Your comment and the parent's are snarky and ungenerous. The accomplishment is the self-driving truck crossing 3k miles, not the butter contained within.
No single driver can make that time, but a two person team can make coast to coast in 3days in decent weather.
The issue with all these autonomous vehicles is that this country regularly has some nasty weather.
It’s a refrigerated good. No human is safely driving from California to Pennsylvania in 3 days. If you need something fresh, this is basically telling supermarkets and distributors that robots can get it to you faster.
"Citizenship"
A celebration of all the moments our children will remember as the beginning of the end, thanks to our desire to change the world for the butter.
Actually the butter is the important thing in this article. The self-driving revolution isn't going to enable beautiful and wondrous accomplishments. Instead, it's going to enable international megaconglomerates to more cheaply exploit the desperately poor migrant workforces of far-away places. That's all you're going to get out if it: butter at the same price, but from Tulare County and the butter company saves ten cents per ton by cutting out the trucker.
I have trouble believing you actually think that. I suspect you are just trying to defend a comment that's indefensibly vapid. But, if you genuinely believe there's no positive value in freight and that making it more efficient is an unworthy goal, then I don't think we'll come eye to eye on anything tonight.
Why isn’t this a great accomplishment? People don’t have to be long haul truck drivers or be alert the whole time..
Even if it entirely eliminates human beings, it means the person who’d be driving the truck will be able to do better paying or other fulfilling tasks. Who knows...study or become an artist or spend more time with children etc.
I also don’t see how migrant workers are being exploited? How is anyone exploited if they are not driving long haul truck routes?
> I also don’t see how migrant workers are being exploited? How is anyone exploited if they are not driving long haul truck routes?
Because you are making it cheaper to transport from California agribusinesses who are known for violating labor laws to Pennsylvania who is known for enforcing labor laws.
This is in opposition to local manufacturing which becomes more economically feasible the more transport costs.
I chose those two articles because they are quite a bit more "pro-immigration" than others and most likely to blunt the knee-jerk "Yer a raciiiiist!" idiots.
The real problem is that rather than deporting all these people we should be hitting the agribusinesses with gigantic fines and jail time for exploiting them in the first place. If some CEOs wound up in jail for employing undocumented workers and not paying minimum wage instead of just getting a slap on the wrist, this problem would self-correct.
Once upon a time, horse drawn carriages transported people and there were stables and groomsmen and carriage drivers and those who provided food and board for the horses. That entire industry and those jobs disappeared when the motor cars came along. They found other jobs. We moved on.
^ this is a great comment, and speaks to the reality. as cars came to prominence a whole host of supporting industry developed, creating jobs. it seems like some of those jobs required more technical training than the jobs they replaced.
A bar friend of mine is currently a truck driver. He's going to school to learn to be a network engineer.
Retraining is a really important part of our modern reality. The idea that we can simply turn off the tap of advancing technology so that the hardest working, lowest paid workers can continue to toil for peanuts is super shitty. There are some incredibly intelligent people who stumbled in their development who really deserve a second chance at jobs that aren't ass.
When my family immigrated to this country I was told I was here to take "their jobs". I started by taking an engineering job but I'm only one person that's not good enough, so I automated everyone around me out of a job... but I could do better. Make AI that does people's jobs and I the immigrant can take a lot more people's jobs.
> San Francisco-based self-driving truck startup Embark Trucks, which last year completed a five-day, 2,400-mile cross-country trip. But that truck carried no freight.
Still, you'd think they'd ship something in abundant supply in California and short supply in Pennsylvania. Optimism, maybe.
The only one that sounds indefensibly vapid, is you. I thought they were thoughtful comments that would be valued in a more open-minded, and frankly more interesting venue. Certainly not worthy of being flagged. Not much latitude in thought at this site.
That’s the reality of modern agriculture. All of this innovation and advanced tech just squeezing a few pennies out of butter.
Check out this gentleman, a 4th generation onion farmer in upstate NY who cannot sell his onions at any price. Like many farmers in the northeast, he’ll be bankrupt in a few months.
Not really. Labor is a constraint that has kept truly dominant players from taking over the industry.
Without that, trucks are no different than cable companies, airlines, or other capital intensive businesses. They’ll consolidate over time into oligopoly. Whatever efficiency gains appear will be eaten up by the lack of market forces.
Reading his posts it sounds like what he needs are futures contracts. He is complaining of the price dropping once harvest season hits. He is claiming there is a conspiracy that once supply enter the market prices drop. Sadly due to historic reasons futures markets for onions are illegal: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Onion_Futures_Act
His plight speaks to why futures markets are important. His costs and production plans were set many months ago, yet his revenue is only decided now. With futures he could hedge downward exposure.
There are definitely big changes in how produce is being purchased now, with closed-market strategic sourcing replacing older markets that were more transparent. Producers are paying for increasing consumer competition in grocery.
I wish I had posted this link..it’s a much better one and gives more details https://www.supplychaindive.com/news/plusai-autonomous-truck... [..]To comply with hours of service (HOS) requirements, Shawn Kerrigan, COO and co-founder of Plus.ai, told Supply Chain Dive that the truck driver took over when getting off the highway for rest stops and breaks, otherwise, he said the journey was completed autonomously.[..]
I’ve driven this route before. What’s remarkable about it is how unremarkable it is. The only thing could be a possible risk would be a snowstorm in Colorado. Otherwise the route is basically one long boring ride. Maybe the Las Vegas 95-15 intersection presents a challenge? St Louis and Kansas City have some transitions. Everywhere else - Mojave, Utah, Colorado, Indiana, Ohio, PA is all relatively straight, without obstacles and rural. Even the 78 to 309 transition to Quakertown is a fairly pedestrian two lane merge. I guess my point is if you’re gonna do a 3000 mile butter run, it could get any easier. Personally I would have hired a 78 Trans Am and shipped a container’s worth of Coors.
The delivery for Land O' Lakes is the first where Plus.ai has been able to disclose companies involved. Kerrigan said he was unable to confirm whether Plus.ai would run similar deliveries for Land O' Lakes. He said the trip allowed Plus.ai to collect data on driving conditions, including rain and snow, which is crucial to ensuring the technology is safe for mainstream use.
