17 ms·

Uber-owned Otto to offer freight hauling services using autonomous trucks

127 points by doppp 10y ago

mabbo 10y ago
They have the right plan: autonomation, leading towards automation, rather than automation from day 1. First, reduce the work for the human. Then, continually improve it until they aren't really needed anymore.
- pauldw 10y ago
  1) You drive. 2) The robot helps you drive. 3) You help the robot drive. 4) The robot drives.
  - aetherson 10y ago
    1) You drive 2) The robot helps you drive, you start to zone out, and plow into, let's just say as a random example, a truck crossing your lane of traffic. 3) You help the robot drive, while you are super, super, super drunk, and best-case you stop all traffic on four lanes of freeway. 4) Maybe we need to skip to this step.
    - serge2k 10y ago
      > 2) The robot helps you drive, you start to zone out, and plow into, let's just say as a random example, a truck crossing your lane of traffic. This is my concern. How many days of sitting around for 12 hours not doing anything (because the computer is pretty good) does it take before the truckers who are supposed to be alert and ready to take over are completely zoned out. I would probably last about an hour.
      - Vraxx 10y ago
        that's the thing, at the point that the computer is already that good, missing that one accident isn't optimal sure, but it's definitely better than the current state of vehicle operation.
        aetherson 10y ago
        No it's not. People here have a really exaggerated vision of how bad human drivers are. Even the most pessimistic views of how common accidents are suggest that there is one contact collision every 75k to 100k miles or so. An autonomous driver which was twice as dangerous as a human, then, would still go 37k to 50k miles between collisions. A human who was trying to backstop that robot's fallibilities would be required to pay close attention for weeks between actions. Which is inhuman.
        GFischer 10y ago
        I don't know where you're getting that data, but it's incorrect, at least here in Montevideo, Uruguay, and in Brazil. Source: I worked for an insurance company for 8 years, and part of my job involved updating casualty models. There are a LOT of accidents, but most are fender-benders. I guess if you exclude those, yes, a serious collision occurs about those numbers.
        aetherson 10y ago
        I admit that I have no idea what the accident rate is in Uruguay or Brazil. In the US: The Department of Transportation gets reports of one accident per 250k miles (roughly). It is broadly agreed that many accidents are unreported, with estimates of the true rate ranging from 1/200k miles to about 1/75k miles. For example, this document from the US Department of Transportation: https://crashstats.nhtsa.dot.gov/Api/Public/ViewPublication/812101 https://crashstats.nhtsa.dot.gov/Api/Public/ViewPublication/... suggests 5,687,000 total crashes (including fatality, injury, and non-injury) in the US in 2013. This graph: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/M12MTVUSM227NFWA https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/M12MTVUSM227NFWA puts total vehicle miles driven in 2013 in the US at 2,980,181,000,000. So divide: 5,687,000 / 2,980,181,000,000
        GFischer 10y ago
        Wow, yes, there are a LOT less accidents in the U.S. According to other statistics, there are 5 million accidents, for a population of 300 million. In Uruguay there are 50.000 accidents for a population of 3 million, and with a LOT lower average mileage per driver. That's something we've discussed a lot here - there's NO way self-driving cars can go around South American streets - unless they learn to be very aggressive, beep the horn, cross streets whenever they can, shout and otherwise interact with other drivers. And we mostly don't have highways. Americans drive a lot in highways, that must skew the per mile accidents. I don't know how often accidents like fender-benders go unreported in the U.S. though.
- empath75 10y ago
  The step where you need a human supervising an imperfect AI is filled with landmines, though. All it takes is a semi-autonomous truck or two taking out a family car, and it's over.
  - walshemj 10y ago
    Espesialy if its a cute young WASP female - you would see a moral panic driven by the tabloids / press (and don't for get the old school print media are not exactly friends with google etc )
