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I've always felt that self driving trucks make the most economical sense to automate. A self driving truck would get to its destination faster (saving money) an

• Klover 8y ago
  Not to mention that it can drive 24/7 when necessary, turning it into a mobile freight train.
  • onemoresoop 8y ago
    Self service at the gas station?
    • Klover 8y ago
      I think that if you can figure out self driving trucks, you can figure out keeping it fueled as well. As a quick and easy solution I would imagine large enough fuel tanks on the truck itself, and a couple of gas stations with people fueling the trucks at places. One for every large industrial place would already make it very widespread. Another solution would be mechanical arms attaching to the truck.
      • snerbles 8y ago
        See Shell Oil's SmartPump...from 1997: https://robotnews.wordpress.com/2006/04/07/service-robots-shell-smart-pump-2/ https://robotnews.wordpress.com/2006/04/07/service-robots-sh...
    • dragonwriter 8y ago
      Worst case, it signals a human fueler in advance of it's anticipated need to stop for gas, and the fueler meets it and handles fueling. Over time, though, building a network of compatible automated fueling stations to support the trucks makes sense, and you can use data from the trucks for siting decisions.
    • a3n 8y ago
      You can always pay a human to do what a computer can't, until it can. Some truck stop fuel islands have a lane where a human will come out and check/fill your tires. You pay for the service, and it's not much. Most humans, or the occupations, are cheap, as you can see when you think about all those humans paid to stand on street corners and wave signs. Cheaper than paying to plant the sign on property, and a cheap enough workaround when you can't plant the sign at any price.
  • the_mitsuhiko 8y ago
    Not sure how the laws in the US are but most of Europe has deiving restrictions for trucks at night and weekends.
    • Klover 8y ago
      Which is what I was thinking of making it such a boon. Drivers need breaks, commutes, limited time of driving per day.
      • shadowtree 8y ago
        :) Those regulations protect the people living next to heavy routes, not the drivers. Similar to how airports cannot operate 24/7.
        • windows_tips 8y ago
          Do you know what a global boon it would be if I could operate a cryptomine in your bedroom?
        • a3n 8y ago
          >> Drivers need breaks, commutes, limited time of driving per day. > Those regulations protect the people living next to heavy routes, not the drivers. They're talking about amount of time in a driver's day spent driving, not what part of the day they drive. And those regs definitely are to protect the drivers, as well as all other involved parties and stakeholders. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hours_of_service https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hours_of_service
          • the_mitsuhiko 8y ago
            I’m not talking about the driver limitations but truck bans. Example from Austria: https://www.asfinag.at/traffic/hgv-bus/lorry-driving-bans/ https://www.asfinag.at/traffic/hgv-bus/lorry-driving-bans/ Semi complete list for europe: http://www.lkw-walter.com/en/carrier/useful-info/public-holidays-with-driving-ban http://www.lkw-walter.com/en/carrier/useful-info/public-holi...
  • kennydude 8y ago
    Or just run actual freight trains which require very little humans and are quite effecient.
    • Piskvorrr 8y ago
      Their problem is the huge infrastructure cost up front - this was built for cars as the interstate network...mostly during the Cold War, as a dual-use technology (military transports on railway are far more easily sabotaged).
• sorenjan 8y ago
  You could even have human pilots meet up and drive them through cities, and let the trucks drive themselves on the interstates, just like ships have maritime pilots navigating harbours.
  • stcredzero 8y ago
    Instead of having them meet the trucks, how about assisted remote piloting? I know a guy who pilots big ships.
  • dsnuh 8y ago
    Yeah, I don't understand why they aren't doing something like this. Seems like a no-brainer to have a number of staging facilities along major transport corridors that the self driving trucks deliver to, leaving the last X miles to human drivers. The truck unhitches, fuels up, picks up a new trailer, and is back on the highway in 30 minutes. You could have these operating 24/7, with human drivers picking up loads for delivery during human working hours.