TuSimple, another autonomous trucking company, is planning to run fully autonomous commercial freight deliveries in 2021. The company's trucks also run at L4 autonomy, and completed pilots delivering cargo for UPS and the U.S. Postal Service in Arizona this year.
Amazon, Google and other major companies have explored using autonomous trucks to speed up delivery times, address the driver shortage, or potentially phase out drivers.[..]
it's worse than that, of course. You'll find, like a certain Greek philosopher fond of asking annoying questions, that the first 90% of the last 10% will be OK, and that last 10% will be the other 90% of the ... etc. etc. etc.
In 1995 having a domestic phone call, placed on a wired line, drop due to line issues was effectively inconceivable -- it simply would never happen. In 2015 we were in a time when it happened all the time, people simply accepted that voip was often unreliable.
In 2019 the idea of a vehicle around you simply stopping because its driver doesn't know how to handle a situation is extremely rare.
I suspect that by 2039 it will be far more commonplace, shrugged off as just a fact of life that electronic drivers fail on a regular basis and need to pull over and wait either for intervention or conditions to change.
True ... I kind of forgot how reliable analogue tone switching were. Someone cut of the wire once in the road. It's like I see more and more cars stuck at the roadside. Atleast in the 90s the drove until they started to smoke.
Is that actually true? My parents had phones around then and they've always had this habit where they say "Hello! HELLO!" At the shortest momentary pause in the conversation.
No, we had calls drop often enough when I was a kid. But we didn't live in a big city, and it wasn't surprising to us when it happened.
It happened about as often as it happens to me with a cellphone when neither party is moving between towers and has decent coverage.
We expect cell drops because of a technology constraint, even in big cities. Likewise, I think the parent poster is right that we'll expect it more once it starts happening more.
Huh? The comment you're replying to says the first 90% of the work is easy and the last 10% is difficult. What you're saying is very much not "worse than that"; you're saying the first 90% is easy, then it's a small jump to the first 99%, and then just a bit more to the first 99.9%...
That's a huge improvement over the last 10% being difficult!
I'll take a 90% efficiency gain any day. If they can drive I-70 from SF to NYC with no human, or the 10 from Florida to California, that seems like a win, even if the person has to drive in the city. Warehousing will just get shifted around to work with where the trucks can safely drive.
If having less work that needs to be done is a negative then there's a problem with our system of economics, not with having less work that needs to be done.
More automation is a win for the middle class and every other class. If a society chooses to violently deprive the middle class of economic resources, that's the fault of the police, not the automated economy.
The police might enforce the legal code of a system the funnels economic gains to fewer and fewer people, but they don’t come up with the ideas on which that system is based.
But that isn't what the article talked about either (A European company did do a run like that a while though).
It did talk about "level 4 autonomy" based on a single drive with no disengagements (they mentioned they'd made a lot of drives but didn't mention their disengagement rate overall), doesn't sound like "achieving level 4" autonomy either-either.
I would imagine that the current google captcha system has so much traffic, you could use it to power real time driving with static pictures. Set 20 people to tell you if there is a stop sign. 50 more to decide if that object in the road is dangerous or not. All you need is a decent number of responses coming back that agree.
This is halarious and terrifying. I can envisage groups of trolls who get together to captcha-troll lorries into buldings or worse for lulz and the terribly written legislation shoved in place to mitigate it before nation-states get in on the fun.
>> If you need a safety driver 100% of the time, the net gain in efficiency is 0%.
If this trial period helps us improve the technology and eventually remove the safety driver after 1, 2, or 10yrs, that is a huge gain. What is the rush? -- every technology takes time to perfect. Lets judge the technology once it has had time to mature.
If the truck still requires a human for some tasks (intra-city, fuelling, etc.) but can be rated to legally drive itself for most of the trip, then the human could sleep / eat / etc. during those times they're not required. This would presumably let them avoid minimum stationary rest times etc. since they could get a full rest of sleep while the truck drives itself (on sufficiently long journeys).
For owner-operators who live out of their vehicle anyway and are more concerned about getting work than sleeping in a hotel somewhere this could dramatically increase the volume of work they can take on (at least until fully autonomous trucks become widely available and humans are completely deprecated as truck drivers).
From that perspective it would be more efficient, not 90% but there would be significant gains.
Well, if you had trucks that were safe enough to sleep in while they auto-drove, the companies would certainly want to go one better and have them drive empty. They could create dedicated fueling and loading areas if need-be.
But the trucks being that safe is the big question. The article describes a single trip without disengagement. Much more that is clearly needed.
Handling that 10% is going to be tricky, though. Can an unpiloted truck be trusted to know its limitations perfectly, shutdown and park when it hits borderline road conditions?
Judging by how frequently I occasionally lose internet connection for a mile or two in my major metro area for even basic tasks, like Siri dictation or streaming audio, I can't imagine how remote takeover could possibly be the answer to the "10%" situation unless we're prepared for some percentage of the time we are faced with a truck that simply gives up, puts on four-way flashers and comes to a stop wherever it may be (which could include network dead zones)... and then it's a matter for the police and/or recovery workers to either get the AI back in the saddle or move the truck.
> Judging by how frequently I occasionally lose internet connection for a mile or two in my major metro area for even basic tasks, like Siri dictation or streaming audio, I can't imagine how remote takeover could possibly be the answer to the "10%" situation
I mean, it's possible that demand for self-driving trucks means reliable wireless connections get implemented everywhere they can drive.
There is already fantastic LTE along all the long-haul truck routes, because human truck drivers like to be connected to the rest of society while they are alone on the road for dozens of hours.
"I-80 does not enter New York City. [...] I-80's designated end (as per signage and New Jersey Department of Transportation documents) is four miles (6.4 km) short of New York City in Teaneck, before the Degraw Avenue overpass."
The problem is that you can't plan the remaining 10%. Perhaps it's every 10 miles you have to have the safety driver take over. That makes it effectively useless.
I want to hear more about how it will work when guys who are braking-bad can drive up alongside the truck and determine that there's no human driver. One car in front, one car on the side ...
> The truck... had to take scheduled breaks but drove mostly autonomously. There were zero “disengagements,” or times the self-driving system had to be suspended because of a problem
These seems to imply short bursts of voluntarily shutting off auto-drive; I'd be curious to understand the rationale for when the two human copilots did so.
