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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 not

by 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.

by a_imho 11y ago

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.