See the following analysis by Brad Templeton, a SDC expert: Road wear There is strong potential to reduce the damage to roads (and thus the cost of maintaining

See the following analysis by Brad Templeton, a SDC expert: Road wear There is strong potential to reduce the damage to roads (and thus the cost of maintaining them, which is immense and seriously in arrears) thanks to the robotruck. That's because heavy trucks and big buses cause almost all the road wear today. A surprising rule of thumb is that road damage goes up with the 4th power of the weight per axle. As such an 80,000lb truck with 34,000lb on two sets of 2 axles and 6,000lb on the front axle does around 2,000 times the road damage of a typical car! An interesting solution is now possible. With fully self-driving trucks (or platoons with nobody in the rear vehicle) you can have two half-weight trucks, which would do 1/8th the damage. 4 1/4 weight trucks would do roughly 1/16th the damage. This is a bit more expensive in fuel and truck wear, though you can get back some of it with platooning. The platoon can space out further on bridges to avoid stressing them. https://ideas.4brad.com/otto-and-self-driving-trucks-what-do-they-mean https://ideas.4brad.com/otto-and-self-driving-trucks-what-do...