- ben_jones 10y ago
  Tell Tesla marketing that. They have autopilot already!
  - dmix 10y ago
    Airplanes have had autopilot forever. In that context we don't expect that phrase to mean "autonomous flying". Anyone who knows anything about airplane autopilot knows to expect the pilot to engage autopilot at certain non-critical moments and always be ready to take over for the difficult parts. Tesla's autopilot is no different. They clearly state it's intended for certain parts of highway driving. Like a glorified cruise control, much like autopilot is used in other fields. I don't believe they've ever tried to market their tech as a totally self-driving vehicle. So why then should Tesla not call their assisted-driving "autopilot"? When our current common-sense understanding of "autopilot" in other industries has worked just fine? Maybe because it's not marketing by a single trendy firm so you can't attack it with your superior intellect? Or maybe you also expect airplane manufacturers and pilots to stop calling their tech "autopilot" because it might mean something else, now that autonomous cars are becomes a thing... and we wouldn't want to confuse anybody who can't grasp context and commonly accepted meanings of phrases...
Ericson2314 10y ago
So phase one is cruise control? :D
JMCQ87 10y ago
Hope there won't be any serious crashes early on, I suppose.
riebschlager 10y ago
Yeah, but will the autonomous truck be able to call in to right wing talk radio shows and say racist things?
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
- dawson 10y ago
  Yes, I believe they've licensed Microsoft's AI chatbot "Tay" for this purpose /s
slv77 10y ago
Confession time... I really want to see fully autonomous vehicles but I don't really believe we'll see them on the road in the next 50 years. I think Google's concerns with being able to reliably pass control between the driver and the computer is warranted. I think that the technology will get stuck in the equivalent of the CGI uncanny valley where they find that the technology has to leave more control with the driver than its capable of to keep the driver engaged but never is capable of full control. My guess is that these systems will evolve into assisted driving technologies that will use force feedback to the driver that will suggest the sanest path but won't take full control until the driver is outside the envelope and will predominantly be used to extend the window where baby boomers can drive and also save inattentive and unsafe drivers for themselves. In other words a drunk behind the wheel is still going to look like a drunk behind the wheel but just less likely to kill someone. I expect the technology will be displace drivers in military convoys but I don't think it will be good enough for general use. Even if the technology is close I don't think the safety will be as good as the "augmented human" model which will also rapidly improve and so insurance and regulation will continue to hamper rollout. Would love from those in the know to tell me I'm wrong. I want to believe!
- ghaff 10y ago
  I'm willing to believe that there could be full autonomy under some circumstances (e.g. highway driving) significantly sooner. Which would probably be a significant safety win if nothing else. (Presumably, it could also increase vehicle utilization for trucking.) Of course, what that doesn't enable is eliminating the need for a licensed, competent human to be present. So it doesn't allow for any of the shared automated car scenarios that get people excited. I do know a lot of smart people who are convinced that we're on this exponential technology improvement path and nirvana really is only 5 or 10 years away. But I listen to other experts and just look around busy, congested cities and getting computers to the last 5% looks really hard.
  - kesselvon 10y ago
    You can have a single human driver be followed by a number of autonomous trucks. It doesn't eliminate the human, but it makes them way more efficient.
coldcode 10y ago
I wonder how they will handle truck inspections, generally you have to wait in a long line to drive over the scales.
- tim333 10y ago
  At the moment there's a guy in the truck to take over. A little further in the future you could have a video like to a control center. Full autonomy for that stuff is probably a way off.
aresant 10y ago
