10 ms·

Self-driving truck convoy completes its first major journey across Europe

114 points by mattiemass 11y ago

riprowan 11y ago
It seems evident to me that once these machines prove their value in both safety and efficiency, the companies that insure trucking firms will compel/persuade them to switch from human to self-driven vehicles. These machines can safely convoy closely in one lane leaving other lanes free, will obey traffic laws and courtesy rules, and never get sleepy. The disruption of the trucking industry is one that we will have to watch closely for its likely economic and political effects.
- spdy 11y ago
  Its one step of many imagine we have a fully automated supply chain from Producer -> Consumer without much human interaction. And it will happen in the foreseeable future as this is just cost efficient. Many jobs will disappear without replacement and we have nearly no discussion in the general public on how to solve this problem.
  - meric 11y ago
    If the consumers are unemployed, where will they get the cash to buy the products? If they're not buying, from where do the producers find the consumers? EDIT: Fiction ahead: Companies automate to sell to consumers. Consumers are put out of jobs, become unemployed, and no longer purchase as much as they used to. Companies that invested capital to build their automation infrastructure for too little return will go broke. The only automation that is profitable to build is automation the serves other owners of automation. The world's economy will separate into two, one small population, the owners of automation who trade amongst each other, and the automation-less, formerly unemployed labor. The automation economy will require huge inputs of commodities, metal, wood, silicon, and everything, to fuel their own never-ending desires, for ego-building rocket projects, moon colonies, etc. The automation-less labor will take up service jobs to serve each other, as people are wont to do. People in this economy will live with similar technology as today. But in the future they will be considered impoverished and backwards. Same kind of society, except having to compete with the automation economy for commodities. In fact, commodities like gold and silver, and perhaps even more common ones like copper and iron, will be so valuable, and with society constantly near unrest due to wealth inequality, they may be nationalised by government. Labor will be hired to strip the earth of commodities, to be shipped off the automation trillionaires. The income will be distributed as welfare payments to automation-less labor, to purchase services and goods from each other as well as a share of the commodities the automation-less economy are selling, and bits and pieces of technology from automation economy. In effect, land with resources become the last piece of real capital these people own. In the automation economy, people are mostly self-sufficient. In the automation-less economy, people are more dependent than ever on others. It will be a continuation of the present human civilisation's trend - Where originally all humans were more or less equal as hunter gatherers, in the twenty first century, humans were separated into developed, developing and undeveloped economies, where there are entire countries full of the one percent richest. In the end, the automation and automation-less economy becomes the final culmination of this trend. There are several thousand people who control the vast majority of the world's capital, and the rest unwashed masses, backwards and impoverished - the undeveloped, automation-less economy.
    - joe_the_user 11y ago
      Already in California, I see shops catering to middle-income consumers dying and being replaced by shops catering to the very poor or the very wealthy. The challenge to keeping the consumer side of the economy seems to be creating a class of consumers who 100-200K but still spend most or all of it. That doesn't seems to be as hard as one might imagine in a city like San Francisco.
  - RyanZAG 11y ago
    An interesting point: our whole economy is based around the idea that each person specializes in one thing. Eg, making torches. Then he sells his torches to a farmer in exchange for some food so that the farmer can work after dark to make more food. And he sells his torch to a miner so that the miner can go in deeper tunnels. And so on. Simplified extensively, but at the heart of it, this is what we do. So our whole economy is built around this concept of making one thing others want, and then getting them to give you things you need in exchange. What happens with automation where a single person can use automation to make everything he needs without having to barter his work for the work of others? The entire system - the entire economy - becomes unnecessary. Is it possible that's where we're rapidly heading and maybe there isn't even a problem - just a movement to end 'economy' that we've relied on for a few thousand years?
    - Retric 11y ago
      'Stuff' is a smaller part of our economy than you might think. Software, Entertainment, Healthcare, Lawyers, Land, Prestige, etc. Even then raw materials don't show up by magic. So, automation might get rid of low end restaurants, factory's etc but it's going to take high end AI to really kill 'the economy' as we think of it.
      - afarrell 11y ago
        I think raw materials are actually going to be easier to automate. Australian mines already have self-driving trucks and US farmers have been at the forefront of UAV use.
        jkaunisv1 11y ago
        You'll have to convince China
        Retric 11y ago
        Mines are a factory that use raw materials they don't make them. Consider some Ore in ground is raw martial gold is the end product. So, as long as people still value land gold is not going to be free.
  - nthot 11y ago
    Insurance premiums are a function of losses. Automated trucks will reduce losses and reduce premium. It's not going to just reduce drivers, it's going to put a dent in the insurance industry. Companies like Geico could lose 40% of premium according to a KPMG report I can't link to because I'm on my cell. This could also affect the amount of capital available to the economy as insurance companies invest their premiums.
