16 ms·
Will automation put an end to the American trucker?
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- patrickg_zill 9y ago"Then what you have is a truckers’ lounge with 20 or 30 guys standing around getting paid." THAT's the error: those guys aren't getting paid anything to stand there. They get paid by the mile. Making them wait is benefiting the warehouse, and costing THEM.
- SomeCallMeTim 9y agoYeah. My wife has a friend who's a long-haul trucker. He gets profoundly disrespected by the current system, including showing up at 8AM to an appointment and being made wait all day, and sometimes into the next day, for his truck to be unloaded/loaded and ready for him to take. And he's paid nothing for that. There's no penalty at all for wasting the trucker's time. I cite this as evidence that the truckers have no effective lobbying body, and therefore will in fact lose most of long-haul jobs over the next 15 years.
- themaninthedark 9y agohttp://www.getloaded.com/load-board-blog/post/Whats-the-Best-Way-to-Collect-Detention-Fees http://www.getloaded.com/load-board-blog/post/Whats-the-Best... It looks like your wife's friend needs a better broker because all the companies we deal with charge us. Our shipper won't schedule a truck unless we know that the load is ready due to how steep the fees can be. When we shipped some equipment to a major trade show, they try to schedule it so that the truckers have a minimum wait but the show will also pay the detention fees back if they were the source of the delay.
- csours 9y agoJust because you're getting charged, doesn't mean the trucker is getting paid.
- SomeCallMeTim 9y agoHonestly, I would guess you've nailed it: The delivery company is collecting a fee because they are only paid for per delivery, so making a driver (and truck) wait doesn't otherwise make them money. But there's no guarantee that the fees are passed on to the driver. Just in case, I'll pass a question back through my wife to see if some truckers are actually paid for waiting. They talk to each other; I bet they all know if anyone is paid to wait.
- 2by4 9y agoSuggest change title from tracker to trucker.
- 2by4 9y agoSuggest tracker to trucker in your title.
- observation 9y agoThe automation of vehicles is taken to strongly imply robotic devices elsewhere in society. Apart from more sophisticated robot hoovers, lawn mowers I don't think that is necessarily so. Hoovers and mowers are safe because they are small, light, low to the ground and constrained to floors and lawns. Vehicles, fast, heavy, high, are in a controlled environment. Other controlled enviroments like factories have already ventured into robotics. It seems to me that main advantages of automated movement would exist in unstructured environments like streets, shops. The robots I've seen so far have low center of gravity, are heavy so as to inhibit any danger. What exactly does automated driving do for other unstructured environments? It is far from clear to me that this is going to be a trifle soon after the roads swarm with autos.
- dsfyu404ed 9y agoWe don't even have autonomous street sweepers (well defined environment, not allowed to run over stuff) mining dump trucks (not as well defined environment, few things it's not allowed to run over and most of them have reflectors on them) or forklifts to unload trucks (well defined environment, nothing to run into). I'm not holding my breath for automated trucking.
- alphaalpha101 9y agoI thought we did have automated mining vehicles already?
- avar 9y agoAutomated mining trucks are already being used: https://www.technologyreview.com/s/603170/mining-24-hours-a-day-with-robots/ https://www.technologyreview.com/s/603170/mining-24-hours-a-...
- DoodleBuggy 9y agoDepends, do truckers have a strong political lobby? If no, they'll be in trouble. If yes, then they'll be guaranteed to exist for as long as they are funding lobbyists and politicians.
- michrassena 9y agoIn the United States at least, it's going to be devastating. I don't see a bunch of individual owner-operators banding together to protect their livelihoods. As soon as it's cheaper to run automated trucks, they'll get picked off one by one. Probably the best than can be hoped for is laws mandating a person as co-operator in case of emergency. There's also some version of the last mile problem, where people need to be present. For fully automated trucking, I imagine no one has explored the security implications yet. These vehicles seem far too easy to hijack, redirect, or delay and steal the cargo. Take out the human factor and long-haul trucks are autonomous warehouses roaming the countryside.
- tynpeddler 9y agoAutonomous trucks may actually be a little more secure. The vast majority of truck thefts occur within 200 miles of the origin and truckers are strongly encouraged to not stop in this zone. Many still do though, either for legitimate reasons, or they're working with the thieves. Automated trucking will probably fix this problem. You can have automated trucks moving from secured site to secured site without worrying about exceeding a truckers 11 hour drive limit.
- mxuribe 9y agoThey can also lock down the cargo in such a way that it sort of becomes a sort of totally-sealed (automated) roving container. Much like any security, there would be limits into how cheap they can make the container still relatively secure of course (those hijackers are pretty wily and clever!)...but that doesn't seem to be such a logistical challenge in my mind.
- ranit 9y ago
- melling 9y ago“Trucking is a $700bn industry, in which a third of costs go to compensating drivers” That’s enough information to answer the question.
