would bet because the wage paid is insignificant compared to maintenance of the vessel and that the maritime laws would be further complicating such a scenario.
Not so much maintenance as capital costs, I think. Giant cargo vessels can't be replaced as often as trucks either. But drone ships are certainly coming, it's a very trendy topic in the trade publications. I'd give it 10 years.
If you were able to dispense with the cab and any human interfaces/amenities, that would cut out a big chunk of weight and drag. It would look radically different but just think of all of the components on a truck that are only there for the driver. No need for a cab, AC system, heater, pedals, steering wheel and linkages, airbags, seats, pretty much all of the glass and windows, doors, etc. The added sensors, telemetry, and computational requirements necessary for an autonomous vehicle suddenly don't look so pricy compared to the savings of removing a huge chunk of the vehicle, nonstop operation or maintenance, no salary for the driver, lower insurance costs, lower fuel costs, and other assorted savings. Really it's looking like more and more of an inevitability in my opinion. Once the control problem is solved, I doubt it'll be more economical to continue putting a trucker behind the wheel.
Of course if you need to provide all of that to allow for someone to drive it manually around town a lot of those benefits are gone. Who knows, there will probably be some transitional period where all automated trucks are still equipped for manual control but I doubt it'll stay that way for long.
The automated part of the journey could be done by a driverless / cab-less / HID-less prime mover which drops the trailer(s) / cargo containers off at an interchanged where they are picked up by human driven vehicles for the last mile.
Even if we remove all the facilities for a driver, i likely you would still need a human guard.
Although thinking about it, the guard could travel in a separate vehicle, and could be responsible for overseeing an entire convoy of trucks at one time.
I don't know what became of it, but at one point there was a DARPA initiative to do just that for military convoys. The reasoning was that automated trucks would allow soldiers to treat the convoy as a "dumb herd" that would follow and be overseen by a squad of heavily armed and armored "sheepdogs". This would improve protection for soldiers, while simultaneously improving the efficiency of battlefield logistics.
Definitely can't remotely operate a 40 ton truck. Wireless network latency is a bit high even under ideal conditions, and latency spikes could easily cause disastrous accidents.
You can continue to rely on the automated systems for avoiding collisions. The intelligence is more with dealing with the decisions that the AI can't make.
I don’t think you’re going to be “driving” such trucks. I think you’ll be making decisions. For example, when you reach a yard and need to back it into a loading bay, you may draw a path on a map of the yard, taking into account obstacles that are there at that moment. The truck will handle the turning, backing up, and so on.
Likewise, you may be monitoring city traffic and choosing alternate routes. But you won’t be driving with one foot on the brake pedal and your hands on the steering wheel.
You could make massive gains just by not having to stop and rest drivers. I suspect the drivers will be on-board but able to relax or sleep until getting close to the destination. That lets all trucks drive 24hr straight through to their destinations.
>Or operate the rigs from thousands of miles away, like drone pilots, with displays showing 360 degrees around the rig and access to all of its sensors?
Any driverless technology that requires a constant wireless internet connection is a non-starter.
As I said elsewhere, I do not think a constant wireless connection will be an issue, because I don’t think you’ll be operating the truck remotely the way a hobbyist operates an RC car. The truck will brake when a car, pedestrian, or bicycle cuts it off, and do it better than you could.
You are there to route it around traffic jams, talk to the foreman on site, and choose the loading bay.
Even if you had a reliable high-bandwidth/low-latency connection, the truck will be better than you are at handling things that requires instant response. You are there to make decisions.
The video stream bandwidth and requirement for near-zero latency will make remote control very challenging, if not impossible. I'd say the last-mile driver will be in the truck.
They may have humans do all the manoeuvring within the distribution hubs long after they've automated all of the street driving.
Shifting and braking, though, seem to me like the kind of thing that automata should be good at. And I suppose that, once most of the cars on the road are autonomous, the streets will be much more truck-friendly.
Sort of reminds me of a Harbor Pilot[0]. A person who holds unique knowledge of how to operate a large vehicle in a particular piece of confined geography.
I doubt a "hub driver" will earn a 6-figure salary, but manoeuvring a semi truck two or three trailers is definitely a skilled job that many (most?) people are not capable of learning to do well.
The geometry- and mechanically- related tasks seem like they would be ripe for automation. For example, the trailer reversing problem is related to the inverted pendulum problem, which is easily solvable by automated systems.
The judgement for when to stop with an unsafe load and wayfinding at the last 100 yards of a route are indeed tasks that I'd prefer to leave to a human for the time being. Maybe we'll have 'dock pilots' like we do for large cargo ships?
I was referring more to the inner-city manoeuvring, and within loading/unloading zones. Getting a trailer lined up with the loading dock isn't an easy task at all. It can be automated, but it's the variability between load length, weight, and the loading dock's surroundings that make it difficult.
A comment below talked about harbour pilots. That seems like a great idea.
Lexus automated the most hated driving maneuver for all car drivers - parallel parking, and Google's had decent success w/their self driving Prii fleet... it's hard, safety would be the #1 concern, but w/enough human brainpower and some decent hard realtime OS-es, it should be more than doable.
But my point, and the one made by the article as I understand it, is that you wouldn't even have to do any of that initially. The vast majority of the driver's time is spent just cruising on the highway. That's the part you want to work on automating first, both because it provides the greatest cost savings, and because it's the easiest to solve technically.
An Australian friend of mine told me that the trucks that carry load from Australian mining fields are almost fully automated, and have been for a while now. So perhaps it's not that complicated?
> Trucks are way more complicated to drive. Once they're up to cruising speed, they're easy. But it's everything leading up to that point which is hard. Dealing with gear changes, airbrakes, load shifting, other vehicles that will inevitably cut you off, and much more.
The mechanical aspects of controlling a large truck and accounting for the variables is probably the easiest part of the problem.
Things involving humans (vehicles cutting you off, pedestrians, etc.) are part of the general class of problems that I'm assuming all automated vehicles are working on and are much harder.
Mechanical aspects, may be easy. Modeling human behavior and reacting to it, not so much.
I suspect it will still be years before much of trucking is automated. Why? It's not just the take crap from point A to point B, it's also being responsible for making sure what was ordered is actually loaded. It will be years before, say, the laborers at Earth Bound Farms south of Salinas (supplies large quantities of "organic" produce all up and down the west coast) automates their work staff or actually has their schedules down tight.
Trucking and hauling is full of inefficiencies, and those that suffer the most are the drivers. A pickup/dropoff that takes too long because the people at the origin/destination are lazy/slow/don't care/behind has a ripple effect.
And, one could argue "but automated trucks, what schedule?", there will still need to be a human present, regardless. I suspect said human will be restrained by rules similar to what drivers experience now.
But we've already got automated warehousing systems that work pretty well -- I'd imagine these wouldn't be too hard to extend to load and unload trucks. In fact, I wouldn't be surprised to find out that they already can.
Where is the money going to come from for produce suppliers, some on thin profits, to automate where hiring a bunch of seasonal laborers is less overhead, maintenance, etc.
if an automated solution ends up being cheaper than manual laborers, then some lending institution will be happy to lend the money for the transition. any players that avoid the transition will likely get obviated by the competitors that capture and pass on the cost savings.
It's going to come from automation costs dropping and seasonal (and other) labor costs rising in real terms, so that the cost effective approach is automation. Same as everywhere else.
Specifically, the automation of long haul trucking, comparable to what large tanker ships do, may be more feasible. The last mile, scheduling, and the rest, is a horrid mess. A family member is in the business and I live in an area where ag work is prevalent and know people who have worked in such.
Agreed here. I don't think anyone reasonable is suggesting the local delivery trucks are going to get automated any time soon.
But the long-haul interstate runs? I see this happening faster than any automated passenger cars, and once it starts it's going to rapidly take over that industry. Probably starts with convoys with a couple human tenders until the tech is proven.
It won't be a perfect fit for all types of trucking (say, delivery drivers), but many loads can certainly be transported place to place without a person needing to babysit it. Example: I imagine Amazon would love to be able to move loads around distro centers with automated trucking.
I wonder what the accident rate of professional truck drivers is compared to other passenger class drivers. Certainly the outcome of an accident is potentially a much higher level of mayhem.
Not exactly what you're asking for, but related. In accidents where both a large commercial truck, and a car were involved:
"the car was the encroaching vehicle in 89% of headon
crashes, 88% of the opposite-direction sideswipes, 80% of the rear-end crashes, and 72% of the same-direction sideswipes."
Now you need to take into account how many cars vs how many trucks were on the road in the period that yielded those numbers. Only then you can obtain the propensity of car drivers vs truck drivers to get into accidents.
Sure, but unless the car running into the truck _prevents_ the truck from being at-fault in a different accident further down the road, that doesn't really matter.
Yes. Truckers have to deal with a sort of standard "road safety dilemma" all the time, which can be boiled down to this:
A trucker is driving a 40 ton truck at 65mph. A passenger car with a family of four cuts in front of it, and the distance is closing fast.
A passenger car takes roughly 315 feet to come to a complete stop. A fully loaded truck takes 525 feet. The trucker now has to make a decision.
A) Do I slam on the brakes and keep going straight, and completely obliterate the car in front of me and the family inside it?
B) Do I cut off to the side, running over the rail, flipping the truck, killing myself, and possibly any other vehicles or pedestrians around, behind, or coming in the opposite direction of me?
The robot trucker could of course decide on B), but there are unknown variables about the extent of the resulting damage. This risk increases with merging between lanes or on/off ramps both by passenger vehicles, the truck itself, and motorcycles.
A dedicated lane would make this fantastically safer, but who will pay for it?
Anecdotally, the 3 truckers i've known have complained about it. I now drive very carefully around trucks.
Swerving at the last minute is a non-option because it means turning sharply, which jackknifes the truck. Turning while braking is worse because turning while either braking or accelerating compromises steering. You can try to brake until the last moment and then take off the brakes and try to turn, but again possible jackknife, the wheels could have locked up to the brakes, and now that you're traveling slower you will actually turn slower, so it's harder to cut the wheel and go around. All of this within a few seconds.
You have to either try to slow down and blow the horn, or get out of the way and blow the horn. Some people are lucky and either swerve away from the truck at the last moment, or their car only gets marginally crunched.
One hacker friend of mine's car actually got thrown nearly into the opposite lane of traffic on the highway with the same scenario. Recovery took a while. I think he's still got pain and limited mobility.