  - marknutter 11y ago
    > Many jobs will disappear without replacement Citation needed
    - coldtea 11y ago
      Visit most places where a factory or trade died... This sometimes can include whole countries where nothing else came to replace the lost jobs...
  - random_upvoter 11y ago
    IMO people forget that a human being, as a general-purpose problem solving automaton, is actually a relatively cheap resource. You can make a human being -- at this moment still the most complex object in the universe -- perform tasks for $10/hour.
- revelation 11y ago
  The self-driven super safe truck exists, it's called a train. What makes you so confident in the market forces? They're clearly failing.
  - chinathrow 11y ago
    Yes, trains exist. What the mentioned platooning achieves though, is rapid re-grouping once a truck joins or leaves the platoon. Imagine that you save 10-20% of fuel within a platoon (as pointed out in the article), then precise scheduling entering the highway at the right time makes suddenly sense. Trains can't do that with the same flexibility.
    - revelation 11y ago
      Fuel consumption is about the last thing you want to bring to the fore when comparing trucks to trains. You could take all the diesel in a truck, burn it in a oil power plant and use the generated electricity to power a train. You would go much further.
      - chinathrow 11y ago
        I only compared the ability of those truck platoons to re-group dynamically to those of trains.
  - jpatokal 11y ago
    "Failing"? Can you name a company with profit margins better than Google? Here's one: Union Pacific. http://fortune.com/2015/06/04/union-pacific-railroad/ http://fortune.com/2015/06/04/union-pacific-railroad/ The problem with trains is the last mile: you obviously can't drive them to every store etc that needs a delivery. But the process of loading and unloading containers from ships to trains (and trucks) at ports is getting more and more automated as well.
    - revelation 11y ago
      I mean the market forces are failing us, not that train companies are. Then of course a transportation company with 20% profit margin is very likely the result of market failure...
- LoSboccacc 11y ago
  It still needs a human lead.
- Havoc 11y ago
  I don't think insurance is the main motivation here. Getting rid of the human element has a certain appeal to it from a management point of view though.
Matt3o12_ 11y ago
What if one car merges infront of one of the following trucks and slows down a bit? What do these trucks do at construction sites (we have quite A few of those on German autobahns)? This technology looks hardly any better then Tesla's lane keeping assistant, the speed is set by the driver (it doesn't really matter if the speed is set by the driver in the very first vehicle IMO), and It only handles very simple roads
- nmrm2 11y ago
  From the article: > The trucks did not travel in platoon for the entire journey — only on motorways when traffic conditions were "normal" — and each vehicle, even those following the lead truck, had a human driver on hand. Also, the convoy formed a network and explicitly communicated with the goal of not just driving autonomously but also recognizing cost savings: > a Wi-Fi connection keeping their braking and acceleration (but not steering) in sync. So quite a bit different from just lane keeping.
- tablewatcher 11y ago
  The lead trunk has indicators that the convoy is platooning, sure some people with interfere with it but for the most part when drivers start to recognise this on the road they are mostly going to stay out of the way. >This technology looks hardly any better then Tesla's lane keeping assistant So? It's the first step in removing a human driver. Are you assuming that this technology is not going to ever improve? The end game is a head office operator that controls a network of 50 trucks across a country remotely. It's just a matter of time until they get there.
  - visarga 11y ago
    In the year 2020 a 12 year old girl could operate a fleet of 50 trucks through an open source NPM package (orders, planning, monitoring). You'd never suspect when you see her in person.
- the_mitsuhiko 11y ago
  > This technology looks hardly any better then Tesla's lane keeping assistant, the speed is set by the driver (it doesn't really matter if the speed is set by the driver in the very first vehicle IMO), and It only handles very simple roads. It's not better or worse, it's different. The main difference is that the trucks in the convoy talk to each other and can thus drive more efficient manoeuvres than a Tesla can because of that. Also not sure how this is related to Tesla given that Tesla does not actually manufacture trucks.
signa11 11y ago
i was just wondering about the distance between these vehicles, and if that really would add up to some amount of finite-non-zero fuel savings as well ? for example, the lead vehicle just pushes the air away, and the rest following close by in the "slip-stream" experience less overall air resistance...
- chinathrow 11y ago
  The first video explains that - yes it reduces drag.
mortona 11y ago
When you see how crowded European truck stops are you realize that parking a truck there is probably the ultimate challenge for an autonomous driving system. This system might allow two drivers to drive a convoy of maybe six trucks across a long distance of highway, but it doesn't provide much benefit over the existing road-trains that they use in Australia - and they've never been used in Europe. It's still exciting and amazing though.
1024core 11y ago
The US trucking industry is ripe for disruption. The role of a driver is minimal as it is: s/he has to just steer the truck along the highway, with periodic fuel stops. There's nothing preventing an automated system from doing the same. Self-driving cars may be years away, but self-driving trucks which automatically attach themselves to trailers, drive 2500 miles and drop them off, only to do the same in return, 24x7 ? That'll be huge.