- didgeoridoo 9y agoThe approach that Starsky (http://starsky.io/ http://starsky.io/) is taking seems to be a promising one. They employ truck drivers as remote pilots for the "first and last mile", i.e. the local roads and loading dock work that autonomous vehicles struggle with most. Other advantages include lower fuel costs (driving slower because AVs aren't subject to operator-hour limits) and probably also lower labor costs (you don't need to pay truckers as much if the job is safe and nearby to home). If the Starsky model ends up dominating, this could all add up to a case where the price of truck transportation drops so much that demand for truck drivers actually increases, possibly even counterbalancing the pressure of individual truckers being able to manage multiple vehicles at once. This would be an example of the "Jevons Effect" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox
- jobu 9y ago> this could all add up to a case where the price of truck transportation drops so much that demand for truck drivers actually increases The problem is that local drivers average about half the pay ($30-40k) vs long-haul drivers ($70-80k). Even if there is more demand for local drivers it likely won't offset the wages lost.
- didgeoridoo 9y agoThere are a lot of unknowns here. The factors putting downward pressure on trucker salaries are: - Remote operation of trucks is an easier lifestyle, so more people would be willing to take the job, driving down salaries - Fewer human truckers are needed per truck on the road, so for a given level of trucking activity, fewer jobs exist Some potential countervailing factors: - Price of trucking plummets, potentially jacking up demand (Jevons Paradox) depending on price elasticity of truck transportation - Managing multiple vehicles may end up being more cognitively challenging than driving a single truck, reducing the pool of available workers and driving up salaries The values of these parameters (and how they change over time) will be crucial to determining the net impact to trucker salaries and employment numbers. My intuition is that salaries will go down dramatically, employment numbers will go down modestly, and overall trucking activity will expand.
- dchuk 9y agoThe most likely thing (imo) that will happen will be highway trains...there will be a real human driver in the front of the caravan, maybe just in a van or car, and then 1-10 self driving heavy duty trucks behind them. They'll draft off of each other and do 99% of the long haul route in an automated way. Once each truck is near it's destination, it will peel off of the pack and park itself near the highway, at which point a real driver will hop in and finish the route. I work in the telematics space, and work with extremely large fleets that you'd all recognize on the highway every day. None of them are afraid of self driving trucks disrupting them any time soon. However, these automated caravans could be their first opportunity to restructure the flow of their capacity across the country.
- autokad 9y agoit seems they would need to build additional infrastructure. its my understanding that truckers would already like to caravan behind one another in very long chains (save lots of fuel), but its illegal due to traffic and safety concerns for other drivers.
- Terr_ 9y agoToo bad that all the "speculative VC dollars" seem to be in trying to jump directly to full-automation of multiple small passenger vehicles. Now, I've never heard any public figure say this out loud -- so maybe I'm just barking up the wrong tree -- but I think the bandwagon is being pulled by a very particular idea about a market they can try to corner. Specifically, they're thinking of a future demographic bump in people who are too age-impaired to safely and legally drive themselves. Folks who can't (or won't) pay another human to drive, or move to a location with better public-transit, but who still have enough affluence for a self-driving car. IMO it explains the bubbly frenzied focus from multiple companies, despite the significant degree of basic research still required.
- TeMPOraL 9y agoPart of the allure of self-driving cars is drastic reduction of traffic deaths. Long-haul drivers are not the one who kill themselves on the road the most; regular people are. I'm not saying this is the driving force behind focus of companies, but it's an important consideration for many individuals in this space.
- rezashirazian 9y agoEveryone talks about truck drivers becoming obsolete once self driving cars take over the road. What I would worry about are endless number of doctors and surgeons that spent a life time mastering a skill and will just as easily be rendered obsolete by the same technology. Lawyers too.
- wott 9y ago> What I would worry about are endless number of doctors and surgeons that spent a life time mastering a skill and will just as easily be rendered obsolete by the same technology. You mean, because they operate on car crash victims?
- Density 9y agoYou jest but the vast majority of lawyers in the US practice automotive law.
- alphaalpha101 9y agoThat doesn't mean they only practice automotive law.
- wbl 9y agoThe day we don't need trauma surgeons is a good day.
- petra 9y agoDon't worry about doctors. Political power wins out in the end, and they have tons of it. For example: for decades they've managed to resist entry of decision-support systems(which were not perfect, but still, an improvement), even though their own error rate is ~1/8.
- ams6110 9y agoPretty much the reason I don't go to the doctor unless I need stitches or am experiencing intolerable pain.
- malandrew 9y agoI haven't thought of this until now, but it's going to be interesting to see the impact of self driving trucks on human migration. Today many people feel trapped where they live because it's prohibitively expensive to move. Once self-driving trucks are common, the cost of moving across the country should plummet. Imagine being able to move everything in your apartment or home across the country for a few hundred dollars.