    • deleted 8y ago
      [deleted]
    • londons_explore 8y ago
      I would guess it's due to investment... Self driving experts can easily pull in salaries of $5M plus per year, and this stuff takes many years. To build a team of those people, you need to burn an insane amount of cash. That much cash is only available from investors if the reward is huge. Replacing all interstate trucking is a much smaller potential reward than replacing all human transportation. Hence everyone is working on the harder, but much higher reward projects.
      • MegaButts 8y ago
        > Self driving experts can easily pull in salaries of $5M plus per year I think this is an exaggeration by almost an order of magnitude, unless you are referring to the handful of people that have had successful exits in this space.
• amarka 8y ago
  What do you mean by "most economical sense to automate"? It seems like everything about automating a truck would be more expensive (cost of 1 truck = 5-6 cars), the insurance and maintenance on the truck and hardware, the potential for catastrophic failure (1 runaway car doing 70 = bad, 1 runaway truck doing 70 = REALLY bad), the extra complexity of pulling a trailer and monitoring the trailer as well as the truck, monitoring the size and type of load of the truck and modifying the driving characteristics to match the load, the extra regulations that trucks are subject to (what roads they can be on, what loads they could cary on certain roads, what time of day they can drive on said roads, when they can or can't use engine braking). Edit: even on 'simple' point A to point B route that involve 99% highway, what happens when a small part of the highway shuts down for whatever reason (flooding, multi-lan accident, fire, etc) and all traffic is routed on smaller adjacent streets, or forced to share a lane with oncoming traffic. Automating a truck is as hard or harder than automating a car, since you're dealing with the same external variables but have more internal/attached moving parts.
  • selimthegrim 8y ago
    If they platoon or draft (or whatever the word is where like five travel right on top of each other and save fuel based on avoiding air resistance incurred only by the front one), there can be substantial savings if that is automated.
    • sirkneeland 8y ago
      peloton (comes from french word for platoon, so, close enough)
      • a3n 8y ago
        No, the word relative to automated trucks is actually platoon. https://duckduckgo.com/?q=automated+truck+platoon&t=lm&ia=about https://duckduckgo.com/?q=automated+truck+platoon&t=lm&ia=ab...
  • Splines 8y ago
    From my uninformed point of view, most of those things apply to human drivers as well. Automated trucks seem appealing because they solve (what appears to me to be) a large problem with human drivers - fatigue and allowable working hours. Building a fixed-route automated truck seems more doable than a self-driving car that can handle arbitrary roads. I don't know if it's actually any easier, but the problems that need to be solved seem smaller in scope.
• barkingcat 8y ago
  Have you looked at the complexity of driving a semi trailer? There is a ton that can go wrong even in the best of conditions. Also, nothing about driving extra long distances in remote areas where there may not be any type of cell signal, or in places where GPS can be lost (no line of sight to satellites, or places where there are tree/building cover, etc) is predicable.
  • mmirate 8y ago
    > Have you looked at the complexity of driving a semi trailer? There is a ton that can go wrong even in the best of conditions. How much of that could be solved by a fly-by-wire control system?
    • samplatt 8y ago
      A fly-by-wire system can't fix a blown tyre or an improperly-secured load, both of which are very common occurrences.
      • jonknee 8y ago
        No, but they can react to those situations much better than a human driver and then wait on the side of the road for help.
        • a3n 8y ago
          Officer: "OK, move your truck into the oncoming lane to make room for incoming emergency vehicles." Autonomous Truck:
          • ApolloFortyNine 8y ago
            ... On an interstate? What situation are you trying to describe here.
            • a3n 8y ago
• deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
• samstave 8y ago
  Why dont we have autonomous single-line rail connections between cities where we just put cars of stuff on the line and it conveys itself to the next endpoint? We basically just need to dig two N-foot-wide trench lanes and have a loop of cars constantly flowing between them, simply like a gondola where the shipping containers get swooped up by crane-lift once they exit the loop. Cover the trench so that people cant mess with it... Why do train systems need to involve so many humans?
  • mason55 8y ago
    Which cities do you choose? N cities will require O(n^2) connections. That grows very, very quickly.