- mdorazio 11y ago
  Keep in mind that the role of a modern truck driver covers far more than just hauling a trailer on the freeway. Drivers also have to navigate city/suburb streets to an actual end destination (usually a warehouse), work with the loading dock workers, sign paperwork, etc. Personally, I think we will see a system where trucks like this do all the long-distance driving and stop at a drop-off location just outside cities. Then the role of truck drivers changes to that of delivering cargo the last mile to the final destination (the part that's much harder to automate). That, too, will eventually be automated, but not for a while.
  - a_imho 11y ago
    You don't need to transport the driver for that, you can have workers residing in the cities to finish the work. But you still have to pay them, so you gain nothing at all. We already have quite a few more or less useful driving aids, I just don't get the obsession of making it fully autonomous. Legislations are lacking behind tech, ethics problems won't go away either, autonomous trucks could be prime target for hacking etc.
    - mdorazio 11y ago
      I don't understand how it doesn't save money. If the human drivers are only driving the last few miles and working with loading operations, they can handle many more trucks in a day than they can currently, so the number of drivers needed drops quite a bit. Salaries for those drivers might go up, but not enough to compensate, so the trucking companies stand to benefit. Let's say a popular shipping route is 300 miles from dock to warehouse, of which 280 are "easy" open road perfect for automating. For the sake of example, let's also say it takes half an hour at the loading/unloading point on either side, the 20 "city miles" take an hour to drive, and the middle 280 miles take 4.5 hours to drive. The total time is then 6.5 hours for a single truck, all of which is currently human labor. Now let's say the truck drives itself the middle 280 miles, and the human driver is handling the rest. Whereas before the human driver would have been able to handle a single truck in 6.5 hours, the end point operations now only require 2 hours of driver time per truck, so we've cut the need for 2/3 of our human driver hours because one driver could handle 3 trucks in the same time as before. With good scheduling and tracking, that means we've also cut the need for 2/3 of our human drivers. Obviously it's more in favor of human drivers for shorter hauls, and more in favor of self-driving trucks for longer hauls.
CullingTheHerd 11y ago
The writing is on the wall. Tough time to be a meth dealer or truck stop hooker. Time to retool for a new career.
naveen99 11y ago
If they just put a human in the first truck, then you could just treat the convoy as a train on the road. Probably safer than a real train.
kaonashi 11y ago
Seems like glorified cruise control.
- dominotw 11y ago
  Agreed. Seems a bit much to call this 'self driving'. Its like calling power steering, self-driving steering.
Animats 11y ago
That's a road train. Wait until Road Trains of Australia gets hold of this.
lnrdgmz 11y ago
Each truck in the platoon needs to be able to drive competently on its own, right? I don't think one driver can change lanes for an entire platoon, and each truck will have to adjust its speed to allow for other cars merging in and out. If that's the case, why plan to have a driver at all? Just for navigational purposes?
ris 11y ago
The thing that strikes me about this is less to do with highway safety and more "how many assets can a company put in the hands of one human to guard?". It seems like it would be none too difficult for hijackers to box off the tail end vehicle and slow it to a halt giving them ample time to loot it before the driver even got a chance to stop the rest of the convoy. The looters could be gone without even needing to confront the driver. Worrying.
- hrktb 11y ago
  This would be an arms race between truck companies and looters, with companies leveling up in security on their trucks. But in this case I am not sure the problem is so different than with a human driver. I can't imagine a employee risking to get beaten up/shot just to save the cargo from a group of robbers for instance.
  - ris 11y ago
    I think though that this makes a difference from the criminal's point of view. Performing the operation without threatening the driver makes it theft instead of robbery (?), which is significantly less serious from a legal point of view.
shiftoutbox 11y ago
Totally pointless. I like truck drivers driving trucks . Not out of work angry and with nothing to do . Ohh and on a sid driverless trucks sound a lot like a train . Why not just use freight trains ?
- Havoc 11y ago
  >Why not just use freight trains ? How many kilometers road are there in there world versus kilometers rail?
  - shiftoutbox 11y ago
    For example if rail handles long range transport to distribution hubs and actual truck drivers transport last mile . What's wrong or bad about this idea ? again I don't see the point in wrecking the lives of truck drivers.
  - deleted 11y ago
    [deleted]
- thescribe 11y ago
  How much safer would not having truck drivers have to be to be worth it?
richardw 11y ago
I've wondered why rail isn't automated. Trains have accidents but they have a (mostly) 1D, simple existence. Cars and trucks are mostly 2D, with many more variables and one-off situations. Fix rail accidents and you get a huge win.
- martinald 11y ago
  A lot of trains are to various degrees. A lot of passenger services are entirely automatic with a conductor just shutting doors and checking tickets. Freight trains probably aren't worth automating right now. Trains are huge, only one guy there, probably useful to have him there anyway if there is a mechanical fault (vs blocking the line for hours while the nearest person flys/drives to the train).
ProZsolt 11y ago
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hVtd33JEsN0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hVtd33JEsN0

