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Driverless electric truck starts deliveries on Swedish public road
- dmitriid 7y agoThe gist: > The T-Pod has permission to make short trips - between a warehouse and a terminal - on a public road in an industrial area in Jonkoping, central Sweden, at up to 5 km/hr, documents from the transport authority show. > > Einride would apply next year for more public route permits and was planning to expand in the United States. So, not as sensational as the title would lead you believe.
- hef19898 7y agoSo kinda like the automated trailers used for containers at major ports, just electric.
- sorenjan 7y agoWhoever claimed that Jönköping is in central Sweden needs some kind of measuring device, it's quite clearly in the south. Even if the northern half is comparatively sparsely populated it still counts as part of Sweden. https://www.openstreetmap.org/?mlat=57.783333&mlon=14.166667&zoom=12#map=5/62.664/18.853 https://www.openstreetmap.org/?mlat=57.783333&mlon=14.166667...
- dsfyu404ed 7y agoIt's like when people say anything more than an hour north of NYC is "upstate". You kind of need to have a "there is no land beyond the beltway" world view to wind up working for most media outlets anyway (not sure which is the chicken and which is the egg) so this is "central Sweden" by that yard stick.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- CPLX 7y ago> It's like when people say anything more than an hour north of NYC is "upstate". That is a correct statement that essentially nobody would argue with. The more aggressive and somewhat arguable view is that upstate is anything north of about 125th street.
- MagicPropmaker 7y agoI was born in Brooklyn and (seriously) everything north of The Bronx was upstate.
- CPLX 7y agoI mean realistically the only actual argument is if the upstate line is there, or immediately north of Westchester County.
- elygre 7y agoThatI would argue that an population based map projection would put Jönköping nicely in the middle. https://www.visualcapitalist.com/massive-world-map-redrawn-based-country-populations/ https://www.visualcapitalist.com/massive-world-map-redrawn-b...
- elamje 7y agoI believe this is what is referred to as central Sweden because it lies in the middle of Sweden's two major cities, Stockholm and Gothenburg. Similarly, Austin is considered Central Texas, Dallas is considered North Texas, etc. even though that isn't extremely accurate looking at a map.
- HNLurker2 7y ago>So, not as sensational as the title would lead you believe. But enough to make me believe in not wanting to get a future job in driving trucks (there's a market here that pays)
- dmitriid 7y agoI think truck drivers (especially long haulers) are safe for at least 10-20 years. But yeah, truck are probably the first road vehicles to be reliably automated.
- pwagland 7y agoActually, I think that long haulers are going to be the ones that first suffer. When you need a human there anyway to sign/unload/etc, then having that human also be a driver isn't such a huge problem. With long-haul the only thing that the human really needs to do is drive, and then, if needed, you could have a staging area to get the truck into the city… in much the same way that road-trains are dealt with.
- dmitriid 7y agoMy thinking is that long haul happens over public roads, and the problem of navigating public roads hasn't been solved yet. However, shorter distances especially inside large industrial zones (like in the linked article) can be reliably automated. But yeah, however you look at it, being a truck driver in industrial countries might not be a wise long-term career choice: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/apr/07/convoy-self-driving-trucks-completes-first-european-cross-border-trip https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/apr/07/convoy-se...
- seanmcdirmid 7y agoIt’s not like many kids are planning to be truck drivers. It is a job that people wander into. The bigger problem will be those that are doing it when the job goes away, as well as continued pressure on the job market as a whole (what will pop up to replace the portion of the labor pool that would have driven trucks before).
- rakoo 7y agoIs it not the first fully autonomous truck, if not vehicle, used in a "real life" scenario that is not just a closed-off portion of a street ? That is the real interesting point, regardless of the speed or the actual location.
- TotempaaltJ 7y agoIt's definitely not the first /vehicle/. Waymo has fully autonomous cars driving people around in Phoenix.
- dotancohen 7y agoThose are manned with a qualified driver who supposedly is paying attention and can take control at any time. These trucks are unmanned, with a remote driver who may or may not be paying attention but can take control at any time.
- CorvusCrypto 7y agoThe rule is clearly stated in the swedish article that during these drives a person must be present with one hand on the controls just I'm case. Same saftey net, really, remote or not imo makes no difference
- rakoo 7y agoSlight difference that makes it all the more interesting: the remote controller watches 10 vehicles at once. I feel this is the same difference as a manned vs unmanned subway, because it means reliability is good enough that you don't need one human per vehicle. Each vehicle is a little bit more autonomous. Also, the safety net inside the vehicle is clearly just for testing purposes, while the remote safety net is something that can be done in production.