This would still be a big win for long haul trucking, most of time is spent staying in lane on the interstate. The drivers are required to take breaks to stay alert which adds time to the delivery unless alternating drivers.
IMO this is where self driving should focus, not city driving. Truck drivers or anyone gets the vehicle on the interstate and you can sleep or whatever to the next exit for fuel or your destination then take over again.
The devil is in the details... Which are totally absent from the article.
So what if it drove itself down the freeway? This is literally the easiest thing that "self-driving" vehicles manage to do.
Did it fuel itself? Did it take exits and drive itself to the gas station? Where did the driver take over when it got near the delivery docks? Did the truck also get clearance and dock itself? Did the truck even pull itself out of the loading dock when it first embarked on it's trip? Those are the hard things to solve, and conveniently are omitted.
For the initial truly driverless test, mount a nice comfortable seat on the truck's front grill and ask the CEO to sit there for this same trip. If he's confident enough to be the crumple zone, that's something.
Maybe the same should go for the larger shareholders and the lead engineers. The rest of us will have skin in the game whether we want to or not. They should have more.
Yeah that doesn't make much sense to me. Local brands of butter made with local dairy are popular in Pennsylvania. It's alarming to think how environmentally inefficient shipping butter two thousand miles must be.
One can not forget the genius product that is Fiji Water[1]. Thinking about what happened to get that bottle into the fridge of my bodega makes me shudder.
One hundred percent of FIJI Water is from a single source in the pristine, tropical Fiji Islands, an archipelago of over 300 islands nestled in the South Pacific, more than 1600 miles from the nearest industrialized country."
Interesting thing is that their Silicon Valley office is next to a strip mall and is more of an office space than an industrial one. I live near there and so far haven't seen any of their branded trucks or anything of their brand really relative to other self driving startups like Apple roaming around with their mattress-like hardware system.
So I'm guessing most development work is happening in China, just like several other Chinese based self-driving companies.
Yes. You are right R&D offices are in China. US HQ in Cupertino. It only started in 2016...so I guess most of the AI R&D already developed in China prior.
Makes you wonder if the things they are claiming to have working, and the accomplishments, are actually true, or just smoke as they hope for a high flying payday by a cash flush competitor hoping to buy advancements.
Why does it need to be without human intervention? A gas station attendant on major trucking routes is a pretty easy solution until some autonomous docking standard is developed.
By not having one and being an electric truck instead. That will help with heavy loads as well because they have awesome torque. Just a matter of time before battery production volume enables mass retirement of Diesel fleets. Short term, there simply aren't enough batteries and plenty more lucrative things that also require batteries (like luxury tank like trucks for people who need to compensate for something). Once that market saturates, trucks are obviously going electric at a massive scale.
We need to create lots of jobs in other industries that allow living wages without a college degree.
The government should massively incentivize:
- solar farms
- wind turbines
- battery storage deployments
- residential solar w/ batteries and grid-down operation (most grid-tied virtual battery solar stops working completely in a power outage)
- achieve fusion power net output
- elderly and disabled caregivers
- offer an option to teach and mentor people the fundamentals of running a successful small business (expanding SBA/SCORE)
- give people a chance to showcase, see and try out different industries
- setup a factory incubator to allow bootstrapping and designing efficient, streamlined operations for quality products made in the US at globally-competitive prices.
Investing in people and infrastructure brings lots of indirect returns. Do everything possible to help people to succeed and have a future.
These don't sound like drop in replacements for truck driving. A truck driver might not be able-bodied enough to install solar panels, might not be willing to take the pay cut or move to a new state where the job is.
A paying job is better than no job. And there is such a thing as minimum wage. And no reason to assume it'll necessarily be a pay cut. EDIT: And according to another comment further down this thread, trucker jobs don't even pay all that well.
> move to a new state where the job is.
Because that's worse than being away from home/family for long periods of time? I don't understand this logic.
Why? Is there something you're missing that requires a lot more workers?
The assumption that people need to be fit into "jobs" is, well, a salaried employment fetish; or the moral assumption that if you don't work a job you don't deserve goods and services.
Now, it's true that there actually is a whole lot of work in setting up and distributing alternative energy devices and infrasturcture. But overall, a lot of human labor is becoming redundant with automation, and there aren't "more jobs than people". Getting people to artificially create businesses as an alternative to salaried employment is also no solution.
PS - "At globally-competitive prices" = "Make workers compete with sweatshop pseudo-slave-labor in other countries, thus ensuring their own poverty and overwork."
They already have been displaced largely due to propaganda which is why we have record remuneration and demand for truck drivers. Musk already failed the 2020 goal, so I think it's important to decide when exactly they will be replaced. Will they replace log truck drivers in New Zealand like my brother, who has a ton of responsibilities other than just driving on single-lane off-road tracks (which requires special protocols for safety, etc)?
What's interesting is that it seems that there's already a shortage of truck drivers out there, so it's not only displacement, but also filling of jobs which don't have enough people willing to take https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-07-24/u-s-truck...
It might indicate that the people are aware that the long term prospects are terrible and would make the investment of time/money a bad idea even if the jobs pay incredibly well right now.
That just means that it doesn't pay enough though. Imagine this thought experiment, if you could make 1,000,000USD a year from being a truck driver, would you do it? Even if that job only has a 3-4 year lifespan?
I suspect that most people would.
Obviously 1,000,000 is _too much_, but conversely whatever the current rate is, is probably too low.
You're looking at the pay in isolation from other career options. Imagine you're 25 and looking for something long term. Do you do trucking knowing that it won't last and you'll have to change to something else later, or do you look for a different career instead? Everyone who thinks it through will choose something else. The current level of pay is attractive to truckers moving to other companies, but it's not much of an incentive to start trucking unless you have no other options.
If I was 25 and offered $1,000,000/year for 2 years as a trucker, or $100,000 as a code monkey, I'd take the trucking job.
It helps that I have the benefit of hindsight having only started my career in IT at 27, and done all sorts of other stuff before then, none of which had any long term prospects, nor did it pay $1MM/year.