"More than double the fleet" . . . from 6 to 12 trucks in 2017 I have a hard time believing that Otto was more than an opportunity to pick up engineering talent and that their interest in freight - for now - is more than an ongoing PR opportunity.
seibelj 10y ago
I'm a regular Boston driver that enjoys driving here. On any average 15 minute drive, you will see numerous examples of cars, pedestrians, and cyclists breaking laws in sometimes shocking and life threatening ways. The drivers are also extremely smart and competitive, looking for any edge they can to get where they are going faster. If self driving cars start driving here in large numbers, they are going to be the most slow, weak, taken-advantage-of cars on the road. If tailgating a self driving car makes it pull over, everyone on the road will do it. If a honk makes it pull over, everyone on the road will do it. You just can't understand the mindset of drivers here until you experience it. This is just Boston, but wait until forums, youtube, etc. of people trading tips on how to fuck with the people sleeping in their cars spring up. In a tech utopia where everyone has a self-driving car and human operators are banned, maybe it can work. But in the real world, where not everyone is a college educated rich HN user, self driving cars are going to require a very difficult-to-accomplish change in behavior to succeed.
- DigitalJack 10y ago
  I think you are right, it will likely not be an obviously good move until you are at > 70% autonomous. I think there would be a big market for trucking though to have augmented autonomous, so you can keep going for stretches while sleeping. Plenty of routes in the midwest would allow for that, so cross country travel could be improved. Also, driving at night. After traveling back and forth to my inlaws a few times late at night, I noticed I saw many more three trailer trucks on the road. a lot more. It finally occurred to me that they likely drive at night to avoid traffic, with such a difficult to maneuver load.
- ctrl-j 10y ago
  And then there will be laws that make this illegal. Plus the car will probably be taking video of the infraction. Hell, if everyone driving self-driving cars reduces the 38k deaths and 4.4 million injuries, then it's possibly that eventually it will be illegal to drive. At the very least, I would expect there to be autonomous-only roads - and you'll have to pay higher insurance premiums to manually drive a car.
  - 10y ago
nashashmi 10y ago
In a previous HN discussion, there was talk about the last mile being the most expensive and enduring process of automation. This being posted today makes me imagine there being truck transfer stations where humans will board trucks before city entry points and driving them in and out.
Animats 10y ago
Well, Otto is Anthony Lewandowski, who is very good. He did the self-driving, self-balancing motorcycle for the 2005 DARPA Grand Challenge while an undergrad at UC Berkeley. I met him back then. At least it's not the Cruise crowd.
- dmix 10y ago
  Indeed, it seems they have some real talent, excellent financing, and political backing here to really accomplish something. Or at least make a strong go at make pioneering efforts to commercialize this. HN's usual negativity generating machine is in full force in this thread. It's sad because we should be supportive of bold companies making difficult plays. But it seems we're all in a race to reward people who can most effectively dismiss the ideas as not possible. Yet people constantly criticize Silicon Valley as not investing in bold ideas anymore and instead obsessing over the next photo sharing emoticon apps. You can't wonder why VC/angels are hesitant to capitalize entrepreneurs taking real risks when this is the public reception they get - especially from a site full of technical people and entrepreneurs. The more money the startup has the more the hyper-critical audience shows up to show the world how much smarter they are then these guys. People who actually went out in the world, built something, and got $640m to implement the idea - and haven't even yet made public releases/test available that can be analyzed and fairly criticized. But that doesn't seem to stop anyone.
  - Animats 10y ago