- marcosdumay 7y agoThe remote controller can not only watch 10 vehicles at the same time, but also go home at the end of a 6 hours shift and handle the vehicles to another driver without even stopping.
- black6 7y ago> Thewes said the rollout of 5G technology, vital for electrification, was lagging. Why is a cellular network standard needed for electrification?
- LeonM 7y agoMy best guess is that they confused autonomous driving with electrification.
- Sharlin 7y agoTo be fair, automation is also a form of electrification, just not of the powertrain but of the driver ;)
- maxerickson 7y agoThey apparently want to use it for when a human operator controls the vehicle to get it out of a situation the autonomous system can't handle.
- snarf21 7y agoThis is what I expect for the first set of automated for freight. There will be designated on/off ramps for automated trucks. Some human will drive them there and park them. The trucks will drive across interstates and get off at another designated on/off ramp and a human will drive them to the warehouse. This removes a lot of the risks associated with automation and reduces the biggest expense of having long haul driver teams.
- michaelt 7y agoNot sure I buy the remote-controlled-by-humans idea personally. I mean, to remotely drive a car at 30mph, you either need to emergency-stop any time the control signal drops out (in which case you'll constantly get rear-ended) or you need a control system so good it can keep going even through signal drop-outs (in which case why do you have the remote control anyway) or you need an immortal data connection that never suffers drop-outs or so much as 100ms of latency (i.e. orders of magnitude better than what we have today). I mean, you could do "Human remotely controls the vehicle at walking pace" easily enough, as you could stop all you liked without people hitting you. But we'd need lots of changes to the roads to support a mass of vehicles going that slowly.
- adav 7y agoI wonder what would cost the Transport firm more: the time impact due to the low 5km/h speed or the costs of a human driver per truck? At was speed does the automated system pay for itself if speed vs human is a reasonable trade off to consider? * Not considering the cost of doing the research and the cost of the self-driving truck.
- dsfyu404ed 7y agoFor OTR use the human driver costs you tons of money because the regulations that go with the human driver force the truck to be stationary a large fraction of the time. That's the market they're (eventually) targeting, not local delivery where the driver usually also has responsibilities having to do with the cargo. For the use case mentioned in the article the human driven option is going to be cheaper because the human driven truck goes faster. Going 10km/h results in basically the same throughput as having two trucks (yes I know there's other "per trip" overhead, that's not the point).
- dredds 7y agoAssuming the battery could be swapped out in a few minutes, then traveling at a 1/3 of the speed of a human driver displaces the cost of one driver on a regular shift of 8 hours. But on a 24/7/365 schedule (weekends and holidays too) even 1/4 the speed will cover wages. Reversing this, an Electric Truck with battery swap or on-road charging going 25km/h displaces the cost of 1 driver traveling 100km/h for equal distance.
- skohan 7y agoThere was an electric car startup (now defunct) in Israel which built a network of "swap stations" so drivers of their cars could do long drives without spending hours at charging stations. The process was a bit like going through a carwash: it was completely automated and couldn't have taken more than 5-10 minutes.
- swampthinker 7y agoAh yes, Shai Agassi and Better Place right? There are some entertaining (if biased) post-mortem articles on that startup: https://www.fastcompany.com/3028159/a-broken-place-better-place https://www.fastcompany.com/3028159/a-broken-place-better-pl...
- melling 7y agoThere’s a fortune to be made in the global freight industry. https://www.cnbc.com/2019/05/15/convoy-flexport-automating-the-shipping-industry.html https://www.cnbc.com/2019/05/15/convoy-flexport-automating-t... There are tens of billions that can be carved out with automation. Electrics near large urban areas will definitely help air quality.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- icxa 7y agoThere's more than a couple of fortunes to lose by automating the trucking industry as well.
- tannerc 7y agoCan you elaborate? I don't necessarily agree nor disagree, I'm simply curious what you're specifically referring to here.
- TaylorAlexander 7y agoWealthy people will dump money in to R&D and some will lose. Robotics is an unforgiving business and the field is littered with dead.