    • hyperdimension 8y ago
      Not necessarily. We can just construct the absolute shortest (total distance) route from one city to the next. Sounds like a good weekend project.
      • tk75x 8y ago
        Let the mold plan the routes https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2016/12/the-brainless-slime-that-can-learn-by-fusing/511295/ https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2016/12/the-brai...
  • Erlich_Bachman 8y ago
    Elon is trying to do something similar now with his car tunnel transport network: https://www.cnbc.com/video/2017/05/12/elon-musks-new-underground-tunnel-project-will-transport-cars-at-125-mph.html https://www.cnbc.com/video/2017/05/12/elon-musks-new-undergr...
• hourislate 8y ago
  My brother in law works as a recovery driver for a very large trucking company 10000 + Trucks. He really doesn't make that much (50k-65k)considering he is at the top of the pay scale, so I am under the impression that the driver costs are pretty low. Fuel, Insurance, Break Downs, Regulations, and just waiting for loads that are not ready are the largest costs. Part of his duties is to fly out and bring back new trucks and he was telling me that some of the new trucks have lane assist, cameras, an automatic distance feature where his speed to stopping distance is calculated and the if he crosses that threshold the truck will apply the brakes to slow him down to a safe driving speed (I think he mentioned he can override this feature). He also said there are alarms to let him know when he gets to close to a lane line, etc. I imagine that eventually there will be sensors in the steering wheel that can measure his condition/attention and relay that back to dispatch so they can monitor his wellness and how alert he is, etc. Lots of interesting technology is making its way into the cab to help the driver be safer on the roads and probably is the result of some of this new self driving tech filtering it's way down.
  • MikeKusold 8y ago
    > He really doesn't make that much (50k-65k)considering he is at the top of the pay scale ~~I find that surprising, but it may be because he works for a large trucking company. The vast majority of truckers on the road are Owner-Operators and can easily pull down 150K+.~~ While looking for some facts to back this up, I came across this link [1] which talked about how even though drivers earn 183K on average, expenses eat that away and the average take home is 50-60K. [1]: https://haulhound.com/blog/owner-operator-driver-pay/ https://haulhound.com/blog/owner-operator-driver-pay/
    • hourislate 8y ago
      It's a tough business. When he started out driving he barely broke even. After a year or two the company he drove for offered to sell/lease him a truck and trailer and he could contract for them as an Owner Operator. He decided to decline and just kept driving and eventually ended up moving up the ladder to recovery driver (the very top of the ladder for drivers). Now most of his expenses are covered so he can earn a decent living. As a recovery driver he flies around the country picking up brand new trucks or trucks that have been abandoned by a driver (sometimes they just walk away), or a driver quits because he realizes he can't earn a living, or gets fired. A few have been when a driver passes away. Typically the only folks getting rich in Trucking are the big companies/owners.
• windows_tips 8y ago
  >A self driving truck would get to its destination faster (saving money) I think traveling faster requires quadraticly more energy though. mv^2 E = --- 2
  • greenyoda 8y ago
    The truck couldn't travel at a higher MPH (they already travel at highway speed limits). What they mean is that the truck would get there faster because a human truck driver legally needs to rest for 10 hours every day, but a self-driving truck does not. The money you'd save is by not having your truck sit idle while the driver slept. You could thus deliver the same amount of freight with fewer trucks. However, trucks would wear out faster due being run for more hours per day.
    • windows_tips 8y ago
      Drivers could be swapped out when the trucks are refueled or loading/unloading. There'd be no speed-up in general if speeds stay the same. >The money you'd save is by not having your truck sit idle while the driver slept. That wouldn't save money. Operating actually costs money, though your total money may increase if the operation is profitable.
      • bloak 8y ago
        There was an article in The Economist about improving road transport in India with clever logistics. If I remember correctly, one of the significant savings was that by swapping drivers every few hundred miles you can arrange for each driver to sleep at home most nights, which makes the job more pleasant, so you don't have to pay them so much.
        • windows_tips 8y ago
          Sounds like an Economist position, to focus on minimizing pay. Reminds me of the Pony Express.