114 points by mattiemass 11y ago

It seems evident to me that once these machines prove their value in both safety and efficiency, the companies that insure trucking firms will compel/persuade them to switch from human to self-driven vehicles. These machines can safely convoy closely in one lane leaving other lanes free, will obey traffic laws and courtesy rules, and never get sleepy. The disruption of the trucking industry is one that we will have to watch closely for its likely economic and political effects.

spdy 11y ago
Its one step of many imagine we have a fully automated supply chain from Producer -> Consumer without much human interaction. And it will happen in the foreseeable future as this is just cost efficient. Many jobs will disappear without replacement and we have nearly no discussion in the general public on how to solve this problem.
- meric 11y ago
  If the consumers are unemployed, where will they get the cash to buy the products? If they're not buying, from where do the producers find the consumers? EDIT: Fiction ahead: Companies automate to sell to consumers. Consumers are put out of jobs, become unemployed, and no longer purchase as much as they used to. Companies that invested capital to build their automation infrastructure for too little return will go broke. The only automation that is profitable to build is automation the serves other owners of automation. The world's economy will separate into two, one small population, the owners of automation who trade amongst each other, and the automation-less, formerly unemployed labor. The automation economy will require huge inputs of commodities, metal, wood, silicon, and everything, to fuel their own never-ending desires, for ego-building rocket projects, moon colonies, etc. The automation-less labor will take up service jobs to serve each other, as people are wont to do. People in this economy will live with similar technology as today. But in the future they will be considered impoverished and backwards. Same kind of society, except having to compete with the automation economy for commodities. In fact, commodities like gold and silver, and perhaps even more common ones like copper and iron, will be so valuable, and with society constantly near unrest due to wealth inequality, they may be nationalised by government. Labor will be hired to strip the earth of commodities, to be shipped off the automation trillionaires. The income will be distributed as welfare payments to automation-less labor, to purchase services and goods from each other as well as a share of the commodities the automation-less economy are selling, and bits and pieces of technology from automation economy. In effect, land with resources become the last piece of real capital these people own. In the automation economy, people are mostly self-sufficient. In the automation-less economy, people are more dependent than ever on others. It will be a continuation of the present human civilisation's trend - Where originally all humans were more or less equal as hunter gatherers, in the twenty first century, humans were separated into developed, developing and undeveloped economies, where there are entire countries full of the one percent richest. In the end, the automation and automation-less economy becomes the final culmination of this trend. There are several thousand people who control the vast majority of the world's capital, and the rest unwashed masses, backwards and impoverished - the undeveloped, automation-less economy.
  - joe_the_user 11y ago
    Already in California, I see shops catering to middle-income consumers dying and being replaced by shops catering to the very poor or the very wealthy. The challenge to keeping the consumer side of the economy seems to be creating a class of consumers who 100-200K but still spend most or all of it. That doesn't seems to be as hard as one might imagine in a city like San Francisco.
- RyanZAG 11y ago