For this reason alone I would trust autonomic trucks much more than human driven counterpart. I must admit, I've drifted away few times as well while driving passenger car over long, boring highways..
Given that an automated truck will follow a certain safety framework, it's interesting to contemplate if there might be automated truck pirates.
Jam mobile connectivity, run the truck off the road by herding it with other vehicles, then break in and run-away with the goods or the entire trailer for that matter.
Meanwhile, cargo ship companies are looking toward automation and remote control to get humans off the water. Pirates aren't scared of humans being on board, and in some cases they prefer it, because a human crew is worth more ransom.
If a cargo was valuable enough, a driver's life would only be a collateral damage. Furthermore, all (non military or security) personnel training programs I've encountered specifically highlights, that in a case of armed robbery, do not resist, obey and do not escalate conflict in any other manner while trying to call help unnoticed.
Granted, but a human guard nevertheless presents a problem for robbers.
Do you take the guard hostage? Do you kill them? Will they themselves be armed? Will they put up a fight, training or no training? If you try aggressively to bring their vehicle to a halt, will they concede immediately (as an autonomous vehicle likely would), or will they try ramming your vehicle?
A human guard is an unknown quantity, and any crimes you commit against their person are in a different league to the theft of the cargo.
Your house sits empty all day and nobody robs it. Video cameras work pretty well for this if it becomes a problem. Great to live in a country with rule of law.
>A passenger car takes roughly 315 feet to come to a complete stop. A fully loaded truck takes 525 feet.
How does this change if truck design and "per-axel" fee incentives were rationalized[1][2] to instead maximize the number of axles? Doubling the number of axles reduces road damage by 94%. Currently semi trucks account for 6% of vehicle miles driven[3] and 99% of all traffic damage to roads.
But would this measure also improve braking distance and safety?
Braking distance is a factor of speed, weight, brakes, tires and road surface. A 40 ton truck can only stop so fast with rubber tires on typical brakes on a typical highway road surface.
Race cars are designed to stop faster than passenger cars. Their brakes are huge, they're designed with exotic components to transfer heat to air faster, designed to take higher heat for longer, the cars are designed to flow air over the brakes, and they cost much more and don't last as long, and have advanced computerized systems to optimize brake utilization. They also have pretty big tires (usually for power transfer, not braking). Their tires are also grippier on a given surface at a higher tire temperature, so they cost more and don't last as long, and work best on dry flat surfaces. They strip all the weight out of the car to decrease the amount of force working against the tires and brakes. Even the suspension and shell is designed to increase tire, and thus brake, traction. They stop really goddamn fast - 93 feet for a Ferrari F430 Scuderia, from 60mph.
Trucks are designed to carry 40 tons up and down hills, survive tire blow-outs, brake system failures, and more miles than 1000 F430s will ever see, on all kinds of road surfaces and temperatures. It is possible to improve the brake time, but it would probably cost so much you might as well ship your produce in a Ferrari. Halve the weight they carry to reduce braking distance and now we have to have twice the trucks to carry the same loads, but you still have a vehicle 10x heavier than other vehicles with dynamics that simply can't move around like the lighter ones. More accidents would be guaranteed.
> Race cars are designed to stop faster than passenger cars. Their brakes are huge, they're designed with exotic components to transfer heat to air faster, designed to take higher heat for longer, the cars are designed to flow air over the brakes, and they cost much more and don't last as long, and have advanced computerized systems to optimize brake utilization.
A lot of that isn't to brake faster but to keep the brakes from overheating from constant high use during a race that can last a couple hours or more. For normal emergency use you can drop a lot of that because they only need to be used extremely hard rarely and they'll have time to cool.
In other words, look at aircraft, not at racecars. What you have described is practically the only mode of operation for wheelbrakes there ("brakes catch fire during emergency braking? No biggie, just keep an eye on them while they cool.").
Brake heating is not a real issue with emergency braking, only with frequent braking which race cars do. That's why "upgrading" to "big brake" systems on passenger cars is usually a waste of money and reduces performance: unless you're driving on a track where you have to brake a lot, and the cumulative braking keeps the brakes hot, you're not helping. Even worse, the brake pad compounds used for race cars are different, and are designed to maintain performance even when very hot, whereas passenger car brakes have to have great performance when cold.
The bottom line is: a single panic stop on the highway isn't limited by your brakes on a passenger car, it's limited by your tires. The more friction your tires have with the road, the faster you'll slow down.
So yes, if you want a 40 ton truck to stop faster, it's completely doable: just increase the amount of rubber in contact with the road. Adding more wheels will do that quickly. However, more tires means more rolling friction which means less fuel economy and fuel economy is critically important to long-haul trucking. Also, adding more axles causes maneuverability problems in the city. Notice that on standard trailers, the rear axle set can be moved forward and back. They set them in the rearward position for long hauls, and in the forward position for shorter hauls.
Not necessarily. More, smaller trucks will mean your transport costs will go up because you get less economy of scale. Eliminating the driver helps mitigate that of course, but going to smaller trucks then eliminates the savings you got by eliminating the driver. Having more, smaller trucks would be more versatile however, if you don't need to transport full truckloads of cargo between certain points.
Also, drivers as I understand it aren't paid monthly salaries, they're paid by the mile.
The article mentions driverless trucks would drive slower, at 45mph, wouldn't this make a key difference in this scenario, eg a much shorter breaking distance. Also, a driverless vehicle has one option a manned vehicle doesn't - self destruction to save life, eg drive off the side of the road and crash (assuming it could determine that no one was there)
That'd be a disaster on single-lane roads. Even with human trucks and their help (signalling if road is clear, driving on the shoulder when possible etc), it sucks to overtake them. If trucks were limited to 70km/h, there'd be much more need to overtake them. Which would either cause either traffic congestion or more drivers doing reckless things. Let alone that non-driverless trucks/buses/campers/etc would be stuck behind them forever.
I imagine they would start out only on multi-lane, limited-access highways. The small number of entry and exit points would make it much easier to program the truck. Such roads carry the bulk of long-distance truck traffic anyway.
Once you get away from highly populated and developed areas, there're lots of single-lane roads. Let alone that single-lane roads are used as backups when inevitable accident happens on multilane. Of course, there's not as much traffic in such areas as in those with multi-lane highways.
Well, the current tests with self-driving trucks are almost exclusively by european carmakers on German roads – where 2 to 3 lanes are common about everywhere, and trucks are limited to 80km/h or 100km/h anyway.
It's difficult enough for driverless cars to know where the lines on the road are. I don't think we can expect in the near future to be able to not only detect pedestrians, but to have an idea what series of events may happen during an avoidance maneuver. There's a lot of things to go wrong.
However, stopping distance in real-world scenarios is wayyyy farther than in practice runs, because even a second faster braking by the driver can save a hundred feet. So robotic braking (that we have today in passenger cars) could improve the distance a lot. But...
Trucks are still 10-20x heavier than passenger cars, and there are practical upper bounds to the size of their brakes and the g's they can pull. If a passenger car normally stops in 388 feet at 65mph (not uncommon) and it would stop at 196 feet at 45mph, a truck at 45mph would stop in 265 feet. So yes, the truck could in theory stop faster than the passenger car.
But passenger cars don't just slam on their brakes in front of trucks (often). They also just drift right the heck into the truck. Perhaps mechanisms could be developed to safely merge away, and they'll probably be developed in passenger cars first. But there's no denying that a dedicated roadway would not only save repair costs for passenger-vehicle-only roads, it would remove the risk of colliding with passenger vehicles no matter whose fault it was.
Robot chooses A) and also immediately uploads footage to the DA
Idiot that caused roadwreck is sued for that (I'm pretty sure there are specific laws against causing massive damage. In my country at least, there are.)
Soon, people learn that they are responsible for acting, well, responsibly.
There's a real possibility that once driverless trucks become widespread, human behavior will change as well. A very aggressive driver may take advantage of the fact that an automated truck will brake for them, and start routinely cutting off trucks, whereas today they'd be a little more respectful. Even pedestrians could start crossing a highway where they shouldn't and know they could get away with it.
I think the worry also is that at some point, hundred years into the future someone somewhere might write the code where the truck will go "I'm carrying 1 million dollars worth of cargo which would be destroyed if I drive into the ditch, but the cost of litigation for smashing into this small car that clearly broke the law and will be at fault in this situation is smaller - continue program;".
A robot trucker will never do (B). The car put itself there and can presumably get itself out again. More importantly, swerving will lead your truck to jackknife and roll in unpredictable ways and cause who knows how much extra damage.
As I've said before about smaller autonomous vehicles, they'll be programmed to always choose the option which is most defensible in court. I will be amazed if we ever see an autonomous vehicle on public roads which does something more complicated than "come to a complete halt as fast as possible while steering for the clearest area of asphalt."
There are situations where the safest course of action is to accelerate, or maintain speed, while maneuvering. I'm sure we'll get there if the trend of automating individual driving tactics continues.
'Truckers have to deal with a sort of standard "road safety dilemma" all the time...'
I think you mean that truckers FEEL like they deal with that dilemma all the time. If they ACTUALLY dealt with an A or B dilemma, they would routinely end up in situation A or B: running over a passenger car or flipping the truck. It happens SOMETIMES, but infrequently.
In reality the situations where other drivers do something stupid are probably much better handled by the self-driving truck, which doesn't panic, doesn't feel a fight-or-flight response, doesn't overstate the gravity of the situation... doesn't do anything except assess what to do next without emotion.
> Things involving humans (vehicles cutting you off, pedestrians, etc.) are part of the general class of problems that I'm assuming all automated vehicles are working on and are much harder.
The more mass you have, the longer your braking distance and the more sluggish the reactions. While the problem is the same, and the mechanical differences easily modelled, light vehicles get away with lower accuracy and higher latencies, because they don't need to plan ahead so far.
Yes, but there are more problems to consider here. With some types of cargo, applying maximum brakes can actually damage it(think livestock for example). You also don't want the truck to be going into panic mode and applying maximum brakes for a plastic bag or a small animal. I'm afraid that our current technology can at best tell that there is something there, but it won't be able to tell what - humans at the moment are much better at visual recognition. It's just a concern at the moment, but I think it's an important one because it can lead to some serious accidents when the technology launches.
have you not been following the developments of self driving cars? Like the story of how google cars had problems gauging the intent of bike riders that were themselves stopped to let the car pass ... it looked like they were about to take off, so the car was too conservative and didn't move until the bike changed what they were doing. And then, once that condition was experienced and identified, it was fixed for all google cars in the entire fleet.