Well, if they paid you a billion dollars a year, you'd do it, which means that there's a point between a dollar and a billion where you can satisfy demand. The fact that pay is less than that means the grandfather is correct, what you're referring to is just why people feel it doesn't pay well enough.
it is also an indication of a highly regulated industry which disqualifies a lot of would be workers for better or worse. There are many issues which prevent hiring, ranging from certain felonies on your record, if there are outstanding warrants, and that a CDL comes with drug and alcohol testing. This is on top of the obvious issues with your driving history.
While there is this big push to legalize drugs like marijuana it does not negate federal and state rules against its use legal or not and certain occupations.
The job pays like shit. You have to pay $2-5k for classes to get a CDL or get locked in with a company that trains you and you pay back at their variable rates of interest... oh and they "lose payments" often along with charging you high late fees.
They take anyone with a heartbeat. It's the ultimate form of equality. If you're dumb enough or desperate enough, they'll take you no matter your gender, race or self identifying whatever.
The job pays like crap, you're treated like crap and your body goes to shit real fast.
There are regulations, and most of them are pro-trucker, aimed to protect them from abuse by the company. Problem is, a majority of voters have this weird and incredibly stupid fantasy that trucker life equals a cowboy life. Thus, company lobbyists are able to easily manipulate the narrative to the media, public and Congress. Making sure truckers don't get a voice or have a leg to stand on. Most truckers aren't the brightest bulbs in the shed. I had to do it out of desperation from a spat of unemployment. I had a plan and a way out, unlike most of them. What really sucks, most truckers are really good people. They do the job in hopes of putting their families in a better situation. But because the companies run them down and they only get 3-5 days a month of home time, nothing works out as expected. A lot get divorced in their first year or so. Argue? Oh, what's that, there's no loads coming out of butt fuck nowhere Wyoming. Looks like you're stuck there for the week. Btw, you are paid based on miles driven when you have a load. Thus, in that situation, I didn't get a paycheck for the week.
And it's one of those jobs that people need to stay in their lane about. If you were never one, you actually don't know the shit they go through.
So no, it needs more regulation. The kind of regulations that puts a noose around the company's necks.
Wow. I had no idea it was this bad. And you didn’t even touch the hazards of actual driving for 8 hrs a day, often on tricky mountain passes, with heavy snow
It's a 14 hour window to drive 11 hours. It's not a 9-5. Everyday with 70 hour limit in a 7 day time period.
Quick look, they did change the rules since I quit in 2012. Looks like a 60/70 hour limit in a 7/8 day span.
Though, you're restart is a wonderful 34 hours time-off in... a loud truck stop in the middle of nowhere. Always.
Oh, but you are protected (and I believe the insurance companies help with this too) that if a driver says road conditions are too dangerous, the company can't force them to drive anymore. Doesn't stop them from punishing you afterwards with too little loads.
Technically, a shortage is a situation where price is unable to rise. When something external prevents you from paying more, like the government imposing a price ceiling.
A good example in the labour market is doctors. While experience may vary, at least in the jurisdiction I live, it is illegal for a doctor to accept more money from me in order to prioritize my care. Instead, the law mandates that patients are prioritized first by need, second by order of contact (i.e. first come, first served). If the doctors are busy, there is no legal priced-based mechanism for me to incentivize directing their services to me, thus there can be a shortage.
I am doubtful that there could be a shortage in the trucking industry. I'm certain if I offered a 30% raise to just about any truck driver, they would jump ship to my operation in a heartbeat. I know of nothing external that would prevent me from doing that. Realistically, I might not be able to pay that much, but that simply means I was never in the market in the first place (as your comment about Tesla alludes to).
It is funny how the term shortage is used differently in the labour market when compared to other markets, like cars. I often wonder if it is because people once heard about doctor shortages, which can legitimately happen (depending on local laws), misinterpreted what was being said, and extended that misinterpretation to all types of labour.
The PBS AI special said that many truck drivers are essentially independent contractors. They buy their own truck, and pay for their own fuel and maintenance, which alone can be $120k/yr. The driver interviewed made $22k/yr after expenses.
Everyone is crying doom and gloom but I see a mostly seamless transition.
The more cargo management responsibilities a driver has the later they will get automated. These are also the most senior and well paid drivers. Truck drivers who will be replaced first are going to be the steering wheel holders that drag a dry van from loading dock to loading dock. These are also the most junior and poorly paid drivers.
As automation takes over we'll have fewer people taking entry level trucking jobs (because the jobs won't exist or the pay will be too low) and the industry will automate the harder jobs as the supply of experienced enough drivers slowly drives up and pushed the cost of a driver for those jobs high enough to be worth automating.
I'm sure some people will lose their jobs but I doubt we'll see millions of unemployed truckers and the value of a CDL tank.
> Truck drivers who will be replaced first are going to be the steering wheel holders that drag a dry van from loading dock to loading dock. These are also the most junior and poorly paid drivers.
These junior and poorly paid drivers are humans who need to eat first of all. If we automate their jobs away we need to come up with a way where that doesn't result in undue hardship.
That said I think you're underestimating how many poorly paid junior truck drivers there are. I don't think there'll be enough cargo management jobs to catch all truck drivers, not by a wide margin. Don't forget that currently the cargo management jobs are already being done by people. It's not like it's a new category of work that didn't exist before.
The amount of job available is going to shrink significantly if trucks get automated. No matter from which angle you look at it that means people are going to need to work less. Which in practice means that people are going to earn less. We need to figure out how to deal with that before it happens. Maybe it resolves itself and that's fine, but assuming it will is playing dangerous games with the food source of people you don't know.
It will also have ripples. What about all the small truck stops and diners that will slowly have less and less customers. These long haul runs will be pretty easy to automate away with automated refueling stations. All metro or major warehouse areas will have depots where the automated trips start/end and people will handle the last 5% of more difficult local driving and delivery.
"I believe about 50 percent of jobs will be somewhat or extremely threatened by AI in the next 15 years or so,” says Kai-Fu Lee, who has written a book called AI Superpowers. He fears that the rise of AI will contribute to another alarming trend: the growing inequality in earnings. “AI will exacerbate that and I think it will tear the society apart,” Kai-Fu Lee warns, “because the rich will have just too much, and those who are have-nots will have perhaps very little way of digging themselves out of the hole."