    It's amusing reading the comments on automatic driving. In Tesla-related discussions, Tesla fanboys dominate and are annoyed at criticism of Tesla. This discussion, on the other hand, is rather negative. There's been a lot of work on self-driving trucks. Mercedes has demoed self-driving trucks. Volvo has some heavy trucks in operation in mines. Otto and Volvo have some kind of a deal on self-driving. If Volvo's involved, safety is being considered. Their CEO has said that if one of their cars crashes in auto mode, it's Volvo's fault. Volvo says they will deploy 100 self-driving cars in one city in Sweden in 2017. These will only work on certain mapped roads, but they will be driven by customers, not Volvo employees, and the driver will not be expected or required to pay attention. This will be the first large deployment of self-driving without human backup. (Volvo also leads in self-driving marketing videos.[1]) [1] http://www.volvocars.com/au/about/innovations/intellisafe/autopilot http://www.volvocars.com/au/about/innovations/intellisafe/au...
awt 10y ago
Anyone ever read Shadowrun? I remember in one book there were automated trucks that shipped goods through the unsafe areas between the large cities...
- walshemj 10y ago
  mm Just ripe for hijacking by a rigger/decker combo
  - walshemj 10y ago
    And to follow up in the real world ripe for hijacking by people smugglers.
  - shostack 10y ago
    And then you trace the signal back to the rigger and get the cargo and the rigger's deck/drone fleet. That session definitely paid off for my crew.
Aloha 10y ago
I'm a former truck driver. The future of long haul trucking is not automated trucks - its the rail. As it is now, a majority of long haul freight goes piggyback on a train. The only thing that goes on a truck end to end, is stuff that is more expedited than the train can deal with (or where it misses the window), and freight traveling under a certain distance (where the extra day to get in an out of the rail yard pushes it out of time). It's easy to automate the long haul portion of the journey, not so much the bumping the dock portion.
- bduerst 10y ago
  Warren Buffet agrees with you [1], even though I think Otto is trying to automate the rail-to-warehouse segment, not long distance trucking. Kind of like "last-mile" for freight. [1] http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2014-11-10/buffetts-15-billion-from-bnsf-show-railroad-came-cheap http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2014-11-10/buffetts-1...
  - Aloha 10y ago
    I personally see very limited returns in automating the last mile - local drivers often only make 15-25 dollars an hour, and often its drop and hook (drop one trailer, pick up another) to maximize tractor utilization. In addition, the hours of service rules for intra-state drivers are often much more generous than the federal standard. In short, it makes sense to spend alot of money to eliminate the big cost - but not to eliminate the little cost.
    - dmix 10y ago
      > local drivers only make 15-25/hr Really? I thought Teamster unions made that cost higher. My father made much more than that in the early 90s when he drove a truck temporarily for a salary. Unless local drivers aren't unionized? The average salary for private drivers is much higher: >> The median annual wage for a trucker that works for a private fleet, such as a truck driver employed by Walmart, is $73,000, according to ATA. The Labor Department pegs the median annual salary for all truck drivers at around $40,000. But it isn't an easy job to fill. There's 1.6 million truck drivers in America. Oct 9, 2015 [0] Also long-haul trucking is the real goal of Otto [1] not just last-mile. The benefits go well beyond just replacing the driver's salary w/ robots. For example, an automated truck fleet could be heavily optimized by algorithms to take optimal routes, utilize time better, work for multiple warehouses at once by operating as a 'floating' fleet instead of with fixed routes (this is happening already with human drivers, but it's a natural extension of automating the vehicles and would make implementation/optimization far easier). Plus speeds could eventually be increased, less accidents, less breaks (washrooms, food, etc), less human management required, zero turnover, no training, no hiring, etc, etc. [0] http://money.cnn.com/2015/10/09/news/economy/truck-driver-shortage/ http://money.cnn.com/2015/10/09/news/economy/truck-driver-sh... [1] http://fortune.com/2016/09/28/uber-otto-long-haul-trucking/ http://fortune.com/2016/09/28/uber-otto-long-haul-trucking/