I'm pretty sure the car will be able to identify and plastic bag ... not to mention a simple cargo manifest that would apply parameters about how the cargo is to be dealt with.
My point is that all of these are "simple" problems. Oh the truck will identify a plastic bag. Oh the truck will have a cargo manifest and drive accordingly.
But these are all new technologies. Our visual recognition libraries are nowhere near ideal. I said this elsewhere but I will say it here too - our best of the best software can't tell a zebra and a sofa in a zebra print apart. I'm pretty sure that all that LIDAR is seeing is a spherical object on the road, it has no idea what it is.
The same with the cargo manifest - it sounds simple, but no one has a system like this. It would need to be made and implemented, and it takes time and effort - I'm not saying that it's impossible, far from it, but it's one more obstacle to overcome to make this possible.
Are you sure they're more complicated for computers? Because some stuff that strains humans, like 360° attention and complicated sequential activities, computers can do with ease. Also computers are not limited to having senses inside the cab. Load shifting? BigDog is an example of computers figuring how to balance a shifting load. Google cars handle being cut off (most of the time).
Google cars are going no more than 25 mph and are lightweight. Different thing all together.
Here is the big thing - the driverless truck has to operate in a uncontrolled environment that can result in human death. Who is the responsible party? The trucking company? The software developer?
Additionally we are talking situations where a computer can't have any reaction interruptions for hours and hours. No reboots. No garbage collection pauses. No panics.
Can this be done? Maybe. But at what cost? It might be that the best role for the computer is helping a truck driver be safer -- not to replace the truck driver.
I'm walking down a busy road with traffic passing me at ~30mph at the moment. Anecdotally, the last 4 cars have had one person in the car who has either been texting on a mobile phone, applying makeup, eating breakfast, and playing with the radio. Do you think the reaction time of the guy who's texting his boss saying he's late would be faster or slower than the driverless car that was in a long garbage collection, if I were to step in front of him?
You do have a point on liability, and I don't have an answer better than a centralised pool of money that everyone pays in or out of.
7 people died in the challenger disaster. 30,000 people die each year in car related fatalities. Completely different order of magnitude.
Additionally, going up on a rocket is a fundamentally risking proposition done by adults.
Having a driverless vehicle that glitches, applies power instead of brakes, and kills a bunch of pretty young girls.... well that makes the 5 oclock news and 11 oclock for many, many days.
How many criminal charges were filed against individual engineers for any those 30,000 fatalities last year? How many were convicted? None and none.
You're illustrating my point for me quite nicely. Frankly, I can't think of a criminal conviction, even at the corporate level, for design flaws in the auto industry without going all the way back to the Ford Pinto.
Additionally we are talking situations where a computer can't have any reaction interruptions for hours and hours. No reboots. No garbage collection pauses. No panics.
You mean, just like existing ones? It's not like we're still driving purely mechanical cars. Current production vehicles already have plenty of software managing stuff.
I think it could help that loading docks could be highly integrated with the truck systems. Backing in to the place where you unload is complicated, but the owners would be willing to invest in putting in sensors, special paint, whatever else is necessary to make that as automated and error free as possible.
We've gotten used to huge commercial airliners flying on autopilot. Granted they have humans on board, but ask any pilot how much flying they do. Even helicopters can be put on autopilot after take-off. That's what the helicopters that run from Macau to Hong Kong many times a day are doing. I can see ironing out the kinks - pedestrians, roadblocks, car stops in front abruptly, etc... I would think you could have a truck lane only like the ones for buses entering the Lincoln Tunnel in NYC, and perhaps a guardrail that could have sections removed to open it up for traffic during less traffic times?
Honestly, I'm not sure that most people understand the extent to which commercial airline flight is automated. For example, most people are shocked when I tell people that pilots are required to let the plane auto-land under very bad visibility conditions.
> "most people are shocked when I tell people that pilots are required to let the plane auto-land under very bad visibility conditions."
As a commercially-rated pilot I would be shocked, too - since few airport runways are certified for Cat III landings, and that's only under restricted wind speeds.
And even after autoland in fog, a pilot still taxis up to the gate.
If everything was smooth and regular, trucks wouldn't have a problem. However, the roads, and the warehouse yards, are not.
A fully loaded truck traveling 55mph (on some roads they are allowed 65 or even 75) can weigh 80,000 lbs or more (in Canada under certain circumstances, 139,500 lbs).
That is a tremendous amount of force that must be handled properly 100% of the time, through rain, hail, sleet, snow - and with smaller cars weaving in and out of traffic all around them.
I am hopeful that robots can fix it, but most likely it will take a little bit longer... robot trucks will save on fuel, brakes, and tires, as they can be programmed to minimize sudden acceleration and taking a turn too quickly (scrubs rubbers off the tires).
Having driven in winter weather I can honestly say it will be a while . . before they are ready to take over. As for tire wear , there are small firms that look for very experienced driver's to cheat the scales . . this is how its done if they are overweight , think ( steel coils ) they time it so they hit the scales at night . . the driver goes into the scale and positions the rear trailer wheels on one side . . up on the curb registering a lower weight on the scale.
At least long-distance trucks can have routes optimized for automation (be it via embedding sensors to aid in bad weather or optimizing a lane for trucks, etc.) for the long segments and then at the city limits (or thereabouts) set-up truck "depots" to have human drivers board the truck and give them override to manoeuver through more difficult city or rural last-segment roads and streets.
I think the flaw here is assuming that the systems around the truck will stay the same - including the truck form factor. Without the required creature comforts of the tractor, you free up a lot of energy (heat/cool) and space (bed/TV etc...) in the cab.
I can also see traffic lanes being created to support commerce, special easement areas for trucks at stops that don't have to support showers/food/bathrooms etc... reducing overall cost.
All of this comes at cost to human workers - but it's inevitable.
With railroads, there is not an economic incentive for automation.
One commentator suggested that driverless trucks would have to be separated from human drivers. Railroads have this thing called "tracks"
Another suggested the wonderful advantage of a driverless truck not getting into accidents. Railroads have an excellent safety record.
Driverless trucks as a way to reduce the need to spend money on humans. Railroads need only 2 humans for 100+ unit train that is equivalent to 300 or so trucks. ( 1 railcar = 3 truckloads https://www.chrobinson.com/en/us/Logistics/Intermodal-Rail/C... )
What is the economic model to use driverless trucks? Sure the trucking industry will push for this. But the railroad industry has so many natural advantages.
"I think the flaw here is assuming that the systems around the truck will stay the same"
That's an interesting point. I wonder if self-driving trucks will tend to be smaller, because there's less incentive to amortize the wages of the driver by making his/her truck as large as possible.
> And then when you get to your destination, manoeuvring a 50' trailer is no easy task, even for a trained driver like my dad.
I wonder if there will be a more specialised role for human drivers here akin to pilots in ports. Companies at the scale able to invest in the tech might have the trucks arrive at a queue near regional hubs and have wet-ware do the 10 minutes of fiddly driving after clearing off the Smart car debris.
If I had to bet, that's the way I see it playing out.
In the states, many distribution centers are located next to major transportation arteries, whether rail or interstate highway. In addition, many of the places they ship to are also located on major arteries. It wouldn't be a huge stretch to have automated trucks you load on one end, they drive to the other (using 98% highway driving), then park in a waiting area until a human finishes the job by parking them.
The interesting edge cases here would be accidents, construction, and detours. Whatever you deploy should be able to handle those without human intervention. Otherwise we could end up with every accident site also having 100 automated trucks at a dead stop waiting on drivers to show up. That'd be ugly.
I wouldn't be surprised. This is where a huge amount of real-world automation ends up; it ends up being much more practical to only automate the 90% of the job that can be done by a simple automaton, and mechanical-Turk the rest. Then you save 90% of the labour costs AND 90% of the R&D costs for the automation.
The article says so. The plan is to have human drivers in each city drive the "last mile" from the interstate freeway exit to the destination. The current autonomous technology is only effective on freeways, so having human drivers drop the truck off at the interstate, and pick it up again solves the temporary problem of not having 100% effective automation of city driving/trailer parking.
If I were younger and not married, I could totally see taking a job as a trucker and guiding it on and off the highway, and doing coding or whatever in the meantime. It'd be a chance to go different places and have some adventure, while continuing to do another job that I love.
It's not unlike many college kids taking a job as a security guard and "watching monitors" while doing their homework, etc. (Another thing that I considered, but never actually did.)
Of course, there's a lot more training for truck driving, but I don't see that as a major barrier, given the benefits of extra pay and travel.
I see the evolution of automated vehicles as slowly taking more and more mental load off humans. e.g
1) Automated gears and obstacle detection - we already have this.
2) Have the truck stay in one lane and maintain distance - We're close. This means humans stay in truck and solve the hard problems when encountered. (Kind of like pilots)
3) Automated port to port driving without humans.
4) Destination to destination driving without humans.
I bet the human driver doesn't even need to be physically in the truck.
We already fly military aircraft remotely, I don't see why a truck that's packed with cameras and sensors can't be driven safely by a human in an office somewhere.
> I think people will be less comfortable with the idea that the truck next to them has no human in it, and could experience some kind of glitch with catastrophic consequences.
Unless the truck somehow acknowledges adjacent vehicles in a comforting way. I don't know what that would look like, but it would probably be coupled with advertising and data collection (no law against filming all the cars around you and what they are doing).
>>And then when you get to your destination, manoeuvring a 50' trailer is no easy task, even for a trained driver like my dad.
My first airplane journey was fascinating. As some one who doesn't know how to drive a car, and is struggling trying to learn it, I was spell bound when I watched the pilot taxi the huge airplane to the terminal.
Well airplanes aren't even regular shaped and size of the human taxi'ing the plane to the plane is very small. Yet the pilot could precision park to the terminal.
The fact is no matter how hard it seems, if you've been doing it day in and out, it looks like just another job at the end.
>The demonstration in Europe shows that driverless trucking is right around the corner. The primary remaining barriers are regulatory. We still need to create on- and off-ramps so human drivers can bring trucks to the freeways where highway autopilot can take over. We may also need dedicated lanes as slow-moving driverless trucks could be a hazard for drivers.
So, right around the corner except for billions in infrastructure investment.
I'm quite certain that this--like many other things related to autonomous vehicles--will happen. But they're decades further away than 75% solutions lead many people to think.