• trocadero 8y ago
  I don't quite get how you can have a self driving car but not also a self driving truck. If you have the sensors and code to power a self driving car you ought to be 99.9% of the way to a truck. It should be a relatively small effort to account for a trucks different physics.
  • kbyatnal 8y ago
    You're forgetting about the data. The data used to train a car is very different from the data useful to trucking.
  • a3n 8y ago
    > It should be a relatively small effort to account for a trucks different physics. Oh wait, I've heard that expressed before! "A mere matter of programming."
• JKCalhoun 8y ago
  I've always thought trains were more economical still. But what do I know?
  • computerphage 8y ago
    The reason it isn't is passenger-to-driver ratio. It's already widely amortized to have a train driver. Sure it's an easier problem, but it's just so much less of the overhead of having a train.
  • Kadin 8y ago
    Trains are far more economical per ton-mile. The issue arises at the "last mile" if you do not happen to have both ends of your shipment adjacent to a rail line (preferably with its own siding so you don't have to deal with demurrage fees, etc.) and then have to do a truck-based leg. Assuming you need to terminate by truck on at least one end of the shipment, it takes about 500 miles for rail's natural efficiencies to make it cost advantageous. That's a very rough rule of thumb, but it's rare to be able to make the case for rail in less than that. (Some specialized situations, like mining ore in unit trains, are exceptions.)
• a3n 8y ago
  > And the majority of their time is spent on relatively predictable interstate roads, not the chaotic roads of a busy downtown, so they'd be simpler to automate. No, they'd be at least as complicated as automating cars, because there are no delivery destinations on the freeway. You have to go through the same surface streets as cars, and it's much harder to drive a truck and trailer through busy and small surface streets than to drive a car.
  • dmead 8y ago
    I think it's assumed they'd drop off to hubs that would be near highways.
    • tCfD 8y ago
      This is how it's done, and has been done, with rail-shipped containers for 70-80 years. The intermodal industry already has all the complex contractual plumbing and logistical framework to handle this with ease, but it's an extremely automation-averse industry. They still use faxes extensively ffs.
      • a3n 8y ago
        Not just intermodal. To get paid for delivering a trailer, I have to fax in the receiver-signed bill of lading to my company. You can do that at virtually every truck stop, or at a company terminal. I use an employer-provided phone app and my phone's camera to do that, but the fax is still heavily used by many or most drivers.
  • lxmorj 8y ago
    Nah, just have "pilots" that wait at hubs. Trucks auto-drive the highways and pull into a staging area where they are prioritized for a human driver to bring them the last mile.
    • ams6110 8y ago
      Even so trucks are more difficult to drive than cars. They need longer following distance and they need to react sooner to traffic jams or obstacles ahead. They have so much more momentum than a passenger vehicle. And they are much less nimble in handling. Anyone who thinks driving a truck is easy because they travel on highways has never driven one.
• brudgers 8y ago
  For bespoke truck fleets, eliminating the driver might be practical. A substantial fraction of truck freight isn't on bespoke fleets. The driver is often involved in loading and unloading. For dock service the driver moves the goods fore and aft for pickup and delivery respectively. Securing and unsecuring separate shipments. Rearranging shipments to make room and balance loading for safe travel. What your friendly UPS driver does with small packages, semi-drivers often do with larger shipments. They often carry pallet jacks and employ helpers. In terms of economics, the trucker provides a set of hands exactly when the truck arrives. The alternative is a set of hands waiting on the loading dock...docks, one at each end of the route and all stops in between. The trucker is the one person authorized to move all the different shipments within the trailer. The cost of employing a driver is often rounding error compared to the value of the goods being transported. Picture UPS but where customers load and unload their own packages. I'd put it this way, the least interesting part of truck automation is on the highway. And that's still in moonshot territory.
• chaostheory 8y ago
  What about a Fast and the Furious situation i.e. when humans start hijacking trucks? It was a ridiculous plot when you have a human driver, but not so much when trucks are automated.
