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An actual long-haul trucker commented at length about this on a reddit thread. I can't seem to find it. The TL;DR was that tyhe actual driving of the truck was
by wmeredith 10y ago
An actual long-haul trucker commented at length about this on a reddit thread. I can't seem to find it. The TL;DR was that tyhe actual driving of the truck was a no-brainer to automate away, but that despite being a large portion of the job from a time perspective, it was a small portion of the job functionally speaking. The majority of a long haul trucker's job is interacting with legal authorities at weigh stations, dealing with loading crews, performing required truck maintenance on the road, etc...
It was an interesting insight. I'm sure all of that could be automated away eventually, but no where near as quickly as the actual driving. I agree with other commenters in this thread that I see truck driving going the way of the train engineer quite soon, but that having truly driverless trucks is a bit further out.
- calbear81 10y agoThe train engineer analogy is a good one, you would imagine that a single "truckgineer" so to speak could be responsible for managing a convoy of let's say 10-15 trucks which would make it much more efficient. In regards to fueling, would you make that more efficient by adding a larger fuel tank or fuel car?
- dgacmu 10y agoIf you have that much stuff from the same source, destination pair, then you're probably better off using rail transport in the first place.
- chefkoch 10y ago> In regards to fueling, would you make that more efficient by adding a larger fuel tank or fuel car. Or have someone at the gas station fill up the trucks like it was decades ago.
- awesomerobot 10y agoor you know, automate it
- ori_b 10y ago> The majority of a long haul trucker's job is interacting with legal authorities at weigh stations, dealing with loading crews, performing required truck maintenance on the road, etc... In other words, the parts that don't have to move much. You can keep a much smaller, more local staff that costs far less per volume of goods flowing. A single agent at a weigh station that handles hundreds of trucks a day, instead of a truck driver per truck. A set of contracts with local mechanics that get paged if a truck breaks down along the route. Loading crews can load trucks without a truck driver, And so on. You don't need someone to attend the trucks -- you just need people at key points along the routes.
- mfoy_ 10y agoOr even simpler, have the self-driving truck, but keep the "driver" to do all the normal non-driving stuff. Would be a great opportunity to get a lot of reading done, for example.
- ori_b 10y agoThat's possible, but it's rather expensive to pay someone to read for most of the day.
- phamilton 10y agoThe solution I liked was to make call center employees double as "drivers" of automated vehicles.
- csours 10y agoCongratulations, now you have a bunch of disgruntled, angry people driving murder machines.
- raisedbyninjas 10y agoYou could about cut the cost in half if the drivers could sleep while driving and remove the driving time limit laws.
- Zigurd 10y agoIt seems odd that an autonomous truck should look like a normal truck. I would imagine going after specialized types of trucking, like moving containerized freight, first.