- alphaalpha101 9y agoI think that's really just an excuse. Deep down those people know that they don't need all the particular things they happen to own right now. That particular couch? Sell it, buy a new one at the destination. They don't want to move (fear of change), and that's a convenient reason they can use to justify to others and themselves why they aren't moving.
- kansface 9y agoI've moved across the country a few times now - I'm not sure the expense of physically moving stuff was ever the largest.
- ryandrake 9y agoThey were for me, by far. What other expenses are there?
- chii 9y agoThe fact that you'd first have to secure employment at your destination city?
- malandrew 9y agoThe only move I've coordinated cost quite a lot. It involved moving a 4 bedroom house from the South to New England and cost about $4-5k with labor and boxing and only unloading at the destination. The majority of the cost was the labor after everything was boxed and loaded.
- kylehotchkiss 9y agoIt would be sort of cool if highways could then promote a "goods carrier trucks can only run nightly" rule with this. Of course allowing essential goods trucks to run in daylight
- Havoc 9y agoObviously. Question is how soon.
- kirykl 9y agoJust the threat of automated long haul trucking should cause rail freight rates to decrease, ultimately rates will drop dramatically. Last mile is the final holdout for truckers.
- alacombe 9y agoAutomation is one thing in fully mapped Mountain View with perfect weather. It's a whole other job when supply lines go through rough terrain, like Canadian western highways in winter... those chains won't get around those tires by themselves, not to mention the risk of mechanical failures.
- blt 9y agoYes, but those surely make up a small proportion of all truck freight traffic.
- darkhorn 9y ago"Will automation put end to the European hand writer?" Unfortuantly since Gutenberg's book pressing automation Europe lives in misery.
- fucktruckers 9y agoHaving almost been seriously injured or killed by truckers more times than I'd like, I fucking hope so.
- greggarious 9y agoThe modern airplane is fairly heavily automated, and probably could be piloted from afar. But we choose to mandate a pilot on board. I suspect a similar situation will play out for trucks. I suspect that truckers, like pilots, may see wages stagnate and longer hours, but the profession won't disappear anytime soon.
- DoubleCribble 9y agoMu impression is most commercial flights are largely run on autopilot. AFAIK, pilots typically only get involved for takeoff, landing, flight path changes and abnormal events. If last-mile piloting was a thing, I'm sure the airlines would try to cut costs by getting rid of the crew for the auto-pilot segments. It seems trivial for an automated truck to pull off the highway and wait for a trucker to deliver a vehicle, yet impossible for an aircraft to hold at 30k feet and wait for a pilot.
- silvestrov 9y agoA huge difference is that when something goes wrong with a truck then the autopilot can just apply the brakes and let the truck come to a halt and wait for help. That doesn't work with airplanes.
- greggarious 9y ago>It seems trivial for an automated truck to pull off the highway and wait for a trucker to deliver a vehicle, yet impossible for an aircraft to hold at 30k feet and wait for a pilot. I think many people will not like the idea of sharing a highway with an unmanned truck. I've done my fair share of driving (including a couple cross country drives to SF for internships), and the scariest parts usually involved passing or being in close proximity to semis.
- JustSomeNobody 9y agoSome will be employed driving the wreckers to go get the trucks that flake out and drive off the road.
- SubiculumCode 9y agoThe freeway is where AI will be first. It is the most controlled driving environment we have. It can be made even more controlled in a fairly efficiently and cheaply. The local city and country roads have a plethora of other issues. Pedestrians, driveways, trees, multitudes of entrances and exits...its a nightmare really. Give me AI on the freeway, and I'd probably be happy enough.
- kibwen 9y ago> while truckers are prohibited from driving more than 11 hours per day without taking an eight-hour break, a driverless truck can drive for the entire day. This effectively doubles the output of the trucking network at a quarter of the cost. Interestingly, doubling the throughput of the trucking network would also halve the average lifetime of road surfaces. "The federal government has estimated that a 40-ton, 18-wheel truck causes the same damage as 9,600 midsize cars." http://www.latimes.com/opinion/readersreact/la-le-0215-sunday-cars-weight-20150215-story.html http://www.latimes.com/opinion/readersreact/la-le-0215-sunda...
- foolfoolz 9y agosounds like a great opportunity for the automated road repair industry
- sumitwatts 9y agoI answered a similar question on Quora. If you look at it from my perspective, automation always brings innovation. You can read the answer I agree to here https://www.quora.com/Will-a-day-come-when-more-people-will-be-jobless-specifically-unskilled-labourers-due-to-automation-and-industrial-IoT/answer/Mayur-Shah-115?srid=uUIWJ https://www.quora.com/Will-a-day-come-when-more-people-will-...