Depots on the highway where loads are transferred to human-driven trucks, and dedicated lanes for slow-moving driverless trucks? Might as well put the trailers onto a train, and build out the rail network (where needed) to be as extensive as the highway network. We've already got plenty of driverless trains around.
There are plenty of highways that already have a ton of trucks driving slowly in the right lane. Many routes will need changes to take advantage of this technology, but not all. The on- and off-loading areas will probably need to be created in many places, but that's a lot easier than adding a whole lane.
I wish. Unfortunately, even though that is the better option, it is more risky: everyone (meaning businesses in this case) already pay taxes to support roads, thus using them, even if it's less efficient, is "free". Plus, all businesses are connected to a road. Compared to building and maintaining infrastructure for a rail network, where you're limited to customers you've built rail to. So I'd wager the "last mile" would likely continue to be truck based, even if rail use exploded.
To be fair though, the rail networks here in North America are seen as the most developed freight networks in the world (I wish we had more passenger service though; my daily commute to KU and back is a pain): 2863 Gt-km (NA), 2451 (China), 2351 (Russia), vs 391 (EU).
I agree. I think another difference with the trucker community (vs angry taxi drivers) is that they are "tight". They have their own social circles, unions, radio talk shows, cb radio, websites, newsletters, etc.
They already know how to organize, communicate, influence, etc. And then there's the union history, tactics, etc.
Trucks are very hard on the roadbed, especially given that road damage scales proportionally to the fourth power of the axle weight. For the same reason we don't ship all of our goods in tons of little cars, but use trucks with GVWR potentially many times greater, similar efficiency is pretty simple with trains in that they require less operators and prime movers to move more goods in the same amount of time.
The introduction of tractors and machinery into farming would have caused a similar amount of job loss (if not more?). I really feel for all of the people and communities that will be affected by the loss of trucking jobs, but in 100 years, we're unlikely to look back and say "I wish we kept human truckers", just like no-one says "I wish we never introduced tractors".
navigating high-grade descents are the wrinkle - truck air brakes seem very finicky. But I think there's no reason why long, sparse, flat freeway sections could not be run by automated cabs relatively soon, for example CA-I5 from Tejon Ranch to Stockton, or the I80 between Chicago outskirts and somewhere in Wyoming.
Presumably we don't spend $10k/trunk on better brakes because humans can deal without them. But if that was what's needed to make self-driving work, the economics could support it. Electric regenerative breaking would do nicely.
Truck air brakes are finicky because they are mechanically designed to distribute brake pressure evenly across the wheels in response to one input -- pressure from the driver's foot on the brake pedal. An automated cab could communicate more information: desired speed, tolerance, required stopping distance, and general vehicle stability info, and a microcontroller at each wheel could combine that with sensor info about road conditions and temperature at that wheel to determine how much brake to apply and where -- all with faster reaction times than a human driver would be capable of.
The old technique was, at a wheel, hit the brakes really hard to stop the wheel rotating as fast as possible, hopefully less than one second, and then fully release the brake. Then the stopped wheel starts sliding and, then, starts rotating again, while still sliding some, until it is full rotating again, and then hit the brakes again. So, the technique is automatically sensitive to load, tread on the tires, traction on the road, etc. So, don't want all the wheels stopped at the same time. Then on an 18 wheel truck, should still be able to maintain directional control.
Of course, there is a lot that could be done, but most of that has one thing in common -- money, for the engineering, manufacturing, original purchase, in-service monitoring, problem detection, problem diagnosis, and repair. Money.
I really don't think this will happen in my lifetime. Could the whole robot drives car really evolve to replace the current state? I'm not sure that can happen over night.
Because of self-driving vehicles currently safely operating in the US, some of the more impressive results various DARPA challenges have resulted in in recent years, and of course a single experiment in a highly controlled environment.
Driverless trucks have been operating in the mining industry in Australia for over four years. There are lots of long haul routes around the world that are almost entirely truck traffic where automation makes a lot of sense.
> Dealing with gear changes, airbrakes, load shifting, other vehicles that will inevitably cut you off, and much more.
Awhile back there was a post about the early experience of a young and enthusiastic programmer. The take away phrase, in response to someone sending nonsense input, was "Some people just want to watch the world burn."
I can see assholes trying to make sure that an automated truck can't change lanes, or get to the exit it needs to reach, etc.
I myself have at times intentionally walked too close to the robotic carts that move supplies to workstations at my work, just to hear them stop and beep for a few seconds.
> The take away phrase, in response to someone sending nonsense input, was "Some people just want to watch the world burn."
That's a big line in the batman movie "the dark knight". While it could have originally came from elsewhere, I'd be willing to bet it came from the movie.
At first maybe, but people get used to things. Sabotage by replaced workers and luddites is nothing new (just look at the origin of the word luddite). And I wouldn't be surprised if laws are passed that create heavy penalties for interfering with self-driving vehicles.
It's an interesting thought, but I don't think this will be a significant problem. The inevitable combination of laws, surveillance, and social norms will, as it does now, keep the vast majority of people from doing random asshole acts like this.
The self-driving trucks will, by definition, be equipped with omnidirectional, high resolution 3d cameras. Who was that guy who kept cutting off our truck? Well, we could 3d print his face and license plate if you'd like. Also, the trucking industry will run to lawmakers the very first time this happens, and they are a very strong lobby. Finally, it's just a shitty thing to do, and everyone will understand that. Much like shining a laser at a plane is almost universally reviled, there will be social consequences for being that guy who torments driverless trucks.
By the way, "robotic carts that move supplies to workstations"? Is this a common thing? Can you say where you work?
The carts are like little flat bed trucks, and they do one thing: move empty and full bins from station to station, and the warehouse. They have rollers on the flatbed part, that push bins over to the hole in the wall at a station. The hole in the wall has similar rollers. They follow a set route along the wall of a hallway that's used by people and the carts.
What is a person supposed to do when another human tries dangerous things while one is driving? I think the smart move there would be to record the incident and have it reviewed for police, or for PR content.
Often while driving i get the feeling im the only one who realizes if you miss an exit, you can just get off at the next exit...
Going your preferred route is never more important than driving safely. People never seem to consider this when they cross several lanes of traffic to make a turn or get off at an exit.
I'm thinking about India where politicians are clashing over train and road as we speak. For a country building new infrastructure, I wonder which one is more viable?
This has been a subject of long debate in India - autonomous cars are fairly useless in Indian cities. At the scale of transportation needed, nothing other than mass transportation (subways,etc) makes sense with last mile connectivity.
The same question exists for freight - should we construct trains or trucks? Taking into account offloading cost - which one is more efficient? I think people overestimate the complexity of shipping items with time guarantees. A hub and spoke model works great here - but what is doing the actual long haul?
And people don't understand the scale at which countries like India or China need to operate. The transportation needs of all of Europe are dwarfed by how much needs to be moved (quickly and economically ) in India.
My friend is some kind of logistics manager for a trucking company. He literally manages dozens of trucks and truck drivers daily.
He says, it's so ridiculous, how far away we are from automatting truck driving. There is a lot of manual work for loading and off-loading rigs. Plus there is driving in every single possible driving condition possible, around the world.
He said, he could see an auto-pilot system being installed in trucks in the next 10 years, but the rest is all manually done.
My friend was a truck driver for a while, and a friend-of-a-friend is some kind of logistics manager. They both had the same objections to self-driving trucks -- the regulatory necessity for a human driver to initially inspect and periodically check the load, and the last-mile driver thing (which they expressed in different terms).
The 'some kind of logistics manager' thinks there'll be autonomous trucks pretty shortly, but the implementation will look like that Simpsons episode for years to come -- the way things work right now, a human in the cab is required.
And I'm sure someone was friends with a confident stagecoach driver before automobiles took over. Computers have taken over tons of ridiculous and complicated tasks already, it's silly to think your specific niche is the special case.
Computers have taken over tons of ridiculous and complicated tasks already, it's silly to think your specific niche is the special case.
Liability and government regulation are some of the biggest concerns of the trucking industry, and could prevent automated driving from taking hold for decades. Anecdotally, I've spent a lot of time talking to technology directors in trucking companies, and this sort of automation is hardly on the radar.
It's a super interesting subject, but I don't really buy the argument that this will drive down costs for the consumer. Never mind that whole better standard of living line...that's just cheerleading. Companies have shown over and over again in the last two decades that they are capable of absorbing those new profits from efficiencies.
I agree there are examples that show what you suggest. There are far more examples to suggest the opposite though. If the technology becomes widely available and there are enough independent companies to promote competition rather than collusion, the prices have no choice but to go down.
That doesn't necessarily trickle down to consumers though. As mentioned, it certainly doesn't in the case of UPS/Fedex. The high level question is what happens with the cost savings driverless trucking brings? Does it turn into profit or reduced pricing to consumers?
Mentioned in the article, but there's a pretty big trickle down effect that will crush other businesses. Roadside motels, for example. And while trucks will still need fuel, I don't think the current economics of truck stops work if you just sell gas.
Maybe a surprise for the government as well, less tax revenue since the new drivers will drive in a more fuel efficient way, and probably require a smaller overall fleet (no need for sleep). Currently, an average truck pays ~$15k/year in road/registration/use taxes.
It's going to be a very visible adjustment for everyone.
It's basically going to decimate the blue-collar workforce. "short term disability" is already increasingly the new stopgap between gaps in social welfare for unemployed and underemployed blue collar workers.
If driverless trucks become the new norm, expect major jumps in SSDI rolls, unless we institute some form of basic income.
I'm skeptical. European roads are not American roads. According to google there are over 4 million miles of road in the US and there is very little standardization. I would venture to say that road quality is much worse in the US. I'm skeptical that the sensors in self-driving vehicles are capable of making long hauls on US roads.
> We may also need dedicated lanes as slow-moving driverless trucks could be a hazard for drivers.
I wonder if the author realizes the amount of money this would take in the US. Even if the federal government put up the money to make this happen on interstates, each state would have to come up with the money for state roads. For most states, the transportation budget is a ongoing battle and I can't see tax payer money going to automated truck lanes any time soon.
My guess is that driverless trucks will only be 'a thing' in very urban areas over a short distance due to safety, maintenance, and financial concerns. Therefore, the long haul trucker will still have a job at the end of the day.
Well even Germany isn't going to start with self-driving trucks driving everywhere. Every country has standardization problems... in Germany there are ancient towns with arches that trucks can't go under (and not all of them are marked). In the US we have inconsistent/missing signs, dense urban areas built for small cars, and all kinds of crazy human driving.