  • alexgmcm 8y ago
    Didn't the Mafia used to hijack trucks? It doesn't seem that ridiculous even with humans - high value loads often have police escorts in my country for this reason.
• Fricken 8y ago
  Commuting is a bigger potential market than freight by 2 orders of magnitude, and an autonomous truck company that doesn't do the first and last mile is begging to be disrupted by the company that does.
  • ajmurmann 8y ago
    I'd expect the utilization for commuting to be much lower though. The truck could pretty much run 24/6. What's the car doing at night? Even utilization of the fleet won't be the same during the middle of the day.
    • Fricken 8y ago
      I'm sure there are creative ways to put them to work, just not at the same profit margins you'll get during peak traffic.
• profalseidol 8y ago
  I think it is time to stop thinking in terms of saving money. Money is just paper printed at will anyway. Making the driver's life better (and ours too) should be the benefit. Revolution calling!
• snaily 8y ago
  Agree. I figured the first step would be cruise-control-on-steroids: trucks from the same owner would have communicating distance sensors and brakes, enabling "convoy" driving at sub-meter vehicle spacing. Because of drafting in the convoy, you'd save fuel and money even with a driver in each truck.
• icantdrive55 8y ago
  I'm all for self-driving trucks. Well, I don't like any tech that takes away a human job, but that's irreverent now. I don't think truck drivers get the respect they deserve. Driving a truck on I-5, in CA, seems pretty straight foreword, but their are so many roads in varying states of disrepair that I think self-driving trucks will be a ways off. I can't imagine a self driving going from Sacramento to Reno on highway 80. What happens when the brakes heat up, and the computer needs to decide when it's prudent to barrel into the gravel stop? Or, that split second where the truck driver needs to decide; do I swerve around the Prius filled with people, hit the rig in front of him, or drive the truck off the road--oh yea, it just started to snow, and there's black ice on the road. I've been on a lot of highways, and it's a symphony. I'm shocked their isn't more accidents. My point is driving a truck, on our decaying roads, is a very complex task. There's judgement calls that take years of wisdom that go into driving a truck. There's a human element involved in driving that I don't think software will ever be able to emulate. We all see people driving who should have a licence, but they are not the ones usually driving commercial rigs.
• downrightmike 8y ago
  Rail is the other options and if trucking becomes more expensive, then the flow will shift back to rail.
  • on_and_off 8y ago
    Some large factories are already connected to the rails system (at least in France) but I don't know how often this is the case. For the other cases, automated trucks would make a lot of sense, even just for the last miles. I often wonder how much of the push to automated cars is due to an US centric vision of the world.
    • Kadin 8y ago
      The freight rail network in the US is very robust and generally runs at or near capacity. About twice as much freight, percentage-wise, moves by rail in the US as in Europe (though this varies somewhat depending on whether the denominator is tons of product or dollar value; there are more bulk commodities shipments, e.g. coal and grain, within the US that are almost invariably shipped by rail). Many people fail to appreciate how much stuff is shipped by rail in the US, because it is largely raw and intermediate goods traffic, and also perhaps because they extrapolate the poor state of US passenger rail and assume that freight rail is somehow equally poor (it is not; in fact some of the problems with US passenger rail stem from the system being optimized for freight). I would expect there to be more raw interest in automated or semi-automated trucking in Europe than in the US, and perhaps there will be once the technology is proven and regulatory issues are ironed out. OTOH, I'd imagine you are correct that the interest in driverless passenger cars is related to the car-centricity of US cities and the lack of public transport options. Many people are seemingly looking to "driverless Uber" as the solution for congested cities, ignoring the established solutions to the same problems, because they aren't things the private sector can deliver.