  An interesting point: our whole economy is based around the idea that each person specializes in one thing. Eg, making torches. Then he sells his torches to a farmer in exchange for some food so that the farmer can work after dark to make more food. And he sells his torch to a miner so that the miner can go in deeper tunnels. And so on. Simplified extensively, but at the heart of it, this is what we do. So our whole economy is built around this concept of making one thing others want, and then getting them to give you things you need in exchange. What happens with automation where a single person can use automation to make everything he needs without having to barter his work for the work of others? The entire system - the entire economy - becomes unnecessary. Is it possible that's where we're rapidly heading and maybe there isn't even a problem - just a movement to end 'economy' that we've relied on for a few thousand years?
  - Retric 11y ago
    'Stuff' is a smaller part of our economy than you might think. Software, Entertainment, Healthcare, Lawyers, Land, Prestige, etc. Even then raw materials don't show up by magic. So, automation might get rid of low end restaurants, factory's etc but it's going to take high end AI to really kill 'the economy' as we think of it.
    - afarrell 11y ago
      I think raw materials are actually going to be easier to automate. Australian mines already have self-driving trucks and US farmers have been at the forefront of UAV use.
      - jkaunisv1 11y ago
        You'll have to convince China
      - Retric 11y ago
        Mines are a factory that use raw materials they don't make them. Consider some Ore in ground is raw martial gold is the end product. So, as long as people still value land gold is not going to be free.
- nthot 11y ago
  Insurance premiums are a function of losses. Automated trucks will reduce losses and reduce premium. It's not going to just reduce drivers, it's going to put a dent in the insurance industry. Companies like Geico could lose 40% of premium according to a KPMG report I can't link to because I'm on my cell. This could also affect the amount of capital available to the economy as insurance companies invest their premiums.
- marknutter 11y ago
  > Many jobs will disappear without replacement Citation needed
  - coldtea 11y ago
    Visit most places where a factory or trade died... This sometimes can include whole countries where nothing else came to replace the lost jobs...
- random_upvoter 11y ago
  IMO people forget that a human being, as a general-purpose problem solving automaton, is actually a relatively cheap resource. You can make a human being -- at this moment still the most complex object in the universe -- perform tasks for $10/hour.
revelation 11y ago
The self-driven super safe truck exists, it's called a train. What makes you so confident in the market forces? They're clearly failing.
- chinathrow 11y ago
  Yes, trains exist. What the mentioned platooning achieves though, is rapid re-grouping once a truck joins or leaves the platoon. Imagine that you save 10-20% of fuel within a platoon (as pointed out in the article), then precise scheduling entering the highway at the right time makes suddenly sense. Trains can't do that with the same flexibility.
  - revelation 11y ago
    Fuel consumption is about the last thing you want to bring to the fore when comparing trucks to trains. You could take all the diesel in a truck, burn it in a oil power plant and use the generated electricity to power a train. You would go much further.
    - chinathrow 11y ago
      I only compared the ability of those truck platoons to re-group dynamically to those of trains.
- jpatokal 11y ago
  "Failing"? Can you name a company with profit margins better than Google? Here's one: Union Pacific. http://fortune.com/2015/06/04/union-pacific-railroad/ http://fortune.com/2015/06/04/union-pacific-railroad/ The problem with trains is the last mile: you obviously can't drive them to every store etc that needs a delivery. But the process of loading and unloading containers from ships to trains (and trucks) at ports is getting more and more automated as well.
  - revelation 11y ago
    I mean the market forces are failing us, not that train companies are. Then of course a transportation company with 20% profit margin is very likely the result of market failure...
LoSboccacc 11y ago
It still needs a human lead.
Havoc 11y ago
I don't think insurance is the main motivation here. Getting rid of the human element has a certain appeal to it from a management point of view though.