Sooner or later, drones will start plying across aerial routes too for transportation of goods. That will be perhaps both cheaper for ebay/amazon and also leave the roads free for people to walk. What do you think?
Depends. Uf you have solar panels, the electricity is more or less free after you buy and deploy them. So if you have some drone fleet and solar panels + batteries, the only real cost you have is basically maintenance. The way many businesses work, variable cost is what matters. So you'd lease the drones, the solar panels & batteries (or just get a cheap energy supplier) and focus on handling and transporting packages. Drones are interesting for that because you can save time by flying point to point, and cost by not having to employ drivers/pilots.
I don't think the kind of truck they're aiming to automatise ever enter cities.
What kind of drones and what kind of goods are you talking about ? Let's say you want to transport 40T of potatoes over 2k miles, how would that work ?
Drones are good for the last few miles of the delivery (for small consumer goods), and even then there are tons of issues to fix before they'll be viable.
Out of curiosity, how do they handle the transmissions in self-driving trucks? My guess was automatics, but torque converter automatics aren't strong enough for use in a big-rig like this. DSG? Fully "automatic" clutch-based manuals? These things have to be pretty expensive.
European heavy trucks are automatic. It's a robot pulling the gearstick and pushing the clutch under the hood.
I guess some US brands offer it too? Even though I know manual is popular in the US. It's kinda funny how the automatic is so popular for cars in the US but not for trucks while in Europe it is the opposite and trucks are automatic and uptil recently cars were manual mostly.
When trucks go electric, they'll be a lot easier to control. Current trucks are optimized for truck drivers. They become a lot simpler if you no longer need to worry about transporting humans. IMHO autonomous ICE vehicles on the road will probably not happen because they are getting replaced with cheaper EVs in roughly the same time frame that autonomous driving is happening and not having to worry about complex engines simplifies the job of automating things.
>>When trucks go electric, they'll be a lot easier to control
The big elephant in the room is of course the fact that no one can actually explain how you'd make trucks electric. Cabs aren't fitted with dual 300 litre diesel tanks for show - moving 40+ tonnes takes a lot of energy and a battery that would provide a similar range to what we have now would be gigantic, meaning both very heavy and very expensive.
Tesla is planning to ship a truck soon and they've been driving the prototypes around for a few years now. So they seem to have a plan for this with all these boxes ticked (class 8 heavy duty truck, check, 500 miles, check, etc.). Also other's are already producing electric vans, trucks, buses, as well. And I think there was a story about some ginormous heavy duty mining ore EV trucks https://hackaday.com/2019/08/22/electric-dump-truck-produces.... Takeaway point is that if you need heavy duty engines with insane amounts of torque, electric is the way to do it. Most modern oil tankers are electric engines powered by diesel generators for the same reason.
Batteries are not cheap of course. But then the life time consumption of diesel for a Truck is not exactly cheap either and probably buys you a lot of battery and power to charge them. Assuming a million miles (which is what Tesla is shooting for with their drive trains) and a generous 6 miles to the gallon, we're talking about 0.5M fuel cost at 3$/gallon. Your mileage may vary a little of course but it's a nice round number. If you'd buy Tesla 3's at 50K each and stripped their batteries you'd end up with with 10 x 75kwh = 750kwh (and a lot of premium cars). So, lets just say that amount of money easily gets you into mwh territory which fully explains why Tesla can advertise a 500 mile range, which in a truck doing 50m/h is about ten hours of driving, which I'm sure legally requires taking some breaks in the US as well (i.e, plenty of opportunity for charging, just in case you'd bring up range anxiety as a thing).
As the whole point of a truck is to move heavy loads, adding a few tonnes of battery that you would need for this should not be a problem. Torque is superior with electric. I doubt moving 40+ tonnes is going to be much of a problem given that they routinely demonstrate the torque of EVs by having them pull e.g. freight trains, large jets, or whatever. Also, EVs can do regeneration downhill or when braking and they barely use any power when idling (unlike Diesel engines).
>but torque converter automatics aren't strong enough for use in a big-rig like this.
Not true Allison makes pretty standard 6 speed automatics with torque converters that can handle class 8 trucks, look at the 4500 series.
They aren't the most efficient for long haul steady state highway though, Allison introduced a sort of hybrid 10 speed with torque converter back in 2012 for highway use called the TC10.
Other makers of automatics are Detroit, Eaton and Volvo I believe they are all dry clutch designs.
The automatics can have better efficiency do to fast optimized shifting and are of course easier to train. I believe that majority of newer trucks (2015+) are built with automatics now.
Sure, it proved it can do an autonomous truck Cannonball run, but why not produce and use locally? Not as some hippy-dippy thing, but it seems like a waste of petroleum to truck products clear across the entire country when there's enough land and resources to make the same or similar products nearer to the points of consumption. Common. sense.
It isn't like we never tried your idea. That's exactly how it worked for decades & centuries and then the world discovered shipping stuff from far away works better.
Yes, obviously about the past. .. and it also worked. You say "better" but you don't give any evidence to support your claim other than it's implicitly the status quo. Furthermore, shipping things halfway around the world is killing us in terms of carbon emissions. Hyperlocal manufacturing + regional manufacturing is inevitable because we cannot afford to keep that near vertical CO2 graph going up another 100 ppm.
Also, corporate giant agribusinesses with their pesticide residues and crop monocultures will likely lead us into illnesses and famines from "unexpected" crop failures by putting all their "eggs" into one clone crop "basket" and one region "basket."
My favorite variation on this meme is where the robot is labeled “clisp” (a less popular Lisp implementation) and its purpose is “to bootstrap sbcl” (a popular Lisp implementation)
This is not at all what we want. We need to build an automated electric high speed cargo rail system connecting the coasts and major ports. The system has to have the ability for individual container units to be routed independently.
Nothing would compare to moving cargo at 300 mph or more on an efficient rail system.
We need trucking to be local or short range and eliminate individual trucks for long range delivery.
Nothing except moving the cargo at 50 or 100mph. A shipping container moving 300mph at ground level is going to encounter some insane wind resistance even if you do attach fairings.
Amazing! Though, you have to wonder, would it be better if people just got their butter from local producers... This, of course, goes with any sort of food. Seems trucking has helped centralize farming which, from a risk perspective, is not a good thing.