• sytelus 8y ago
  For cabs, driver overhead is about 49 cents a dollar while for truck its 38 cents a dollar [1]. However average transportation cost for retail goods is only 2-3% of total revenue [2]. So the net increase in revenue is actually about 1% for retailers - although its significant savings for trucking companies. Now consider the fact that each truck carries 100s of thousands of dollars of goods. The wages you pay to driver can easily compensate for the insurance benefits because insurance companies may cover for human mistake but not for the algorithms mistake. Even if autonomous algorithm was 10X better than human, when it takes on responsibility of driving 1000 trucks, it would commit 100X more accidents than an average human. If a truck driver gets in to serious accident every 20 years, an algorithms will be blamed for a serious truck accident every 2.4 months - even if it was 100X better than human! It's an inescapable law of large numbers. (PS: this doesn't mean there are more accidents in total. It means number of blames assigned to same entity is much higher even though overall accident count is smaller). The autonomous trucking had been attractive only for one reason really: You can avoid last mile. Highways are much more easier for autonomous driving where you rarely have to deal with crossing peds, traffic lights, round abouts etc. [1] http://atri-online.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/10/ATRI-Operational-Costs-of-Trucking-2017-10-2017.pdf http://atri-online.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/10/ATRI-Opera... [2] https://www.supplychainconsortium.com/Leadership-Forum/2009/GetPresentation/Session-1-Logistics-Cost-Metrics-Trends https://www.supplychainconsortium.com/Leadership-Forum/2009/...
  • andruby 8y ago
    > Even if autonomous algorithm was 10X better than human, when it takes on responsibility of driving 100 trucks, it would commit 10X more accidents than an average human. It's an inescapable law of probability. Could you explain this? Are you comparing an algorithm driving 100 trucks to 1 human driving 1 truck? The single algorithm will not outperform the individual driver if it drives more trucks, but it will outperform the aggregate group of drivers needed to drive the same amount of trucks.
    • sytelus 8y ago
      My statement is true if each accident by human or algorithm was random error (i.e. not systematic error). When errors are random, you can reduce probability all you want but if you increase number of instances then you are back to square. BTW, this statement is not saying there is increased number of accidents in total. It is saying how many blames gets assigned to an entity. This is the distributed blame assignment problem. When 1000 humans drive 1000 trucks, blames gets distributed. But when same algorithm is deployed in 1000 trucks, each accident gets blamed on same algorithm. So same algorithm assumes all liability that was previously distributed among 1000 humans although total liability in the system might have been reduced.
• phaus 8y ago
  I think self-driving trucks are going to replace truck-drivers for most large companies in the near future. However, I'm glad that a company run by a bunch of spoiled, sociopathic idiots completely bereft of any sense of ethics has shut down its self-driving truck program. They should get out of the self-driving automobile industry in general before their pathological desire to cut corners kills enough people to trigger over-regulation and the demise of the entire concept.
• dalbasal 8y ago
  The economics of new technologies can be hard to see/predict. Automating personal vehicles has the potential for a lot of efficiency gain too, if people stop owning cars privately. Taxi drivers tend to buy "efficient" models, vehicles that will do a lot of miles/€, so there's a gain here. There would be a shift in consumption habits, as a response to pay as you go pricing. Possibly more ""efficient" consumption, maybe even some new forms of public transport. In terms of infrastructure, you'd need less parking which frees up valuable and scarce space. It could eliminate the parking industry, rental industry, taxi industry and such. All (potentially scary) consequences of efficancy gains. Back to commercial vehicles... One way to think of potential efficiency gains is (driver cost)/(total cost) of a journey. Trucks are expensive. A long distance truck journey uses a lot of fuel & maintanence. So, the driver's wages are a smaller overall part of the journey, a smaller potential efficiency gain per journey. That doesn't tell us much about economy-wide gains, but it does tell us something about disruption. Self driving taxis could reduce the price of taxis by 50% or more. This has major implications for how and how much people consume. For long haul trucks, it probably changes the industry less.
  • kbart 8y ago
    Truck drivers must rest for considerable amount of time. For example, in EU truck drivers cannot drive for more than 9-10h per day and there are further restrictions (i.e.weekly)[0], so you either must send few drivers to a prolonged journey or truck will simply stand idling >50% of time. I'd say this reason only is enough to make autonomous trucks economically viable. 0. https://ec.europa.eu/transport/modes/road/social_provisions/driving_time_en https://ec.europa.eu/transport/modes/road/social_provisions/...