Matt3o12_ 11y ago

What if one car merges infront of one of the following trucks and slows down a bit? What do these trucks do at construction sites (we have quite A few of those on German autobahns)? This technology looks hardly any better then Tesla's lane keeping assistant, the speed is set by the driver (it doesn't really matter if the speed is set by the driver in the very first vehicle IMO), and It only handles very simple roads

nmrm2 11y ago
From the article: > The trucks did not travel in platoon for the entire journey — only on motorways when traffic conditions were "normal" — and each vehicle, even those following the lead truck, had a human driver on hand. Also, the convoy formed a network and explicitly communicated with the goal of not just driving autonomously but also recognizing cost savings: > a Wi-Fi connection keeping their braking and acceleration (but not steering) in sync. So quite a bit different from just lane keeping.
tablewatcher 11y ago
The lead trunk has indicators that the convoy is platooning, sure some people with interfere with it but for the most part when drivers start to recognise this on the road they are mostly going to stay out of the way. >This technology looks hardly any better then Tesla's lane keeping assistant So? It's the first step in removing a human driver. Are you assuming that this technology is not going to ever improve? The end game is a head office operator that controls a network of 50 trucks across a country remotely. It's just a matter of time until they get there.
- visarga 11y ago
  In the year 2020 a 12 year old girl could operate a fleet of 50 trucks through an open source NPM package (orders, planning, monitoring). You'd never suspect when you see her in person.
the_mitsuhiko 11y ago
> This technology looks hardly any better then Tesla's lane keeping assistant, the speed is set by the driver (it doesn't really matter if the speed is set by the driver in the very first vehicle IMO), and It only handles very simple roads. It's not better or worse, it's different. The main difference is that the trucks in the convoy talk to each other and can thus drive more efficient manoeuvres than a Tesla can because of that. Also not sure how this is related to Tesla given that Tesla does not actually manufacture trucks.

signa11 11y ago

i was just wondering about the distance between these vehicles, and if that really would add up to some amount of finite-non-zero fuel savings as well ? for example, the lead vehicle just pushes the air away, and the rest following close by in the "slip-stream" experience less overall air resistance...

chinathrow 11y ago
The first video explains that - yes it reduces drag.

mortona 11y ago

When you see how crowded European truck stops are you realize that parking a truck there is probably the ultimate challenge for an autonomous driving system. This system might allow two drivers to drive a convoy of maybe six trucks across a long distance of highway, but it doesn't provide much benefit over the existing road-trains that they use in Australia - and they've never been used in Europe. It's still exciting and amazing though.

1024core 11y ago

The US trucking industry is ripe for disruption. The role of a driver is minimal as it is: s/he has to just steer the truck along the highway, with periodic fuel stops. There's nothing preventing an automated system from doing the same. Self-driving cars may be years away, but self-driving trucks which automatically attach themselves to trailers, drive 2500 miles and drop them off, only to do the same in return, 24x7 ? That'll be huge.