127 points by doppp 10y ago

mabbo 10y ago

They have the right plan: autonomation, leading towards automation, rather than automation from day 1. First, reduce the work for the human. Then, continually improve it until they aren't really needed anymore.

pauldw 10y ago
1) You drive. 2) The robot helps you drive. 3) You help the robot drive. 4) The robot drives.
- aetherson 10y ago
  1) You drive 2) The robot helps you drive, you start to zone out, and plow into, let's just say as a random example, a truck crossing your lane of traffic. 3) You help the robot drive, while you are super, super, super drunk, and best-case you stop all traffic on four lanes of freeway. 4) Maybe we need to skip to this step.
  - serge2k 10y ago
    > 2) The robot helps you drive, you start to zone out, and plow into, let's just say as a random example, a truck crossing your lane of traffic. This is my concern. How many days of sitting around for 12 hours not doing anything (because the computer is pretty good) does it take before the truckers who are supposed to be alert and ready to take over are completely zoned out. I would probably last about an hour.
    - Vraxx 10y ago
      that's the thing, at the point that the computer is already that good, missing that one accident isn't optimal sure, but it's definitely better than the current state of vehicle operation.
      - aetherson 10y ago
        No it's not. People here have a really exaggerated vision of how bad human drivers are. Even the most pessimistic views of how common accidents are suggest that there is one contact collision every 75k to 100k miles or so. An autonomous driver which was twice as dangerous as a human, then, would still go 37k to 50k miles between collisions. A human who was trying to backstop that robot's fallibilities would be required to pay close attention for weeks between actions. Which is inhuman.
        GFischer 10y ago
        I don't know where you're getting that data, but it's incorrect, at least here in Montevideo, Uruguay, and in Brazil. Source: I worked for an insurance company for 8 years, and part of my job involved updating casualty models. There are a LOT of accidents, but most are fender-benders. I guess if you exclude those, yes, a serious collision occurs about those numbers.
        aetherson 10y ago
        I admit that I have no idea what the accident rate is in Uruguay or Brazil. In the US: The Department of Transportation gets reports of one accident per 250k miles (roughly). It is broadly agreed that many accidents are unreported, with estimates of the true rate ranging from 1/200k miles to about 1/75k miles. For example, this document from the US Department of Transportation: https://crashstats.nhtsa.dot.gov/Api/Public/ViewPublication/812101 https://crashstats.nhtsa.dot.gov/Api/Public/ViewPublication/... suggests 5,687,000 total crashes (including fatality, injury, and non-injury) in the US in 2013. This graph: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/M12MTVUSM227NFWA https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/M12MTVUSM227NFWA puts total vehicle miles driven in 2013 in the US at 2,980,181,000,000. So divide: 5,687,000 / 2,980,181,000,000
        GFischer 10y ago
        Wow, yes, there are a LOT less accidents in the U.S. According to other statistics, there are 5 million accidents, for a population of 300 million. In Uruguay there are 50.000 accidents for a population of 3 million, and with a LOT lower average mileage per driver. That's something we've discussed a lot here - there's NO way self-driving cars can go around South American streets - unless they learn to be very aggressive, beep the horn, cross streets whenever they can, shout and otherwise interact with other drivers. And we mostly don't have highways. Americans drive a lot in highways, that must skew the per mile accidents. I don't know how often accidents like fender-benders go unreported in the U.S. though.
empath75 10y ago
The step where you need a human supervising an imperfect AI is filled with landmines, though. All it takes is a semi-autonomous truck or two taking out a family car, and it's over.
- walshemj 10y ago
  Espesialy if its a cute young WASP female - you would see a moral panic driven by the tabloids / press (and don't for get the old school print media are not exactly friends with google etc )
ben_jones 10y ago
Tell Tesla marketing that. They have autopilot already!
- dmix 10y ago
  Airplanes have had autopilot forever. In that context we don't expect that phrase to mean "autonomous flying". Anyone who knows anything about airplane autopilot knows to expect the pilot to engage autopilot at certain non-critical moments and always be ready to take over for the difficult parts. Tesla's autopilot is no different. They clearly state it's intended for certain parts of highway driving. Like a glorified cruise control, much like autopilot is used in other fields. I don't believe they've ever tried to market their tech as a totally self-driving vehicle. So why then should Tesla not call their assisted-driving "autopilot"? When our current common-sense understanding of "autopilot" in other industries has worked just fine? Maybe because it's not marketing by a single trendy firm so you can't attack it with your superior intellect? Or maybe you also expect airplane manufacturers and pilots to stop calling their tech "autopilot" because it might mean something else, now that autonomous cars are becomes a thing... and we wouldn't want to confuse anybody who can't grasp context and commonly accepted meanings of phrases...

Ericson2314 10y ago

So phase one is cruise control? :D

JMCQ87 10y ago

Hope there won't be any serious crashes early on, I suppose.

riebschlager 10y ago

Yeah, but will the autonomous truck be able to call in to right wing talk radio shows and say racist things?

deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
dawson 10y ago
Yes, I believe they've licensed Microsoft's AI chatbot "Tay" for this purpose /s

slv77 10y ago

Confession time... I really want to see fully autonomous vehicles but I don't really believe we'll see them on the road in the next 50 years. I think Google's concerns with being able to reliably pass control between the driver and the computer is warranted. I think that the technology will get stuck in the equivalent of the CGI uncanny valley where they find that the technology has to leave more control with the driver than its capable of to keep the driver engaged but never is capable of full control. My guess is that these systems will evolve into assisted driving technologies that will use force feedback to the driver that will suggest the sanest path but won't take full control until the driver is outside the envelope and will predominantly be used to extend the window where baby boomers can drive and also save inattentive and unsafe drivers for themselves. In other words a drunk behind the wheel is still going to look like a drunk behind the wheel but just less likely to kill someone. I expect the technology will be displace drivers in military convoys but I don't think it will be good enough for general use. Even if the technology is close I don't think the safety will be as good as the "augmented human" model which will also rapidly improve and so insurance and regulation will continue to hamper rollout. Would love from those in the know to tell me I'm wrong. I want to believe!

