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Google veterans head off on their own to work on self-driving trucks
- B1FF_PSUVM 10y ago"Many of Otto's founders have done well for themselves over the years, and it shows: the company is entirely self-funded right now without any external investment. (In the wake of the reported $1 billion Cruise Automation sale to General Motors, I ask Ron if the plan is to get acquired, but he's insistent that they're focused on bringing a product to market.) Even George Hotz's scrappy upstart Comma.ai has recently taken on venture funding from Andreesen Horowitz." My crystal ball tells me that they'll soon find this course of action unwise.
- xiphias 10y agoI wanted to ask the same thing: did they quit because they didn't get enough money/stocks at the companies that they were at, or were not working on important enough stuff, or just wanted more risk for the sake of getting into more risk? Or do they think that their business model is so much better than Google's? (facilitating drivers to drive even longer without sleeping) The salary of a truck driver is about $50000, I guess he costs at least $80000 for the employer. Buying a new self-driving truck for $200000 should pay for itself in at most 3 years. Retrofitting may work, but it's quite short term business.
- spacecowboy_lon 10y agoI would imagine the first self driving trucks would be for opencast mines and similar sites not on the public highway uses. Milatery supply trucks would be another area and as Google seem to have the vapours over anything milatery or dual use - this maybe why they are doing this.
- lumberjack 10y agoPretty sure those have already been deployed. http://uk.businessinsider.com/rio-tinto-using-self-driving-trucks-to-transport-ore-2015-10 http://uk.businessinsider.com/rio-tinto-using-self-driving-t...
- luma 10y agoYou're forgetting that one driver can only drive 70 hours a week (with rules around breaks in the middle), while presumably the AI could run the truck much closer to 24/7. In this case, installing a $200k system would allow the company to replace ~3 drivers with no interruptions in service.
- icefox 10y agoMore valuable than replacing three drivers is the fact that because the AI can drive all of the time the total time to deliver goods goes down which means it is more valuable and a higher price can be charged for the delivery.
- monk_e_boy 10y agoIt'd be interesting if they could sell the customer a little 'truck' so when I order something and that thing gets to a local warehouse my little truck could drive off and collect it. It could collect from various places (depending on how I prioritize my items) and then drive back home. I don't have a private parking space and I'm rarely in my house when deliveries are being made, so a mini 'collection truck' would hold my items in a secure way for me. I suppose it could be tiny, maybe only a couple of meters long.
- xiphias 10y agoThey can't, as they are not planning to get license for being fully autonomous without a driver.
- reustle 10y agoIn theory, this sounds cool, but I feel like in practice it would be pretty wasteful. Does a town of 500 people really need 500 trucks sitting around doing nothing most of the time? Isn't one of the main promises of autonomous vehicles that we can all share vehicles and we don't need to let them sit parked for days on end? Regarding the safe storage of your items, I think that can be solved with something similar to what Amazon Lockers attempted.
- uola 10y agoSome buildings have integrated lockers. In some countries you can order things to your nearest convenience store. It a fairly solved problem.
- ndr 10y agoThe Simpsons predicted this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xq7CnsZzEEM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xq7CnsZzEEM
- ju-st 10y agoCompany name not to be confused with German e-commerce company Otto group https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Otto_GmbH https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Otto_GmbH
- codecamper 10y agorefueling?
- jon-wood 10y agoAll the out of work truck drivers can become pump attendants waiting to fill up their former vehicles as they pull in for more fuel.
- stuxnet79 10y agoFunny comment, but it looks like you are fishing for downvotes here buddy. Assuming these trucks are electric, they could set it up like the Tesla recharging stations where you can recharge simply by driving over a mini-trapdoor that houses a fully charged battery pack and a robotic arm which can swap your expended pack for the new one.
- jon-wood 10y agoWhat's the point in karma if not to blow it on bad jokes now and then? I'd completely missed the electric trucks angle, but that could work well assuming they can master hit swappable battery packs.
- stillworks 10y agocan be automated as well eventually ? will need more complex robotics though...
- BooneJS 10y agoTesla's Robot Charger. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uMM0lRfX6YI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uMM0lRfX6YI
- chefkoch 10y agoTrucks have realy big fuel tanks.