mdorazio 11y ago
Keep in mind that the role of a modern truck driver covers far more than just hauling a trailer on the freeway. Drivers also have to navigate city/suburb streets to an actual end destination (usually a warehouse), work with the loading dock workers, sign paperwork, etc. Personally, I think we will see a system where trucks like this do all the long-distance driving and stop at a drop-off location just outside cities. Then the role of truck drivers changes to that of delivering cargo the last mile to the final destination (the part that's much harder to automate). That, too, will eventually be automated, but not for a while.
- a_imho 11y ago
  You don't need to transport the driver for that, you can have workers residing in the cities to finish the work. But you still have to pay them, so you gain nothing at all. We already have quite a few more or less useful driving aids, I just don't get the obsession of making it fully autonomous. Legislations are lacking behind tech, ethics problems won't go away either, autonomous trucks could be prime target for hacking etc.
  - mdorazio 11y ago
    I don't understand how it doesn't save money. If the human drivers are only driving the last few miles and working with loading operations, they can handle many more trucks in a day than they can currently, so the number of drivers needed drops quite a bit. Salaries for those drivers might go up, but not enough to compensate, so the trucking companies stand to benefit. Let's say a popular shipping route is 300 miles from dock to warehouse, of which 280 are "easy" open road perfect for automating. For the sake of example, let's also say it takes half an hour at the loading/unloading point on either side, the 20 "city miles" take an hour to drive, and the middle 280 miles take 4.5 hours to drive. The total time is then 6.5 hours for a single truck, all of which is currently human labor. Now let's say the truck drives itself the middle 280 miles, and the human driver is handling the rest. Whereas before the human driver would have been able to handle a single truck in 6.5 hours, the end point operations now only require 2 hours of driver time per truck, so we've cut the need for 2/3 of our human driver hours because one driver could handle 3 trucks in the same time as before. With good scheduling and tracking, that means we've also cut the need for 2/3 of our human drivers. Obviously it's more in favor of human drivers for shorter hauls, and more in favor of self-driving trucks for longer hauls.

CullingTheHerd 11y ago

The writing is on the wall. Tough time to be a meth dealer or truck stop hooker. Time to retool for a new career.

naveen99 11y ago

If they just put a human in the first truck, then you could just treat the convoy as a train on the road. Probably safer than a real train.

kaonashi 11y ago

Seems like glorified cruise control.

dominotw 11y ago
Agreed. Seems a bit much to call this 'self driving'. Its like calling power steering, self-driving steering.

Animats 11y ago

That's a road train. Wait until Road Trains of Australia gets hold of this.

lnrdgmz 11y ago

Each truck in the platoon needs to be able to drive competently on its own, right? I don't think one driver can change lanes for an entire platoon, and each truck will have to adjust its speed to allow for other cars merging in and out. If that's the case, why plan to have a driver at all? Just for navigational purposes?

ris 11y ago

The thing that strikes me about this is less to do with highway safety and more "how many assets can a company put in the hands of one human to guard?". It seems like it would be none too difficult for hijackers to box off the tail end vehicle and slow it to a halt giving them ample time to loot it before the driver even got a chance to stop the rest of the convoy. The looters could be gone without even needing to confront the driver. Worrying.

hrktb 11y ago
This would be an arms race between truck companies and looters, with companies leveling up in security on their trucks. But in this case I am not sure the problem is so different than with a human driver. I can't imagine a employee risking to get beaten up/shot just to save the cargo from a group of robbers for instance.
- ris 11y ago
  I think though that this makes a difference from the criminal's point of view. Performing the operation without threatening the driver makes it theft instead of robbery (?), which is significantly less serious from a legal point of view.

shiftoutbox 11y ago

Totally pointless. I like truck drivers driving trucks . Not out of work angry and with nothing to do . Ohh and on a sid driverless trucks sound a lot like a train . Why not just use freight trains ?

Havoc 11y ago
>Why not just use freight trains ? How many kilometers road are there in there world versus kilometers rail?
- shiftoutbox 11y ago
  For example if rail handles long range transport to distribution hubs and actual truck drivers transport last mile . What's wrong or bad about this idea ? again I don't see the point in wrecking the lives of truck drivers.
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
thescribe 11y ago
How much safer would not having truck drivers have to be to be worth it?

richardw 11y ago

I've wondered why rail isn't automated. Trains have accidents but they have a (mostly) 1D, simple existence. Cars and trucks are mostly 2D, with many more variables and one-off situations. Fix rail accidents and you get a huge win.

martinald 11y ago
A lot of trains are to various degrees. A lot of passenger services are entirely automatic with a conductor just shutting doors and checking tickets. Freight trains probably aren't worth automating right now. Trains are huge, only one guy there, probably useful to have him there anyway if there is a mechanical fault (vs blocking the line for hours while the nearest person flys/drives to the train).

ProZsolt 11y ago

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hVtd33JEsN0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hVtd33JEsN0