ghaff 10y ago
I'm willing to believe that there could be full autonomy under some circumstances (e.g. highway driving) significantly sooner. Which would probably be a significant safety win if nothing else. (Presumably, it could also increase vehicle utilization for trucking.) Of course, what that doesn't enable is eliminating the need for a licensed, competent human to be present. So it doesn't allow for any of the shared automated car scenarios that get people excited. I do know a lot of smart people who are convinced that we're on this exponential technology improvement path and nirvana really is only 5 or 10 years away. But I listen to other experts and just look around busy, congested cities and getting computers to the last 5% looks really hard.
- kesselvon 10y ago
  You can have a single human driver be followed by a number of autonomous trucks. It doesn't eliminate the human, but it makes them way more efficient.

coldcode 10y ago

I wonder how they will handle truck inspections, generally you have to wait in a long line to drive over the scales.

tim333 10y ago
At the moment there's a guy in the truck to take over. A little further in the future you could have a video like to a control center. Full autonomy for that stuff is probably a way off.

aresant 10y ago

"More than double the fleet" . . . from 6 to 12 trucks in 2017 I have a hard time believing that Otto was more than an opportunity to pick up engineering talent and that their interest in freight - for now - is more than an ongoing PR opportunity.

seibelj 10y ago

I'm a regular Boston driver that enjoys driving here. On any average 15 minute drive, you will see numerous examples of cars, pedestrians, and cyclists breaking laws in sometimes shocking and life threatening ways. The drivers are also extremely smart and competitive, looking for any edge they can to get where they are going faster. If self driving cars start driving here in large numbers, they are going to be the most slow, weak, taken-advantage-of cars on the road. If tailgating a self driving car makes it pull over, everyone on the road will do it. If a honk makes it pull over, everyone on the road will do it. You just can't understand the mindset of drivers here until you experience it. This is just Boston, but wait until forums, youtube, etc. of people trading tips on how to fuck with the people sleeping in their cars spring up. In a tech utopia where everyone has a self-driving car and human operators are banned, maybe it can work. But in the real world, where not everyone is a college educated rich HN user, self driving cars are going to require a very difficult-to-accomplish change in behavior to succeed.

DigitalJack 10y ago
I think you are right, it will likely not be an obviously good move until you are at > 70% autonomous. I think there would be a big market for trucking though to have augmented autonomous, so you can keep going for stretches while sleeping. Plenty of routes in the midwest would allow for that, so cross country travel could be improved. Also, driving at night. After traveling back and forth to my inlaws a few times late at night, I noticed I saw many more three trailer trucks on the road. a lot more. It finally occurred to me that they likely drive at night to avoid traffic, with such a difficult to maneuver load.
ctrl-j 10y ago
And then there will be laws that make this illegal. Plus the car will probably be taking video of the infraction. Hell, if everyone driving self-driving cars reduces the 38k deaths and 4.4 million injuries, then it's possibly that eventually it will be illegal to drive. At the very least, I would expect there to be autonomous-only roads - and you'll have to pay higher insurance premiums to manually drive a car.
- 10y ago

nashashmi 10y ago

In a previous HN discussion, there was talk about the last mile being the most expensive and enduring process of automation. This being posted today makes me imagine there being truck transfer stations where humans will board trucks before city entry points and driving them in and out.

Animats 10y ago

Well, Otto is Anthony Lewandowski, who is very good. He did the self-driving, self-balancing motorcycle for the 2005 DARPA Grand Challenge while an undergrad at UC Berkeley. I met him back then. At least it's not the Cruise crowd.