My guess is actually opposite of yours though. I think short distance trucking will come last, with long-haul interstate trucking coming first. Short distances don't really need an automated truck... the trucker just gets in, drives, and arrives. Automating/standardizing loading/unloading would be great but automating the driver is less of a win.
On the hand, take interstates. Trucker gets in and drives for upward a few days with multiple mandated stops for naps/food... afaik, it takes 3 days to safely drive from SF to NY because of those stops. Now imagine a self-driving truck where the driver is only responsible for first/last-mile driving and refueling... done in 48 hours flat. 30% shorter transit time, plus whatever fuel/insurance savings the AI driver generates. Not bad.
> The trucks will likely drive at 45 mph so it would take 65 hours to cross the country. Still a huge improvement.
By "likely" you mean one guy in a Tech Crunch editorial mentioned that would be efficient. Driverless trucks could look totally different because they don't need to house a driver (and their sleeping quarters) and be much more aerodynamic.
> ancient towns with arches that trucks can't go under (and not all of them are marked).
And that are routinely blocked by trucks with human drivers who keep forgetting their required height clearance. If there was a way to make shipping companies fully responsible for all the delays caused but stuck trucks, laser-scanner assistance systems that stop the truck before it is stopped by the arch would already be a popular retrofit.
To be honest, the haulage company or their insurance company is losing money whilst their truck is stuck under a bridge, and even more when someone sends them the bill for the bridge repair. If laser scanners or databases attached to geolocation services aren't sufficiently accurate or affordable to make even that minimal level of driver aid widespread, it's probably an indication that adequate driver replacement services are going to be even further behind for those routes.
Trucking as an industry is still firmly entrenched in the 20th century. Those shipping companies do have to pay for delays, but the industry's mindset is that delays are an immutable cost of doing business... get insurance against delays, travel around areas that might pose risks (even if it takes longer), train humans to predict/handle exceptional cases, pad out shipping schedules, etc. There's plenty of room for disruption.
Truck manufacturers are onboard because they get to sell replacements for every truck on the road... it's the shipping companies that are going to be the hard sell. The market is ripe for disruption but both shipping customers and shippers will be hesitant when faced with new fangled laser-thingamajiggers.
"The average age of a commercial driver is 55 (and rising every year), with projected driver shortages" and "The loss of jobs representing 1 percent of the U.S. workforce will be a devastating blow to the economy" don't really add up. There is more and more jobs that young people don't want to do and this is probably one of the best examples. They have to be automated or at some point we won't have anyone to do them. In addition, this is going to take more than 10 years to get both regulations and road improvements to make this happen, so based on the current average age, a lot of them will be near/past retirement.
If you were 55+ with your only qualification being that you could drive a truck and that niche was automated away, this would absolutely be devastating to you.
That would probably be better. In reality, however, a business will go for the cheaper (or required-by-law) option and will more heavily towards humans or automation
To be honest, if I'm 55+, I'm probably not too worried that self driving trucks without attendant drivers might be permitted on some major trunk routes a few years after my retirement
Most of the truck freight carried on highways should be on railroads instead. It's economically and environmentally far more efficient.
The reason it is still carried on highways is because the highways are heavily subsidized while the railroads are not.
For example, most of the reason for expensive highway maintenance is the fatigue damage cause by trucks. Fatigue damage goes up as the cube of the weight, and the weight fees charged trucks don't remotely pay for it.
Don't have one. I just recall reading years ago that the fatigue damage cause by trucks loaded to the legal weight limit was 9,000 times that of a passenger car (and trucks are often overloaded). The flexing of the roadbed causes it to crumble away after a while. You can feel the roadbed go down when a truck passes.
The main damage passenger cars do is erosion from snow tires.
I was able to find this from the Congressional Budget Office
> Estimates of pavement damage by trucks, the largest per-mile external cost of truck use, range from about 5 to 55 cents per mile depending on the weight of the truck, the number of axles over which its weight is distributed, and where it operates....
So at the absolute highest end of that estimate you need to increase fuel taxes to $3/gallon, i.e., double the price of fuel to ~$6/gallon. That would make trucking 40% more expensive (since that's the fraction of operating costs devoted to fuel).
And a more realistic number might be closer to 20% or 30% more expensive. This would change things on the margins, but it's not clear to me that it would be transformative in pushing transport to trains.
20 to 30% is quite a bit. And road repairs are only part of the cost subsidy to trucks. Property taxes are assessed on the tracks, but not on the highways, for another.
Certainly 30% is a big impact if it's your day job, but it's unlikely that the transportation infrastructure of the US would be dramatically different. (After all, gas prices had $2/gallon fluctuations that persisted over many years without much impact.) Also worth pointing out that the OP article lists labor as 75% of the cost (which is very different than the source I used).
I'd be very glad to see truck taxes/fees adjusted to better match reality. If that means less truck and more trains, all the better. Still, it's not clear to me that trains don't also get implicit subsidies (that are just less discussed because trains don't inspire as much politics), or that the positive externalities of trucks are important, or whatever.
20-30% is huge. And when trucking is no longer a huge source of employment, the political will to assess realistic taxes on the environmental/ infrastructural costs of trucking might increase. No worries of truckers staging protests that tax increases will come out of their paychecks.
How about we automate rail traffic first. They are close...but the electronic system is still so far behind. They keep having to push back the requiremen.
I think there's less incentive for automating trains because of the cargo:driver ratio. The cost of the human at the helm is a much smaller portion of the cost of operating the railroad.
Actually not true; the total number of people it requires to move a train, with all the other trains on the track, and then taking in every safety precaution, track monitoring, etc. The operation involves many people on a highly coordinated level...they don't have a lot of room for error with the number of trains on the small amount of track.
I was just saying it from a standpoint of that is has been mandated by the government (U.S.) and the date has had to be pushed back multiple times because the railroads are having a tough time implementing it. It's actually a much harder problem then you might initially think. The cost of the human is negligible; it's about the cost of the cargo, and not needing to stop unnecessarily to change the humans out.
Either way, if we can't accomplish automated long distance rail...automated trucking freight doesn't look to be that close.
"Where drivers are restricted by law from driving more than 11 hours per day without taking an 8-hour break, a driverless truck can drive nearly 24 hours per day. That means the technology would effectively double the output of the U.S. transportation network at 25 percent of the cost."
This suggests each truck has one driver - the truck stops when the driver stops. Aren't there systems that let drivers pool/share trucks so the trucks can be on the road 24 hours a day?
I think thorstadt was talking about latency: just like express messengers switched horses in the pre-telegraph age, trucks could be handed from driver to driver to keep them running without mandated breaks.
With half-workday legs, a system like that could even allow many relay drivers to get home every day despite driving long-haul loads.
My gut feeling is that this could work in theory, but would never evolve in the framework of a free market economy (whereas a planned economy would tend do everything by train).
Can someone explain why we're supposedly getting driverless cars and trucks yet the simplistic task of ordering food isn't automated? Why does McDonald's have order takers?
Upselling? Why did several fuel stations pull out their pay-at-pump systems and force you to go into the store to pay -- so they can sell you more stuff you didn't originally intend to by (that they also make better margin on).
Automation is driving humans out of jobs. Driverless trucks will layoff 1%+ of the US population, because driverless trucks are far more economical. The general trend is profits go up and employment goes down.
What to do with such an economy? Basic income. Tax the profits and give everyone sufficient income to pay for the basic necessities. That's one of the conclusions of the 2011 book Race Against The Machine, by two MIT professors.
I'm a big fan of Alan Watts' "Money, Guilt, and the Machine" [0] as are many people here. It's most poignant point IMHO is that we're screwed until we can separate money and morality. As we move towards more political extremes here in the US, that's going to be near impossible.
So we can either separate money from morality, or suffer greatly as jobs - especially blue collar jobs - are automated away.
At one point the author says something about convoys of trucks and taking advantage of the speed for maximum fuel efficiency, 45 mph. I'm not sure that people traveling on the interstate will appreciate being stuck behind convoys of automated trucks all running at 45 mph.
If they stayed in the right lane it wouldn't be too much of a problem. The problem with trucks vs cars I run into most today is trucks passing other trucks in the left lane, or middle lanes on 3- or 4-lane highways. A convoy isn't the same thing as three trucks abreast, though.
I don't expect drivers to go away immediately. Instead, I expect their wages to drop 50% overnight - but they will still be required to be on the truck: to fill the tank, to clean something, to be there and guard it against theft, etc.
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[ 3.9 ms ] story [ 305 ms ] threadWe talk a lot about his job. It's not fun. He works long hours, a lot of it is mundane driving, and he sits idle a lot of the time.
I think he would be the first to agree that automation of his job is inevitable and likely necessary, given the dangers of truck driving. Hurling a multi-ton vehicle to and fro is a dangerous task at the best of times.
But therein lies the rub. We are just now reaching the point where we as a society are getting comfortable with automated cars. I think people will be less comfortable with the idea that the truck next to them has no human in it, and could experience some kind of glitch with catastrophic consequences. HN readers will understand that these cars are still a ways away, since the last 10% of the work required for true automation will take a lot longer to develop.
Trucks are way more complicated to drive. Once they're up to cruising speed, they're easy. But it's everything leading up to that point which is hard. Dealing with gear changes, airbrakes, load shifting, other vehicles that will inevitably cut you off, and much more.
And then when you get to your destination, manoeuvring a 50' trailer is no easy task, even for a trained driver like my dad.
It will happen, and it should happen. But it won't be easy, nor soon. Of course, I'd be happy to be wrong, and I'm sure my dad would be too.
RoLa (Rollende Landstraße) as we call this in Germany, or just transporting the flatbed carriages, requires a SHITLOAD of manual work, unlike containers where you don't even need people on the locos in the yard anymore.
Not to mention that long-haul-via-rail is only viable in the US... in Europe, it virtually doesn't exist anymore. It just isn't profitable due to various external conditions:
1) train track pricing is prohibitively expensive
2) freight trains don't get priority over passenger trains - quite the contrary. If you have any time-sensitive stuff, better transport it via road instead.
3) rail tracks are massively overbooked. One single delay and the entire system grinds to a screeching halt.
4) there is no such thing as cross-Europe locomotives/conductors. There might be multi-system-capable locos, but there is not a single loco on the market able to serve the entire fragmented European railroad technology.