- delecti 10y ago
- zipfle 10y agoOT, but can someone explain why this won't instantly be sued into oblivion by the former employers? It seems like some of the Otto team will be using knowledge they gained at their last job on what seems like a competing product.
- spacecowboy_lon 10y agoDepends CA is quite liberal in terms of non competes and I suspect they woudl argue that self driving trucks is sufficiently different from self driving cars.
- exhilaration 10y agoThis is one reason why California is great for tech workers, the unenforceable non-competes. In much of the country you'd have to wait out a year before working in the same industry as your current employer.
- spacecowboy_lon 10y agoAgreed the USA having 52 separate sets of employment laws does not make sense - really employment law should be done at federal level - think of the saving in reduction in red tape. Though I suspect HR and Lawyers might lobby against that as a job protection scheme.
- BooneJS 10y agoIANAL, but as long as you're not infringing on patents, trade secrets, or using stolen source code, you can't be sued just for using your brain to solve similar problems.
- cheriot 10y agoSending a truck down an interstate for 20 hours has to be the lowest hanging fruit for self driving vehicles. When was the last time an entire category of jobs became obsolete fast enough that laid off employees blamed the technology? When long haul truckers are out of work, how will municipal bus driver unions react?
- PunchTornado 10y agoby acting rational and find another job
- jnbiche 10y ago> by acting rational and find another job Some of them will. Some will become despondent, sink into depression, and never work again. Humans aren't always rational.
- zanny 10y agoBecause it is trivially easy for a 20 year veteran of an entire discipline obsoleted profession that despite having very harsh hours did pay a reasonable wage to just pivot into another career of similar merit? That is to even say there are ~4 million jobs in the US currently going undone, that would pay ~80k a year in effective income, that people are just not doing now because only the truckers have the work ethic to do them. That is not how economics works, and the only difference between this sea change and previous ones (the obsolesence of agrarian living being by far the largest) is that unlike those, you could not just "ignore" it until you are dead while your kids and future generations make the transition and just sell your farm after you die.
- Loughla 10y agoThat is so flippant and just the most immature thing. As an under 30 year old, highly educated individual, yep - just get another job. Move somewhere across country if you need to; you don't have kids or a mortgage. As a specialized veteran of a job that requires very few transferable skills, truck drivers are fucked initially, and we'll see massive unemployment from this. In many cases, the areas with high ratios of their economy supported by trade/transportation have very weak other sectors of the economy. Good luck working part-time retail, truck drivers. Hope you didn't like your benefits or salary. ALL of that being said, I support automation and can't wait for it in my life. I am honestly sorry for the anger, but really. Stop to think about this from someone else's perspective for a second. Just acting like they should just go get another job and that there aren't any hiccups is ridiculous. Look at Detroit, look at Gary, look at any of the large rust-belt cities. These things aren't without precedent. Acting like all these people need to do is apply themselves a little harder is just stupid.
- fwiwm2c 10y agoThis makes a lot of sense. Given how rule-based the trucking industry is (max 11hrs/day; 30min break after x amount of driving etc., strict speed limits, complete in lane driving with little overtaking etc.), self driving trucks could gain very strong adoption given they could follow the road rules in place predictably and will not have any time based restrictions wrt driving thus saving a lot of cost.
- JoeDaDude 10y agoAgreed. HN highlighted this artice a few weeks ago. It does the numbers and estimates a 400% increase in productivity by having trucks drive (themselves) around the clock. http://techcrunch.com/2016/04/25/the-driverless-truck-is-coming-and-its-going-to-automate-millions-of-jobs/ http://techcrunch.com/2016/04/25/the-driverless-truck-is-com...
- the-dude 10y agoAlready being tested in North West Europe : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kANWFKKT1AA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kANWFKKT1AA
- chefkoch 10y ago>If you need to replace all of your trucks to get the technology on it, the rate of penetration you'll be able to have is pretty low. Trucks last ten years, a million miles. Actually i would find a adoption rate like this very fast.
- danvoell 10y agoYea, seems extremely fast. They last 10 years now, with maintenance. But assume you have a moderate repair come up and you start running the calculations drive labor + maintanance vs. maintenance only and that 10 year life will shrink to bring in new vehicles.