I could be wrong but I think a good initial phase would be to have some kind of station at the edge of cities where human drivers can jump in and take over for navigating within cities for pickup and dropoff, and then getting out and letting the AI drive the long-haul.
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[ 4.1 ms ] story [ 215 ms ] threadI imagine the point is that it hauled a refrigerated fragile load, and it arrived unscathed.
"Citizenship" A celebration of all the moments our children will remember as the beginning of the end, thanks to our desire to change the world for the butter.
Even if it entirely eliminates human beings, it means the person who’d be driving the truck will be able to do better paying or other fulfilling tasks. Who knows...study or become an artist or spend more time with children etc.
I also don’t see how migrant workers are being exploited? How is anyone exploited if they are not driving long haul truck routes?
Because you are making it cheaper to transport from California agribusinesses who are known for violating labor laws to Pennsylvania who is known for enforcing labor laws.
This is in opposition to local manufacturing which becomes more economically feasible the more transport costs.
"Verify: Are half of California farmworkers undocumented?" https://www.abc10.com/article/news/local/verify/verify-are-h...
Deporting illegal workers is causing farm workers to finally be above minimum wage: "Wages rise on California farms. Americans still don’t want the job" https://www.latimes.com/projects/la-fi-farms-immigration/
I chose those two articles because they are quite a bit more "pro-immigration" than others and most likely to blunt the knee-jerk "Yer a raciiiiist!" idiots.
The real problem is that rather than deporting all these people we should be hitting the agribusinesses with gigantic fines and jail time for exploiting them in the first place. If some CEOs wound up in jail for employing undocumented workers and not paying minimum wage instead of just getting a slap on the wrist, this problem would self-correct.
Once upon a time, horse drawn carriages transported people and there were stables and groomsmen and carriage drivers and those who provided food and board for the horses. That entire industry and those jobs disappeared when the motor cars came along. They found other jobs. We moved on.
Retraining is a really important part of our modern reality. The idea that we can simply turn off the tap of advancing technology so that the hardest working, lowest paid workers can continue to toil for peanuts is super shitty. There are some incredibly intelligent people who stumbled in their development who really deserve a second chance at jobs that aren't ass.
> San Francisco-based self-driving truck startup Embark Trucks, which last year completed a five-day, 2,400-mile cross-country trip. But that truck carried no freight.
Still, you'd think they'd ship something in abundant supply in California and short supply in Pennsylvania. Optimism, maybe.
As a citizen, I wonder if it’s a moment our children will celebrate or remember as the beginning of an end.
Check out this gentleman, a 4th generation onion farmer in upstate NY who cannot sell his onions at any price. Like many farmers in the northeast, he’ll be bankrupt in a few months.
https://twitter.com/ChrisPawelski/status/1173339453332643840...
Produce buyers use cartel tactics to suppress prices and Canadian farmers are dumping product on the market well under cost.
Better working conditions..less accidents..data collection. Fast delivery..efficiency?
Without that, trucks are no different than cable companies, airlines, or other capital intensive businesses. They’ll consolidate over time into oligopoly. Whatever efficiency gains appear will be eaten up by the lack of market forces.
His plight speaks to why futures markets are important. His costs and production plans were set many months ago, yet his revenue is only decided now. With futures he could hedge downward exposure.
There are definitely big changes in how produce is being purchased now, with closed-market strategic sourcing replacing older markets that were more transparent. Producers are paying for increasing consumer competition in grocery.
"You pass butter."
Picture caption:
> A safety driver was behind the wheel, but the truck drove _mostly_ autonomously.
Body text:
> A Silicon Valley startup has completed what appears to be the first commercial freight cross-country trip by an autonomous truck
> There were zero “disengagements,” or times the self-driving system had to be suspended because of a problem, Kerrigan said.
What is the "mostly" qualifier in the picture caption referring to?
The delivery for Land O' Lakes is the first where Plus.ai has been able to disclose companies involved. Kerrigan said he was unable to confirm whether Plus.ai would run similar deliveries for Land O' Lakes. He said the trip allowed Plus.ai to collect data on driving conditions, including rain and snow, which is crucial to ensuring the technology is safe for mainstream use.
TuSimple, another autonomous trucking company, is planning to run fully autonomous commercial freight deliveries in 2021. The company's trucks also run at L4 autonomy, and completed pilots delivering cargo for UPS and the U.S. Postal Service in Arizona this year.
Amazon, Google and other major companies have explored using autonomous trucks to speed up delivery times, address the driver shortage, or potentially phase out drivers.[..]
That last 10% is going to be a lot of work.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ninety-ninety_rule
In 2019 the idea of a vehicle around you simply stopping because its driver doesn't know how to handle a situation is extremely rare.
I suspect that by 2039 it will be far more commonplace, shrugged off as just a fact of life that electronic drivers fail on a regular basis and need to pull over and wait either for intervention or conditions to change.
It happened about as often as it happens to me with a cellphone when neither party is moving between towers and has decent coverage.
We expect cell drops because of a technology constraint, even in big cities. Likewise, I think the parent poster is right that we'll expect it more once it starts happening more.
That's a huge improvement over the last 10% being difficult!
If you need a safety driver 100% of the time, the net gain in efficiency is 0%.
Edit: There's no comment in the article about there being period with no safety driver.
It did talk about "level 4 autonomy" based on a single drive with no disengagements (they mentioned they'd made a lot of drives but didn't mention their disengagement rate overall), doesn't sound like "achieving level 4" autonomy either-either.
If this trial period helps us improve the technology and eventually remove the safety driver after 1, 2, or 10yrs, that is a huge gain. What is the rush? -- every technology takes time to perfect. Lets judge the technology once it has had time to mature.
For owner-operators who live out of their vehicle anyway and are more concerned about getting work than sleeping in a hotel somewhere this could dramatically increase the volume of work they can take on (at least until fully autonomous trucks become widely available and humans are completely deprecated as truck drivers).
From that perspective it would be more efficient, not 90% but there would be significant gains.
But the trucks being that safe is the big question. The article describes a single trip without disengagement. Much more that is clearly needed.
So if I get woken up every 10 miles, am I really meeting the rest requirements?
Edit: Okay, remote driver access might solve this.
I mean, it's possible that demand for self-driving trucks means reliable wireless connections get implemented everywhere they can drive.