There may be "just" 15/25 kV AC + 1k5/3kV DC, but every country needs their own roof collectors because they're NOT compatible (some countries don't even have roof collectors, but 3rd rails or sideway rails for the low-voltage DC stuff, and the DC stuff usually doesn't pack a lot of power so you can't really use them for any heavy load), but the real tech problem is the load of bollocks called signalling/security system, every country has their own, including Germany alone with FOUR popular systems (classic form signals, light-based signals, LZB/PZB and ETCS, in addition to various customizations in Eastern Germany and the S-Bahn tracks).
Not to mention the conductors which have to know all the signalling systems AND all the languages (compared to aviation where English is the standard worldwide), and they need to be expensively re-certified...
Yeah, ETCS, I hear you, but ETCS is a joke that would require literally hundreds of billions to retrofit across the major transit routes in Europe, but that won't happen - we Europeans haven't even managed to get our freight carriages to silent brakes yet!
5) There are still restrictions like maximum train lengths and the plain fact that European freight carriages only carry a pneumatic line for the brakes, but no data lines for controlling middle/back locos - so there's no technical way of extending train lengths because there's simply no loco combo capable of pulling >700m length heavy freight carriages with 3 locos on the front and no way to control a pushing loco in the back of the train. Simple physics, the good old screw coupling just can't support more load. There are alternatives (C-AKv coupling, it's high load AND compatible with the old coupling) but once again a retrofit would cost billions (see #4)...
Trains might be more efficient from an environmental and human-resources POV, but they're fucked up on any economic scale - and politicians all over Europe don't give a single fuck, instead they are all letting their rail systems rot to pieces and squeeze every tiny penny from the rail companies to fix up their even more rotten state budgets!
Freight trains get priority here and it still doesn't make sense to ship by train. Rail is pretty limited by the huge size of our country, and they need to be able to ship to tiny random stores all over the place. It makes more sense to send one truck that can stop anywhere there's a road than send it out via train and then transfer to a local truck, which might be sitting unused the rest of the time.
Quite the contrary, the US is better suited for rail than the rest of the world, at least for cross-country moving of goods (one single area of law, no customs crap to deal with, the only thing I'm not sure is signalling and interoperability of locomotives on rail systems in different states).
Trains are perfect for inter-city travel, the first/last mile should be handled with trucks unless the facility is so large that it can source or sink a huge number of trains (e.g. automobile, steel factories, coal mines, fossil power plants).
Trains have several single points of failure for a larger load. When there is a problem, all of the load is affected, it takes longer to repair, and problems with both the rails and the trains happen regularly. And trains have more complex maneuvering than trucks; switching lines is a non-trivial time-consuming matter and operators have a tough job just on the existing lines.
The fact remains we don't have enough rail to service most of the country, and nobody is paying for new rail, not to mention the issue of fitting more track on the existing land and bridges used for rail. Demand has been increasing steadily on rail, and only so much traffic can possibly run on the rails - which are shared with passenger trains, btw. To switch to trains you'd be adding 230% more traffic to the rails.
If you're a responsible freight truck company, you want to avoid this situation at all costs. There's always cargo that wants to be shipped - the only scarce resources are drivers and tractor units, and some companies even let multiple drivers share the tractors to maximize the usage of their tractors (that really depends on the company though, there are also companies where every driver "owns" his tractor).
> The fact remains we don't have enough rail to service most of the country, and nobody is paying for new rail
Yes, indeed. The beginnings of the stock markets actually were railroad construction companies, but these days the financial markets only care about the next big unicorn and not about creating something with real long term value, which a train track certainly is given that, once the track is laid, the land belongs to the company and the only major investments required are 50-year overhauls and regular maintenance. It's a shame.
Isn't using containers much more efficient anyway, instead of moving the whole truck?
The core problem is that freight companies in Europe standardized on the Euro Pool Palette (EPAL) but ISO containers worldwide use the non-metric US measurement system - thus leading to waste of space and potential safety issues (sliding palettes due to slack space on the floor).
Trucks, however, are fitted to the metric system and can safely transport EPALs, so you've got next to no alternative.
Interestingly in the northwestern u.s. (and I suspect throughout the western u.s.) the main rail corridors prioritize freight.
Discovered this while, as a regular Seattle - Portland traveler, I found myself stationary while lumber rolled by. Amtrak's leases are subordinate to the freight lines.
Example: you have refrigerated items (let's say a shipment of fresh fruit) that has to be maintained at a constant temperature and you want it delivered to your customer on Thursday when you ship Sunday night.
Truck: not a problem, and you can easily get updates all the time from dispatch (or if there is a GPS unit on the truck, immediately).
Railroad: maybe they will get it there, maybe they won't.
If the railroad puts a refrigerator unit on your boxcar and it breaks down, too bad - they won't reimburse you. A trucking company will.
Insurance?
If the thing you insure against actually happens, premiums go up to the point of it being uneconomic.
Sounds like both of those are more to do with shit rail companies than inherent downsides of rail (or upsides of trucking)?
> Now retired after more than 30 years in the produce business, Wolf noted that farmers began growing iceberg lettuce in the region just prior to the 1930s. The demand for the hearty lettuce variety soon took off through the use of refrigerated rail cars.
And yet the highways are full of semi trailers...
In the US, especially outside of the northeast, most interstate highways are not tolled, so users of the road don't pay any more for its maintenance than non-users do. But someone is still paying for it. Taxpayers who don't use the roads are effectively subsidizing those who do.
By contrast, railways usually own their rails and are obliged to maintain them themselves, and thus have to fold those costs into the price.
This is really unfair.
Last mile driving may not look anything like truck driving.
There’s no reason to build a cab into the truck that is only used for the last mile. Telepresence will do just fine.
Of course if you need to provide all of that to allow for someone to drive it manually around town a lot of those benefits are gone. Who knows, there will probably be some transitional period where all automated trucks are still equipped for manual control but I doubt it'll stay that way for long.
Although thinking about it, the guard could travel in a separate vehicle, and could be responsible for overseeing an entire convoy of trucks at one time.
Likewise, you may be monitoring city traffic and choosing alternate routes. But you won’t be driving with one foot on the brake pedal and your hands on the steering wheel.
Any driverless technology that requires a constant wireless internet connection is a non-starter.
You are there to route it around traffic jams, talk to the foreman on site, and choose the loading bay.
Even if you had a reliable high-bandwidth/low-latency connection, the truck will be better than you are at handling things that requires instant response. You are there to make decisions.
We still need to create on- and off-ramps so human drivers can bring trucks to the freeways where highway autopilot can take over.
They may have humans do all the manoeuvring within the distribution hubs long after they've automated all of the street driving.
Shifting and braking, though, seem to me like the kind of thing that automata should be good at. And I suppose that, once most of the cars on the road are autonomous, the streets will be much more truck-friendly.
0: http://www.insidejobs.com/careers/harbor-pilot
I doubt a "hub driver" will earn a 6-figure salary, but manoeuvring a semi truck two or three trailers is definitely a skilled job that many (most?) people are not capable of learning to do well.
The judgement for when to stop with an unsafe load and wayfinding at the last 100 yards of a route are indeed tasks that I'd prefer to leave to a human for the time being. Maybe we'll have 'dock pilots' like we do for large cargo ships?
"We still need to create on- and off-ramps so human drivers can bring trucks to the freeways where highway autopilot can take over."
A comment below talked about harbour pilots. That seems like a great idea.
An Australian friend of mine told me that the trucks that carry load from Australian mining fields are almost fully automated, and have been for a while now. So perhaps it's not that complicated?
The mechanical aspects of controlling a large truck and accounting for the variables is probably the easiest part of the problem.
Things involving humans (vehicles cutting you off, pedestrians, etc.) are part of the general class of problems that I'm assuming all automated vehicles are working on and are much harder.
I suspect it will still be years before much of trucking is automated. Why? It's not just the take crap from point A to point B, it's also being responsible for making sure what was ordered is actually loaded. It will be years before, say, the laborers at Earth Bound Farms south of Salinas (supplies large quantities of "organic" produce all up and down the west coast) automates their work staff or actually has their schedules down tight.
Trucking and hauling is full of inefficiencies, and those that suffer the most are the drivers. A pickup/dropoff that takes too long because the people at the origin/destination are lazy/slow/don't care/behind has a ripple effect.
And, one could argue "but automated trucks, what schedule?", there will still need to be a human present, regardless. I suspect said human will be restrained by rules similar to what drivers experience now.
But the long-haul interstate runs? I see this happening faster than any automated passenger cars, and once it starts it's going to rapidly take over that industry. Probably starts with convoys with a couple human tenders until the tech is proven.
Why on earth did you pick them out so incredibly specifically and put scare quotes around organic? Doesn't seem relevant.
"the car was the encroaching vehicle in 89% of headon crashes, 88% of the opposite-direction sideswipes, 80% of the rear-end crashes, and 72% of the same-direction sideswipes."
http://www.trucking.org/ATA%20Docs/News%20and%20Information/...
The definitive thing you would want, I assume, is "at-fault accidents per xxx miles driven" for all accidents, segmented by vehicle type.
A trucker is driving a 40 ton truck at 65mph. A passenger car with a family of four cuts in front of it, and the distance is closing fast.
A passenger car takes roughly 315 feet to come to a complete stop. A fully loaded truck takes 525 feet. The trucker now has to make a decision.
A) Do I slam on the brakes and keep going straight, and completely obliterate the car in front of me and the family inside it?
B) Do I cut off to the side, running over the rail, flipping the truck, killing myself, and possibly any other vehicles or pedestrians around, behind, or coming in the opposite direction of me?
The robot trucker could of course decide on B), but there are unknown variables about the extent of the resulting damage. This risk increases with merging between lanes or on/off ramps both by passenger vehicles, the truck itself, and motorcycles.
A dedicated lane would make this fantastically safer, but who will pay for it?
But how common is your scenario ?
I consider this a more critical failure :
The Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration suspects that as many as 28% of commercial truck drivers have sleep apnea.
The Sleep Medicine Division surmised that nearly a 250,000, persons fall asleep while driving each day of the year.
Nearly half of semi-truck drivers have admitted to actually ‘drifting off’ while driving a long-haul route.
https://www.hg.org/article.asp?id=29866
Anecdotally, the 3 truckers i've known have complained about it. I now drive very carefully around trucks.
Swerving at the last minute is a non-option because it means turning sharply, which jackknifes the truck. Turning while braking is worse because turning while either braking or accelerating compromises steering. You can try to brake until the last moment and then take off the brakes and try to turn, but again possible jackknife, the wheels could have locked up to the brakes, and now that you're traveling slower you will actually turn slower, so it's harder to cut the wheel and go around. All of this within a few seconds.