- parfamz 10y agoOtto, really bad name regarding googling
- karussell 10y agoNot only that: Uncle Otto's Truck is a short horror story by Stephen King https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uncle_Otto's_Truck https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uncle_Otto's_Truck
- coredog64 10y agoIt's the name of the autopilot in "Airplane!". I'm hoping they whimsically include an inflatable entity to let people know the truck is under computer control.
- cjslep 10y agoWhat if Otto starts deflating?
- karussell 10y agoEveryone who is wondering ... here is the website: http://ot.to http://ot.to and the original post: https://blog.ot.to/introducing-otto-the-startup-rethinking-commercial-trucking-cfdc502ef452#.j3gfbzfl9 https://blog.ot.to/introducing-otto-the-startup-rethinking-c...
- lgieron 10y agoWho goes to jail when the self-driving truck kills someone?
- brixon 10y agosame as a self driving car
- lgieron 10y agoHow does it work for self-driving cars then? In case of regular cars, you go to jail for vehicular manslaughter when you brake the traffic laws and in effect kill someone. My guess is that, if the driver of a self-driving car decides to press the "auto drive" button and the car violates traffic laws and kills someone, it's still the driver who's responsible. The self-driving features are not deemed safe by law and are not meant to replace a driver. It may change when self-driving cars are actually legalized as a thing (as it is currently discussed in California), but I can't imagine the current designs being close to passing a proper homologation process.
- joncrocks 10y agoIf I buy a car, it malfunctions in such a way that was not predictable by a reasonable driver and I use the vehicle in a completely reasonable way. As a result of the fault someone dies. Am I responsible for the death? The answer for the moment is that we haven't figured out the ethical and legal questions in this area yet.
- jhall1468 10y ago> In case of regular cars, you go to jail for vehicular manslaughter when you brake the traffic laws and in effect kill someone. But the truck won't do that. Break the law, that is. Unlike humans, its knowledge of traffic laws will be complete. It won't "break the law" in the sense that you are using the phrase. However, there are other ethical/moral issues (do we program a car to kill 1 person if it saves 3?).
- 10y ago
- amelius 10y ago> Otto isn't alone in trying to automate big rigs. Daimler and Volvo Trucks have both demonstrated self-driving systems in recent months, but Levandowski doesn't sound worried about those efforts. "I think the trucking folks are doing a great job, and eventually they would probably solve the problem. But a company that is used to building trucks is not well structured to solve a technology problem," he says. As opposed to what, an advertisement company?
- wrsh07 10y agoAs opposed to a company with top of the line machine learning systems.
- vonmoltke 10y agoA company with top of the line machine learning systems designed to improve advertising results is not better positioned to build an autonomous vehicle than a company with top of the line non-autonomous vehicles.
- amelius 10y agoIndeed. It has been said many times before: machine learning is all about the data, not about the algorithms.
- wrsh07 10y agoThe argument here is essentially this: Microsoft started to lose when they (a company building computers, operating systems, and essential productivity software) were not best positioned to create mobile phones, despite being the biggest player in the computer market. Being a bigger player doesn't mean you're better suited to solve a problem.
- TY 10y agoReading this article, brought back memories of this 1986 film about trucks going homicidal that Stephen King's directed himself: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0091499/ http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0091499/ Looked ridiculous back then, does not seem so any more. Imagine a new class of malware that turns our vehicles into weapons for criminal and terrorism purposes. Imagine this conversation in a sitcom about near future: Honey, did you update antivirus on the car? Some script kiddie just destroyed our neighbours car - thankfully they weren't in it... Yeah, I know it won't really work this way - OTA updates and etc, but try to picture this from the layman perspective.
- nabla9 10y ago>there's nothing on the books banning self-driving cars as long as a human is in the vehicle (which Otto's product would always still require). This company basically wants to increase efficiency of long haul truckers. They can sleep in the wheel and move 24/7 without mandatory breaks. Turning 11 hour drive into 23 hour drive would bring huge savings for the company. If they make it happen, it sells like candy and after few years all have one.