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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),

• 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.
  • amarka 8y ago
    I think you trade one complexity (fixed vs variable routes) for many other complexities (larger vehicle with more demands). Think of the complexity of getting a driver license for a passenger sized car vs a commercial driver license, there's a lot more rules (physics and human regulations) around a CDL. So yes, you have a fixed route, but is that really the hard problem to solve, the route to take? Isn't the hard part monitoring road conditions, identifying objects, stopping for emergencies, etc?
    • dsnuh 8y ago
      Let's say we limit the application to just ISO compliant steel shipping container transport. It seems like we could apply much of the self balancing technology to trailer design to account for various load weights and distributions. Even without some redesign of the trailer, it's not too difficult for me to imagine software being better at controlling the truck than a human. The things that are difficult for humans to learn about driving a truck don't seem all that challenging, especially when given the limited problem space related to what is trying to be achieved with self-driving cars replacing all human transportation in cities.
  • anticensor 8y ago
    Fixed route is already solved by trains and trains can be made self-driving or be remoted easily. There is a problem in variable-route, variable-size transport.
• jonreem 8y ago
  Trucks often drive mostly or only on major thoroughfares and often on extremely long and tedious routes. A self driving truck that could drive 50 hour stretches without getting tired or making mistakes would be a huge improvement in efficiency.
  • amarka 8y ago
    I agree that there's a case for improved efficiency, but I'm not sure if the economies of developing all the tech from scratch adds up. One accident can endanger the entire company, a problem they're still reeling from with the bicyclist fatality. The car they were trying to automate has much better stopping (and overall safety) performance than any truck, yet they're still experiencing all the woes of developing new tech. Now imagine an automated truck accidentally punting a Grayhound buss full of band kids off the road.
    • dsnuh 8y ago
      There are already rules in place for human truck drivers that push the limits of what a human should be called upon to do for many hours at a time. Human truck drivers already have regular accidents due to fatigue. Replacing or augmenting long haul trucking can only be a positive.
      • sandworm101 8y ago
        Can the robot perform a brake check? Can the robot ensure a load is properly secured? The act of driving the truck is only one of the many jobs a trucker does.
        • dsnuh 8y ago
          I understand that the job encompasses other duties, my father is a retired truck driver. That said, my answer is "yes, I think they could, just as well, or better than any human". You could have multiple cameras on the load using computer vision to detect movement. You could have weight sensors sending feedback to the system. I'm sure there are many ways to do this, and any of them would beat a human behind the wheel.
• bobthepanda 8y ago
  If anything, it would be much easier for a computer to follow the extra regulations than humans, who routinely violate such regulations in the first place, in the same way that autopilots only follow approved routes for planes. Add in the fatigue and long, repetitive drives that are a feature of long-distance trucking, and it seems like a situation more ripe for automation.
  • amarka 8y ago
    I don't mean to be sarcastic here, but I hear developers (myself included) throw out "it would be much easier to..." or "this should only take an hour to automate..." all day long. If it was an easy and profitable problem to solve it would have been solved by now. I agree that it would be very beneficial for everyone if trucks/truck routes were automated (except maybe the truck drivers getting laid off) but it's obviously a very hard and very risky problem to automate.
    • dragonwriter 8y ago
      > If it was an easy and profitable problem to solve it would have been solved by now No one said it was easy. The issue was easier than another problem that is also not yet solved, not easy in some absolute sense.
    • bobthepanda 8y ago
      Otto is not the only player in the automated trucking space. https://www.commercialappeal.com/story/money/industries/logistics/2018/06/28/fedex-volvo-trucks-collaborate-testing-platooning-technology/743198002/ https://www.commercialappeal.com/story/money/industries/logi... In fact, Otto probably suffered negative impact from its association with the Waymo scandal, coupled with the recent bad press for Uber's autonomous vehicles. It sounds like Uber is retrenching in favor of just automating cabs for now.
• beambot 8y ago
  Most of those sound like benefits... Trucks are more expensive: cost of sensing and compute is smaller relative cost to the vehicle. Lots of rules about roadways and times: computers are great at adhering to, enforcing, and providing logged accountability. Monitoring size and load: sounds much more tractable compared to general City street driving.
• a3n 8y ago
  > It seems like everything about automating a truck would be more expensive (cost of 1 truck = 5-6 cars), Yes, the initial cost is about that. But, the truck is directly making money whenever it's rolling, and an automated truck would presumably roll more than a driven truck, since that's an advertised feature. A car is usually only indirectly making money at best during the few hours of the day that it rolls (getting you to work, or to the park and ride). BTW, there has been a partial solution to "trucks don't make money when the driver sleeps" problem for years. Team driving. You have two drivers, and one sleeps in the back while the other drives. That gives a truck up to 22 possible hours per day, 11 federally regulated hours per driver. > 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? Automating a truck is as hard or harder than automating a car, there's no way around it. As I mentioned elsewhere, if automated trucks are on the road, what you describe would already be solved by necessity, because you already have to go through surface streets to get you your shipper or receiver. Or, in an often imagined scenario, to get to the "freight yard" where humans would drive the first and last miles. Yes, automating a truck is at least as hard as automating a car. The actual problem in your emergency scenario is getting the truck to follow the diversion. Right now it's cop-eyeball to trucker-eyeball communication, or even just an orange sign on a saw horse. That'll have to be worked out, plus fallbacks, but it will.
• drb91 8y ago
  You’ve made an argument that it’s easier to automate cars rather than trucks, not that there’s an economic advantage. Among other things, I’m guessing most americans who own a car don’t do it because they’ve crunched the numbers compared to other transit options and figured out that a car is cheaper. It’s a convenience thing where it’s an option at all. Meanwhile, it’d be fairly easy to demonstrate marginal savings in a business where transit costs are already under high scrutiny.
• baddox 8y ago
  All of those things would cost more for a truck, indeed, but a truck is also worth WAY WAY WAY more than a car per mile.
  • MyOwnSpirit 8y ago
    Yes but you also get to automate way way less trucks than cars if we look at the current ratio.
    • a3n 8y ago
      Yes, but my [total] guess is that you get to automate way way more truck miles than car miles.
• randomdata 8y ago
  > It seems like everything about automating a truck would be more expensive (cost of 1 truck = 5-6 cars) Isn't that a good thing for adoption? Here in the agricultural industry, self-driving technology can cost tens of thousands of dollars to add it to your equipment. But when a tractors cost hundreds of thousands of dollars, it seems like a drop in the bucket, so the buyers are willing to put down the money. You don't see many tractors around these days without it. On the other hand, tens of thousands of dollars on a $30,000 car, potentially doubling the purchase price or more, makes for a much more difficult pill to swallow. Humans aren't exactly well known for their rationality. Even if the technology provides tens of thousands of dollars worth of utility to the car owner as it does to the farmer, many will struggle to accept paying 100% more for the same car plus one more feature. Farmers see it as a 5% increase in price for one more feature, so, hey, why not tack it on?
• murukesh_s 8y ago
  The best way would be a hybrid model where on easy, predictable highways (say 90%)use automation and for the rest of the route (say 10%) have a human driver ready to tackle it. And in future the driver part can be avoided as well if you can engage a driver remotely like say using a VR headset with 360.deg view. It can also then handle the emergencies like highway blocks etc. Yea but like any kind of self driving it's scary, a single mistake can get the entire company sued vs the single driver getting sued before.