You have to either try to slow down and blow the horn, or get out of the way and blow the horn. Some people are lucky and either swerve away from the truck at the last moment, or their car only gets marginally crunched.
One hacker friend of mine's car actually got thrown nearly into the opposite lane of traffic on the highway with the same scenario. Recovery took a while. I think he's still got pain and limited mobility.
Not as often as truckers having incidents through tiredness etc. I'd warrant.
> You can try to brake ....
We're talking about "The computer ...."
Jam mobile connectivity, run the truck off the road by herding it with other vehicles, then break in and run-away with the goods or the entire trailer for that matter.
Do you take the guard hostage? Do you kill them? Will they themselves be armed? Will they put up a fight, training or no training? If you try aggressively to bring their vehicle to a halt, will they concede immediately (as an autonomous vehicle likely would), or will they try ramming your vehicle?
A human guard is an unknown quantity, and any crimes you commit against their person are in a different league to the theft of the cargo.
How does this change if truck design and "per-axel" fee incentives were rationalized[1][2] to instead maximize the number of axles? Doubling the number of axles reduces road damage by 94%. Currently semi trucks account for 6% of vehicle miles driven[3] and 99% of all traffic damage to roads.
But would this measure also improve braking distance and safety?
[1] http://www.nytimes.com/1989/07/26/business/economic-scene-be... (erroneously states that damage scales as the cube of axle weight; it scales as the fourth power or even the sixth(!) power on weak roads)
[2] https://truecostblog.com/2009/06/02/the-hidden-trucking-indu...
[3] http://www.princeton.edu/~alaink/Orf467F13/FreightFacts&Figu...
Race cars are designed to stop faster than passenger cars. Their brakes are huge, they're designed with exotic components to transfer heat to air faster, designed to take higher heat for longer, the cars are designed to flow air over the brakes, and they cost much more and don't last as long, and have advanced computerized systems to optimize brake utilization. They also have pretty big tires (usually for power transfer, not braking). Their tires are also grippier on a given surface at a higher tire temperature, so they cost more and don't last as long, and work best on dry flat surfaces. They strip all the weight out of the car to decrease the amount of force working against the tires and brakes. Even the suspension and shell is designed to increase tire, and thus brake, traction. They stop really goddamn fast - 93 feet for a Ferrari F430 Scuderia, from 60mph.
Trucks are designed to carry 40 tons up and down hills, survive tire blow-outs, brake system failures, and more miles than 1000 F430s will ever see, on all kinds of road surfaces and temperatures. It is possible to improve the brake time, but it would probably cost so much you might as well ship your produce in a Ferrari. Halve the weight they carry to reduce braking distance and now we have to have twice the trucks to carry the same loads, but you still have a vehicle 10x heavier than other vehicles with dynamics that simply can't move around like the lighter ones. More accidents would be guaranteed.
A lot of that isn't to brake faster but to keep the brakes from overheating from constant high use during a race that can last a couple hours or more. For normal emergency use you can drop a lot of that because they only need to be used extremely hard rarely and they'll have time to cool.
The bottom line is: a single panic stop on the highway isn't limited by your brakes on a passenger car, it's limited by your tires. The more friction your tires have with the road, the faster you'll slow down.
So yes, if you want a 40 ton truck to stop faster, it's completely doable: just increase the amount of rubber in contact with the road. Adding more wheels will do that quickly. However, more tires means more rolling friction which means less fuel economy and fuel economy is critically important to long-haul trucking. Also, adding more axles causes maneuverability problems in the city. Notice that on standard trailers, the rear axle set can be moved forward and back. They set them in the rearward position for long hauls, and in the forward position for shorter hauls.
Also, drivers as I understand it aren't paid monthly salaries, they're paid by the mile.
Don't they?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/30,000_Pounds_of_Bananas#The_i...
However, stopping distance in real-world scenarios is wayyyy farther than in practice runs, because even a second faster braking by the driver can save a hundred feet. So robotic braking (that we have today in passenger cars) could improve the distance a lot. But...
Trucks are still 10-20x heavier than passenger cars, and there are practical upper bounds to the size of their brakes and the g's they can pull. If a passenger car normally stops in 388 feet at 65mph (not uncommon) and it would stop at 196 feet at 45mph, a truck at 45mph would stop in 265 feet. So yes, the truck could in theory stop faster than the passenger car.
But passenger cars don't just slam on their brakes in front of trucks (often). They also just drift right the heck into the truck. Perhaps mechanisms could be developed to safely merge away, and they'll probably be developed in passenger cars first. But there's no denying that a dedicated roadway would not only save repair costs for passenger-vehicle-only roads, it would remove the risk of colliding with passenger vehicles no matter whose fault it was.
Soon, people learn that they are responsible for acting, well, responsibly.
As I've said before about smaller autonomous vehicles, they'll be programmed to always choose the option which is most defensible in court. I will be amazed if we ever see an autonomous vehicle on public roads which does something more complicated than "come to a complete halt as fast as possible while steering for the clearest area of asphalt."
"Case closed."
(I agree but humans are dumb and companies have to cover their asses.)
I think you mean that truckers FEEL like they deal with that dilemma all the time. If they ACTUALLY dealt with an A or B dilemma, they would routinely end up in situation A or B: running over a passenger car or flipping the truck. It happens SOMETIMES, but infrequently.
In reality the situations where other drivers do something stupid are probably much better handled by the self-driving truck, which doesn't panic, doesn't feel a fight-or-flight response, doesn't overstate the gravity of the situation... doesn't do anything except assess what to do next without emotion.
The more mass you have, the longer your braking distance and the more sluggish the reactions. While the problem is the same, and the mechanical differences easily modelled, light vehicles get away with lower accuracy and higher latencies, because they don't need to plan ahead so far.
If human truck drivers can do it, then a computer truck with a 360 model of the environment around it can do it more efficiently right.
I don't understand the problem here really. Computers are way better at logical computation than humans and that's all we require here.
I'm pretty sure the car will be able to identify and plastic bag ... not to mention a simple cargo manifest that would apply parameters about how the cargo is to be dealt with.
But these are all new technologies. Our visual recognition libraries are nowhere near ideal. I said this elsewhere but I will say it here too - our best of the best software can't tell a zebra and a sofa in a zebra print apart. I'm pretty sure that all that LIDAR is seeing is a spherical object on the road, it has no idea what it is.
The same with the cargo manifest - it sounds simple, but no one has a system like this. It would need to be made and implemented, and it takes time and effort - I'm not saying that it's impossible, far from it, but it's one more obstacle to overcome to make this possible.
Really? I find this surprising. Do you have any links or sources? I'd like to learn more.
http://rocknrollnerd.github.io/ml/2015/05/27/leopard-sofa.ht...
The article mentions 45mph as the most efficient speed for a truck. I can imagine the regulators demanding a pretty low speed for automated trucks.
Here is the big thing - the driverless truck has to operate in a uncontrolled environment that can result in human death. Who is the responsible party? The trucking company? The software developer?
Additionally we are talking situations where a computer can't have any reaction interruptions for hours and hours. No reboots. No garbage collection pauses. No panics.
Can this be done? Maybe. But at what cost? It might be that the best role for the computer is helping a truck driver be safer -- not to replace the truck driver.
You do have a point on liability, and I don't have an answer better than a centralised pool of money that everyone pays in or out of.
Some times we get so fascinated by technology, that we forget that the technology has to fit within human society.
Remember the whole concept of product/market fit - if the market rejects the product: it doesn't matter how "cool" the technology is.
Nope. Short of gross negligence in design, that seldom happens in any engineering field.
How many people were criminally charged in the Challenger disaster? None.
Additionally, going up on a rocket is a fundamentally risking proposition done by adults.
Having a driverless vehicle that glitches, applies power instead of brakes, and kills a bunch of pretty young girls.... well that makes the 5 oclock news and 11 oclock for many, many days.
People get charged with crimes.
You're illustrating my point for me quite nicely. Frankly, I can't think of a criminal conviction, even at the corporate level, for design flaws in the auto industry without going all the way back to the Ford Pinto.
You mean, just like existing ones? It's not like we're still driving purely mechanical cars. Current production vehicles already have plenty of software managing stuff.
As a commercially-rated pilot I would be shocked, too - since few airport runways are certified for Cat III landings, and that's only under restricted wind speeds.
And even after autoland in fog, a pilot still taxis up to the gate.
A fully loaded truck traveling 55mph (on some roads they are allowed 65 or even 75) can weigh 80,000 lbs or more (in Canada under certain circumstances, 139,500 lbs).
That is a tremendous amount of force that must be handled properly 100% of the time, through rain, hail, sleet, snow - and with smaller cars weaving in and out of traffic all around them.
I can also see traffic lanes being created to support commerce, special easement areas for trucks at stops that don't have to support showers/food/bathrooms etc... reducing overall cost.
All of this comes at cost to human workers - but it's inevitable.
I disagree. Specifically, you are assuming that the human workers will quietly accept their fate.
History is full of jobs that have been automated away, and few of those historical examples offered a more obvious and large payoff.
With railroads, there is not an economic incentive for automation.
One commentator suggested that driverless trucks would have to be separated from human drivers. Railroads have this thing called "tracks"
Another suggested the wonderful advantage of a driverless truck not getting into accidents. Railroads have an excellent safety record.
Driverless trucks as a way to reduce the need to spend money on humans. Railroads need only 2 humans for 100+ unit train that is equivalent to 300 or so trucks. ( 1 railcar = 3 truckloads https://www.chrobinson.com/en/us/Logistics/Intermodal-Rail/C... )
Trains are 10x more ( http://grist.org/article/freight-trains-19th-century-technol... ) more energy efficient than trucks.
What is the economic model to use driverless trucks? Sure the trucking industry will push for this. But the railroad industry has so many natural advantages.
Road goes to more places than train tracks.
You dont really need more than that...
The same as for trucks with drivers (only cheaper) and those already control much of the transportation business.
That's an interesting point. I wonder if self-driving trucks will tend to be smaller, because there's less incentive to amortize the wages of the driver by making his/her truck as large as possible.
I wonder if there will be a more specialised role for human drivers here akin to pilots in ports. Companies at the scale able to invest in the tech might have the trucks arrive at a queue near regional hubs and have wet-ware do the 10 minutes of fiddly driving after clearing off the Smart car debris.