Also, Starlink is coming.
I80 goes SF to NJ, but no single interstate will take you from SF to NYC proper.
"I-80 does not enter New York City. [...] I-80's designated end (as per signage and New Jersey Department of Transportation documents) is four miles (6.4 km) short of New York City in Teaneck, before the Degraw Avenue overpass."
These seems to imply short bursts of voluntarily shutting off auto-drive; I'd be curious to understand the rationale for when the two human copilots did so.
IMO this is where self driving should focus, not city driving. Truck drivers or anyone gets the vehicle on the interstate and you can sleep or whatever to the next exit for fuel or your destination then take over again.
So what if it drove itself down the freeway? This is literally the easiest thing that "self-driving" vehicles manage to do.
Did it fuel itself? Did it take exits and drive itself to the gas station? Where did the driver take over when it got near the delivery docks? Did the truck also get clearance and dock itself? Did the truck even pull itself out of the loading dock when it first embarked on it's trip? Those are the hard things to solve, and conveniently are omitted.
Maybe the same should go for the larger shareholders and the lead engineers. The rest of us will have skin in the game whether we want to or not. They should have more.
1: https://www.fijiwater.com/faqs.html
"IS FIJI WATER FROM FIJI?
One hundred percent of FIJI Water is from a single source in the pristine, tropical Fiji Islands, an archipelago of over 300 islands nestled in the South Pacific, more than 1600 miles from the nearest industrialized country."
I've seen it for sale in Europe, which is as far from Fiji as one can be.
They must have a very effective marketing team. It seems every US TV show has Fiji water in the fridge.
Almost! West Africa is a little further.
https://www.geodatos.net/en/antipodes/fiji/western/nadi
So I'm guessing most development work is happening in China, just like several other Chinese based self-driving companies.
Makes you wonder if the things they are claiming to have working, and the accomplishments, are actually true, or just smoke as they hope for a high flying payday by a cash flush competitor hoping to buy advancements.
I know it’s facetious, but I couldn’t help but think of the human batteries in The Matrix when I read that question.
The best plan is to prepare, like Yang and others are saying: https://www.yang2020.com/policies/trucking-czar/
So we can soften the blow.
The government should massively incentivize:
- solar farms
- wind turbines
- battery storage deployments
- residential solar w/ batteries and grid-down operation (most grid-tied virtual battery solar stops working completely in a power outage)
- achieve fusion power net output
- elderly and disabled caregivers
- offer an option to teach and mentor people the fundamentals of running a successful small business (expanding SBA/SCORE)
- give people a chance to showcase, see and try out different industries
- setup a factory incubator to allow bootstrapping and designing efficient, streamlined operations for quality products made in the US at globally-competitive prices.
Investing in people and infrastructure brings lots of indirect returns. Do everything possible to help people to succeed and have a future.
A paying job is better than no job. And there is such a thing as minimum wage. And no reason to assume it'll necessarily be a pay cut. EDIT: And according to another comment further down this thread, trucker jobs don't even pay all that well.
> move to a new state where the job is.
Because that's worse than being away from home/family for long periods of time? I don't understand this logic.
Why? Is there something you're missing that requires a lot more workers?
The assumption that people need to be fit into "jobs" is, well, a salaried employment fetish; or the moral assumption that if you don't work a job you don't deserve goods and services.
Now, it's true that there actually is a whole lot of work in setting up and distributing alternative energy devices and infrasturcture. But overall, a lot of human labor is becoming redundant with automation, and there aren't "more jobs than people". Getting people to artificially create businesses as an alternative to salaried employment is also no solution.
PS - "At globally-competitive prices" = "Make workers compete with sweatshop pseudo-slave-labor in other countries, thus ensuring their own poverty and overwork."
I suspect that most people would.
Obviously 1,000,000 is _too much_, but conversely whatever the current rate is, is probably too low.
It helps that I have the benefit of hindsight having only started my career in IT at 27, and done all sorts of other stuff before then, none of which had any long term prospects, nor did it pay $1MM/year.
What is basically happening is the trucking companies are living with a shortage of drivers, and waiting for self-driving to arrive.
While there is this big push to legalize drugs like marijuana it does not negate federal and state rules against its use legal or not and certain occupations.
The job pays like shit. You have to pay $2-5k for classes to get a CDL or get locked in with a company that trains you and you pay back at their variable rates of interest... oh and they "lose payments" often along with charging you high late fees.
They take anyone with a heartbeat. It's the ultimate form of equality. If you're dumb enough or desperate enough, they'll take you no matter your gender, race or self identifying whatever.
The job pays like crap, you're treated like crap and your body goes to shit real fast.
There are regulations, and most of them are pro-trucker, aimed to protect them from abuse by the company. Problem is, a majority of voters have this weird and incredibly stupid fantasy that trucker life equals a cowboy life. Thus, company lobbyists are able to easily manipulate the narrative to the media, public and Congress. Making sure truckers don't get a voice or have a leg to stand on. Most truckers aren't the brightest bulbs in the shed. I had to do it out of desperation from a spat of unemployment. I had a plan and a way out, unlike most of them. What really sucks, most truckers are really good people. They do the job in hopes of putting their families in a better situation. But because the companies run them down and they only get 3-5 days a month of home time, nothing works out as expected. A lot get divorced in their first year or so. Argue? Oh, what's that, there's no loads coming out of butt fuck nowhere Wyoming. Looks like you're stuck there for the week. Btw, you are paid based on miles driven when you have a load. Thus, in that situation, I didn't get a paycheck for the week.
And it's one of those jobs that people need to stay in their lane about. If you were never one, you actually don't know the shit they go through.
So no, it needs more regulation. The kind of regulations that puts a noose around the company's necks.
Quick look, they did change the rules since I quit in 2012. Looks like a 60/70 hour limit in a 7/8 day span.
Though, you're restart is a wonderful 34 hours time-off in... a loud truck stop in the middle of nowhere. Always.
Oh, but you are protected (and I believe the insurance companies help with this too) that if a driver says road conditions are too dangerous, the company can't force them to drive anymore. Doesn't stop them from punishing you afterwards with too little loads.