dmix 10y ago
Indeed, it seems they have some real talent, excellent financing, and political backing here to really accomplish something. Or at least make a strong go at make pioneering efforts to commercialize this. HN's usual negativity generating machine is in full force in this thread. It's sad because we should be supportive of bold companies making difficult plays. But it seems we're all in a race to reward people who can most effectively dismiss the ideas as not possible. Yet people constantly criticize Silicon Valley as not investing in bold ideas anymore and instead obsessing over the next photo sharing emoticon apps. You can't wonder why VC/angels are hesitant to capitalize entrepreneurs taking real risks when this is the public reception they get - especially from a site full of technical people and entrepreneurs. The more money the startup has the more the hyper-critical audience shows up to show the world how much smarter they are then these guys. People who actually went out in the world, built something, and got $640m to implement the idea - and haven't even yet made public releases/test available that can be analyzed and fairly criticized. But that doesn't seem to stop anyone.
- Animats 10y ago
  It's amusing reading the comments on automatic driving. In Tesla-related discussions, Tesla fanboys dominate and are annoyed at criticism of Tesla. This discussion, on the other hand, is rather negative. There's been a lot of work on self-driving trucks. Mercedes has demoed self-driving trucks. Volvo has some heavy trucks in operation in mines. Otto and Volvo have some kind of a deal on self-driving. If Volvo's involved, safety is being considered. Their CEO has said that if one of their cars crashes in auto mode, it's Volvo's fault. Volvo says they will deploy 100 self-driving cars in one city in Sweden in 2017. These will only work on certain mapped roads, but they will be driven by customers, not Volvo employees, and the driver will not be expected or required to pay attention. This will be the first large deployment of self-driving without human backup. (Volvo also leads in self-driving marketing videos.[1]) [1] http://www.volvocars.com/au/about/innovations/intellisafe/autopilot http://www.volvocars.com/au/about/innovations/intellisafe/au...

awt 10y ago

Anyone ever read Shadowrun? I remember in one book there were automated trucks that shipped goods through the unsafe areas between the large cities...

walshemj 10y ago
mm Just ripe for hijacking by a rigger/decker combo
- walshemj 10y ago
  And to follow up in the real world ripe for hijacking by people smugglers.
- shostack 10y ago
  And then you trace the signal back to the rigger and get the cargo and the rigger's deck/drone fleet. That session definitely paid off for my crew.

Aloha 10y ago

I'm a former truck driver. The future of long haul trucking is not automated trucks - its the rail. As it is now, a majority of long haul freight goes piggyback on a train. The only thing that goes on a truck end to end, is stuff that is more expedited than the train can deal with (or where it misses the window), and freight traveling under a certain distance (where the extra day to get in an out of the rail yard pushes it out of time). It's easy to automate the long haul portion of the journey, not so much the bumping the dock portion.

bduerst 10y ago
Warren Buffet agrees with you [1], even though I think Otto is trying to automate the rail-to-warehouse segment, not long distance trucking. Kind of like "last-mile" for freight. [1] http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2014-11-10/buffetts-15-billion-from-bnsf-show-railroad-came-cheap http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2014-11-10/buffetts-1...
- Aloha 10y ago
  I personally see very limited returns in automating the last mile - local drivers often only make 15-25 dollars an hour, and often its drop and hook (drop one trailer, pick up another) to maximize tractor utilization. In addition, the hours of service rules for intra-state drivers are often much more generous than the federal standard. In short, it makes sense to spend alot of money to eliminate the big cost - but not to eliminate the little cost.
  - dmix 10y ago
    > local drivers only make 15-25/hr Really? I thought Teamster unions made that cost higher. My father made much more than that in the early 90s when he drove a truck temporarily for a salary. Unless local drivers aren't unionized? The average salary for private drivers is much higher: >> The median annual wage for a trucker that works for a private fleet, such as a truck driver employed by Walmart, is $73,000, according to ATA. The Labor Department pegs the median annual salary for all truck drivers at around $40,000. But it isn't an easy job to fill. There's 1.6 million truck drivers in America. Oct 9, 2015 [0] Also long-haul trucking is the real goal of Otto [1] not just last-mile. The benefits go well beyond just replacing the driver's salary w/ robots. For example, an automated truck fleet could be heavily optimized by algorithms to take optimal routes, utilize time better, work for multiple warehouses at once by operating as a 'floating' fleet instead of with fixed routes (this is happening already with human drivers, but it's a natural extension of automating the vehicles and would make implementation/optimization far easier). Plus speeds could eventually be increased, less accidents, less breaks (washrooms, food, etc), less human management required, zero turnover, no training, no hiring, etc, etc. [0] http://money.cnn.com/2015/10/09/news/economy/truck-driver-shortage/ http://money.cnn.com/2015/10/09/news/economy/truck-driver-sh... [1] http://fortune.com/2016/09/28/uber-otto-long-haul-trucking/ http://fortune.com/2016/09/28/uber-otto-long-haul-trucking/