In the states, many distribution centers are located next to major transportation arteries, whether rail or interstate highway. In addition, many of the places they ship to are also located on major arteries. It wouldn't be a huge stretch to have automated trucks you load on one end, they drive to the other (using 98% highway driving), then park in a waiting area until a human finishes the job by parking them.
The interesting edge cases here would be accidents, construction, and detours. Whatever you deploy should be able to handle those without human intervention. Otherwise we could end up with every accident site also having 100 automated trucks at a dead stop waiting on drivers to show up. That'd be ugly.
It's not unlike many college kids taking a job as a security guard and "watching monitors" while doing their homework, etc. (Another thing that I considered, but never actually did.)
Of course, there's a lot more training for truck driving, but I don't see that as a major barrier, given the benefits of extra pay and travel.
1) Automated gears and obstacle detection - we already have this. 2) Have the truck stay in one lane and maintain distance - We're close. This means humans stay in truck and solve the hard problems when encountered. (Kind of like pilots) 3) Automated port to port driving without humans. 4) Destination to destination driving without humans.
We already fly military aircraft remotely, I don't see why a truck that's packed with cameras and sensors can't be driven safely by a human in an office somewhere.
Unless the truck somehow acknowledges adjacent vehicles in a comforting way. I don't know what that would look like, but it would probably be coupled with advertising and data collection (no law against filming all the cars around you and what they are doing).
My first airplane journey was fascinating. As some one who doesn't know how to drive a car, and is struggling trying to learn it, I was spell bound when I watched the pilot taxi the huge airplane to the terminal.
Well airplanes aren't even regular shaped and size of the human taxi'ing the plane to the plane is very small. Yet the pilot could precision park to the terminal.
The fact is no matter how hard it seems, if you've been doing it day in and out, it looks like just another job at the end.
So, right around the corner except for billions in infrastructure investment.
I'm quite certain that this--like many other things related to autonomous vehicles--will happen. But they're decades further away than 75% solutions lead many people to think.
To be fair though, the rail networks here in North America are seen as the most developed freight networks in the world (I wish we had more passenger service though; my daily commute to KU and back is a pain): 2863 Gt-km (NA), 2451 (China), 2351 (Russia), vs 391 (EU).
How much do you think the salary of a truck driver is?
How many years does it take for the automated solution to be more cost effective?
http://fourlightyears.blogspot.com.au/2016/03/get-ready-for-...
They already know how to organize, communicate, influence, etc. And then there's the union history, tactics, etc.
That means public money. Something I don't see happening for a long time.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luddite
The Amish?
Of course, there is a lot that could be done, but most of that has one thing in common -- money, for the engineering, manufacturing, original purchase, in-service monitoring, problem detection, problem diagnosis, and repair. Money.
I never left. ;)
- Dispatch [1]
- Starships [2]
- And at least one stealth mode company
[1] http://techcrunch.com/2016/04/06/self-driving-delivery-vehic...
[2] https://www.starship.xyz/concept/
Video showing how the mining trucks operate: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s0RCSX95QmE (2012)
Awhile back there was a post about the early experience of a young and enthusiastic programmer. The take away phrase, in response to someone sending nonsense input, was "Some people just want to watch the world burn."
I can see assholes trying to make sure that an automated truck can't change lanes, or get to the exit it needs to reach, etc.
I myself have at times intentionally walked too close to the robotic carts that move supplies to workstations at my work, just to hear them stop and beep for a few seconds.
That's a big line in the batman movie "the dark knight". While it could have originally came from elsewhere, I'd be willing to bet it came from the movie.
3.5 million truck drivers in the US alone. I suspect that would be your pool of assholes, and I'm not sure I would blame them.
The self-driving trucks will, by definition, be equipped with omnidirectional, high resolution 3d cameras. Who was that guy who kept cutting off our truck? Well, we could 3d print his face and license plate if you'd like. Also, the trucking industry will run to lawmakers the very first time this happens, and they are a very strong lobby. Finally, it's just a shitty thing to do, and everyone will understand that. Much like shining a laser at a plane is almost universally reviled, there will be social consequences for being that guy who torments driverless trucks.
By the way, "robotic carts that move supplies to workstations"? Is this a common thing? Can you say where you work?
The carts are like little flat bed trucks, and they do one thing: move empty and full bins from station to station, and the warehouse. They have rollers on the flatbed part, that push bins over to the hole in the wall at a station. The hole in the wall has similar rollers. They follow a set route along the wall of a hallway that's used by people and the carts.
Often while driving i get the feeling im the only one who realizes if you miss an exit, you can just get off at the next exit...
Going your preferred route is never more important than driving safely. People never seem to consider this when they cross several lanes of traffic to make a turn or get off at an exit.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CQSRPMFDTSs - only 1 minute long, no swearing
This has been a subject of long debate in India - autonomous cars are fairly useless in Indian cities. At the scale of transportation needed, nothing other than mass transportation (subways,etc) makes sense with last mile connectivity.
The same question exists for freight - should we construct trains or trucks? Taking into account offloading cost - which one is more efficient? I think people overestimate the complexity of shipping items with time guarantees. A hub and spoke model works great here - but what is doing the actual long haul?
And people don't understand the scale at which countries like India or China need to operate. The transportation needs of all of Europe are dwarfed by how much needs to be moved (quickly and economically ) in India.
He says, it's so ridiculous, how far away we are from automatting truck driving. There is a lot of manual work for loading and off-loading rigs. Plus there is driving in every single possible driving condition possible, around the world.
He said, he could see an auto-pilot system being installed in trucks in the next 10 years, but the rest is all manually done.
The 'some kind of logistics manager' thinks there'll be autonomous trucks pretty shortly, but the implementation will look like that Simpsons episode for years to come -- the way things work right now, a human in the cab is required.
https://www.lojistic.com/pdf/UPS-Fedex-General-Price-Increas...
Maybe a surprise for the government as well, less tax revenue since the new drivers will drive in a more fuel efficient way, and probably require a smaller overall fleet (no need for sleep). Currently, an average truck pays ~$15k/year in road/registration/use taxes.
It's going to be a very visible adjustment for everyone.
If driverless trucks become the new norm, expect major jumps in SSDI rolls, unless we institute some form of basic income.
http://apps.npr.org/unfit-for-work/
> We may also need dedicated lanes as slow-moving driverless trucks could be a hazard for drivers.
I wonder if the author realizes the amount of money this would take in the US. Even if the federal government put up the money to make this happen on interstates, each state would have to come up with the money for state roads. For most states, the transportation budget is a ongoing battle and I can't see tax payer money going to automated truck lanes any time soon.
My guess is that driverless trucks will only be 'a thing' in very urban areas over a short distance due to safety, maintenance, and financial concerns. Therefore, the long haul trucker will still have a job at the end of the day.
My guess is actually opposite of yours though. I think short distance trucking will come last, with long-haul interstate trucking coming first. Short distances don't really need an automated truck... the trucker just gets in, drives, and arrives. Automating/standardizing loading/unloading would be great but automating the driver is less of a win.
On the hand, take interstates. Trucker gets in and drives for upward a few days with multiple mandated stops for naps/food... afaik, it takes 3 days to safely drive from SF to NY because of those stops. Now imagine a self-driving truck where the driver is only responsible for first/last-mile driving and refueling... done in 48 hours flat. 30% shorter transit time, plus whatever fuel/insurance savings the AI driver generates. Not bad.
By "likely" you mean one guy in a Tech Crunch editorial mentioned that would be efficient. Driverless trucks could look totally different because they don't need to house a driver (and their sleeping quarters) and be much more aerodynamic.
And that are routinely blocked by trucks with human drivers who keep forgetting their required height clearance. If there was a way to make shipping companies fully responsible for all the delays caused but stuck trucks, laser-scanner assistance systems that stop the truck before it is stopped by the arch would already be a popular retrofit.
Truck manufacturers are onboard because they get to sell replacements for every truck on the road... it's the shipping companies that are going to be the hard sell. The market is ripe for disruption but both shipping customers and shippers will be hesitant when faced with new fangled laser-thingamajiggers.
The reason it is still carried on highways is because the highways are heavily subsidized while the railroads are not.
For example, most of the reason for expensive highway maintenance is the fatigue damage cause by trucks. Fatigue damage goes up as the cube of the weight, and the weight fees charged trucks don't remotely pay for it.
Source?
The main damage passenger cars do is erosion from snow tires.
> Estimates of pavement damage by trucks, the largest per-mile external cost of truck use, range from about 5 to 55 cents per mile depending on the weight of the truck, the number of axles over which its weight is distributed, and where it operates....
https://www.cbo.gov/sites/default/files/112th-congress-2011-...
The fuel tax is 30 cents/gallon of diesel, which for an 18-wheeler getting a typical 6 mpg is about 5 cents / mile.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fuel_taxes_in_the_United_State...
So at the absolute highest end of that estimate you need to increase fuel taxes to $3/gallon, i.e., double the price of fuel to ~$6/gallon. That would make trucking 40% more expensive (since that's the fraction of operating costs devoted to fuel).
http://www.thetruckersreport.com/infographics/cost-of-trucki...
And a more realistic number might be closer to 20% or 30% more expensive. This would change things on the margins, but it's not clear to me that it would be transformative in pushing transport to trains.
I'd be very glad to see truck taxes/fees adjusted to better match reality. If that means less truck and more trains, all the better. Still, it's not clear to me that trains don't also get implicit subsidies (that are just less discussed because trains don't inspire as much politics), or that the positive externalities of trucks are important, or whatever.
They still had drivers in them, but the trucks were automated (it doesn't mention if the drivers had to override it at times or not).
Either way, if we can't accomplish automated long distance rail...automated trucking freight doesn't look to be that close.
This suggests each truck has one driver - the truck stops when the driver stops. Aren't there systems that let drivers pool/share trucks so the trucks can be on the road 24 hours a day?
With half-workday legs, a system like that could even allow many relay drivers to get home every day despite driving long-haul loads.
My gut feeling is that this could work in theory, but would never evolve in the framework of a free market economy (whereas a planned economy would tend do everything by train).
What to do with such an economy? Basic income. Tax the profits and give everyone sufficient income to pay for the basic necessities. That's one of the conclusions of the 2011 book Race Against The Machine, by two MIT professors.
So we can either separate money from morality, or suffer greatly as jobs - especially blue collar jobs - are automated away.
Alas I fear there will be great suffering...
[0] https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=ssDY74nLuLg