A good example in the labour market is doctors. While experience may vary, at least in the jurisdiction I live, it is illegal for a doctor to accept more money from me in order to prioritize my care. Instead, the law mandates that patients are prioritized first by need, second by order of contact (i.e. first come, first served). If the doctors are busy, there is no legal priced-based mechanism for me to incentivize directing their services to me, thus there can be a shortage.
I am doubtful that there could be a shortage in the trucking industry. I'm certain if I offered a 30% raise to just about any truck driver, they would jump ship to my operation in a heartbeat. I know of nothing external that would prevent me from doing that. Realistically, I might not be able to pay that much, but that simply means I was never in the market in the first place (as your comment about Tesla alludes to).
It is funny how the term shortage is used differently in the labour market when compared to other markets, like cars. I often wonder if it is because people once heard about doctor shortages, which can legitimately happen (depending on local laws), misinterpreted what was being said, and extended that misinterpretation to all types of labour.
I found the segment: https://www.limitstogrowth.org/articles/2019/11/06/pbs-front...
The more cargo management responsibilities a driver has the later they will get automated. These are also the most senior and well paid drivers. Truck drivers who will be replaced first are going to be the steering wheel holders that drag a dry van from loading dock to loading dock. These are also the most junior and poorly paid drivers.
As automation takes over we'll have fewer people taking entry level trucking jobs (because the jobs won't exist or the pay will be too low) and the industry will automate the harder jobs as the supply of experienced enough drivers slowly drives up and pushed the cost of a driver for those jobs high enough to be worth automating.
I'm sure some people will lose their jobs but I doubt we'll see millions of unemployed truckers and the value of a CDL tank.
These junior and poorly paid drivers are humans who need to eat first of all. If we automate their jobs away we need to come up with a way where that doesn't result in undue hardship.
That said I think you're underestimating how many poorly paid junior truck drivers there are. I don't think there'll be enough cargo management jobs to catch all truck drivers, not by a wide margin. Don't forget that currently the cargo management jobs are already being done by people. It's not like it's a new category of work that didn't exist before.
The amount of job available is going to shrink significantly if trucks get automated. No matter from which angle you look at it that means people are going to need to work less. Which in practice means that people are going to earn less. We need to figure out how to deal with that before it happens. Maybe it resolves itself and that's fine, but assuming it will is playing dangerous games with the food source of people you don't know.
Excerpt about tearing society apart:
"I believe about 50 percent of jobs will be somewhat or extremely threatened by AI in the next 15 years or so,” says Kai-Fu Lee, who has written a book called AI Superpowers. He fears that the rise of AI will contribute to another alarming trend: the growing inequality in earnings. “AI will exacerbate that and I think it will tear the society apart,” Kai-Fu Lee warns, “because the rich will have just too much, and those who are have-nots will have perhaps very little way of digging themselves out of the hole."
It also mentions China's heavy investment in AI.
I don't think the kind of truck they're aiming to automatise ever enter cities.
What kind of drones and what kind of goods are you talking about ? Let's say you want to transport 40T of potatoes over 2k miles, how would that work ?
Drones are good for the last few miles of the delivery (for small consumer goods), and even then there are tons of issues to fix before they'll be viable.
https://www.trucking.org/News_and_Information_Reports_Indust...
> 11.49 billion tons of freight (primary shipments only) transported by trucks in 2018, representing 71.4% of total domestic tonnage shipped.
I guess some US brands offer it too? Even though I know manual is popular in the US. It's kinda funny how the automatic is so popular for cars in the US but not for trucks while in Europe it is the opposite and trucks are automatic and uptil recently cars were manual mostly.
Yeah, probably more expensive than a manual but they save gas which will cost much more long term.
https://www.ttnews.com/articles/manual-transmissions-rapidly...
The big elephant in the room is of course the fact that no one can actually explain how you'd make trucks electric. Cabs aren't fitted with dual 300 litre diesel tanks for show - moving 40+ tonnes takes a lot of energy and a battery that would provide a similar range to what we have now would be gigantic, meaning both very heavy and very expensive.
Batteries are not cheap of course. But then the life time consumption of diesel for a Truck is not exactly cheap either and probably buys you a lot of battery and power to charge them. Assuming a million miles (which is what Tesla is shooting for with their drive trains) and a generous 6 miles to the gallon, we're talking about 0.5M fuel cost at 3$/gallon. Your mileage may vary a little of course but it's a nice round number. If you'd buy Tesla 3's at 50K each and stripped their batteries you'd end up with with 10 x 75kwh = 750kwh (and a lot of premium cars). So, lets just say that amount of money easily gets you into mwh territory which fully explains why Tesla can advertise a 500 mile range, which in a truck doing 50m/h is about ten hours of driving, which I'm sure legally requires taking some breaks in the US as well (i.e, plenty of opportunity for charging, just in case you'd bring up range anxiety as a thing).
As the whole point of a truck is to move heavy loads, adding a few tonnes of battery that you would need for this should not be a problem. Torque is superior with electric. I doubt moving 40+ tonnes is going to be much of a problem given that they routinely demonstrate the torque of EVs by having them pull e.g. freight trains, large jets, or whatever. Also, EVs can do regeneration downhill or when braking and they barely use any power when idling (unlike Diesel engines).
Not true Allison makes pretty standard 6 speed automatics with torque converters that can handle class 8 trucks, look at the 4500 series.
They aren't the most efficient for long haul steady state highway though, Allison introduced a sort of hybrid 10 speed with torque converter back in 2012 for highway use called the TC10.
Other makers of automatics are Detroit, Eaton and Volvo I believe they are all dry clutch designs.
The automatics can have better efficiency do to fast optimized shifting and are of course easier to train. I believe that majority of newer trucks (2015+) are built with automatics now.
Also, corporate giant agribusinesses with their pesticide residues and crop monocultures will likely lead us into illnesses and famines from "unexpected" crop failures by putting all their "eggs" into one clone crop "basket" and one region "basket."
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X7HmltUWXgs
This is not at all what we want. We need to build an automated electric high speed cargo rail system connecting the coasts and major ports. The system has to have the ability for individual container units to be routed independently.
Nothing would compare to moving cargo at 300 mph or more on an efficient rail system.
We need trucking to be local or short range and eliminate individual trucks for long range delivery.
And then there’s Hyperloop.