- pbhjpbhj 7y agoTens of billions of wages no longer to be paid out to truckers. Amazon seem a long way on with packers too. That's a lot of wealth transfer that's no longer going to happen between companies and poorer people; seems we'll accelerate wealth/income disparity.
- jryle70 7y agoOr a half full view: tens of billions, possibly more, will be paid to the same truckers in their new, more fulfilling and healthier occupation? I don't know which scenario will play out. Neither do you. We'll have to see. Better yet, strive to make my scenario the reality. Complain about automation wouldn't help.
- dotancohen 7y agoI wonder why the truck has "Video recording in progress" in _English_ on the front. Wouldn't Swedish make more sense?
- jbarberu 7y ago¯\_(ツ)_/¯ While not the official language, you can oftentimes assume people will understand English in Sweden. My observation in Florida is you find more people who don't speak English here than in Sweden.
- TallGuyShort 7y agoIn parts of central Europe, I've found it easier to just speak English even when I know what I want to say in the native language. Lots of people from other countries who are also there getting by with English only, and people are so used to speaking English with foreigners that they're not used to hearing their own language in a foreign accent.
- NicoJuicy 7y agoIn North western Europe everyone speaks English. The exception is France sometimes. Eg. Flemish people normally speak Dutch, French en English. Sometimes, you see a Wallonian ask direction in dutch and they "hate" you, because you respond in French and they want to learn Dutch. Fyi, hate is a too strong word of course. But you see them thinking: oh come on, respond in Dutch because I'm learning it and your not helpful for that.
- MagicPropmaker 7y agoI try to learn enough of a language to be polite (Hello, Please, Thank You, How Much, "I don't speak ____") but I found I could make myself understood in much of Europe with English. The only exception was Spain, but fortunately, I do speak Spanish conversationally.
- 7y ago
- dagw 7y agoHere's the road (Skruvgatan) where the initial tests are being done: https://goo.gl/maps/mRj1qyMtYckVKzDz5 https://goo.gl/maps/mRj1qyMtYckVKzDz5
- dmix 7y agoThese industrial parks look like the perfect semi enclosed environments to start using these level “4” vehicles in production. Plenty of wide open lanes and clear paths, not too heavy traffic and no random tourists gawking at them or being put at risk.
- INTPenis 7y agoWouldn't it make more sense to make the automated trucks more accessible in case of the AI going on a rampage? I mean how do you even get into the cab? If it was more normal looking you could at least smash the window. But they even protected the tires.
- pojzon 7y ago> AI going on a rampage You are watching way too much of Sci-Fi. Default action in case of any malfunction would be to safely stop.
- INTPenis 7y agoHehe I've been enough in this industry of IT to know about Murphy's law. So relying on default action is like relying on security through obscurity.
- pojzon 7y agoThat statement in my country is just false: "face a growing shortage of drivers" They just want to cut on costs.
- drugme 7y agoA perfectly valid point, of course. And hence, there's no reason you should have been downvoted.
- donaltroddyn 7y agoAs with all labour, they face a growing shortage of drivers at the rates they want to pay.
- perfunctory 7y agoYep. This is just another example of framing.
- elamje 7y agoI have been resistant to the idea of government/state support for people who are losing jobs to automation, because I think people will adjust over the long run and focus on more digital jobs. However, in the nearer term, there does seem to be a bigger case to be made for some sort of support since trucking a top occupation in the US, and #1 in most states. In 10 - 20 years it seems concerning to think that 2 - 3 million people will be out of traditional work with little or no education. Additionally, young people will not have that occupation as an option. Any industry that large (including traditional diesel truck manufacturers, truck stops, gas stations, truck mechanics, etc.) will be drastically impacted, all in a relatively short time span. Should there be some help? Should the government be rapidly retraining truck drivers for something else in the next few years?
- cabaalis 7y agoThe primary barrier to social safety nets is the cost, and the ideological idea that government should not take more from its productive citizens to cover that cost. If the largest organizations are effectively optimizing humans out of the costs, then wouldn't their profits correspondingly increase? And as the demand rises for the safety net, along with corporate profits, it seems so would the argument to take a portion of those profits to cover the nets. Maybe to the point of breaking the ideological barrier. So wouldn't the businesses most harmed be those who continue to employ humans, as they'll have to pay the increased profit taxes as well as their employees?
- dwild 7y ago> Additionally, young people will not have that occupation as an option. What if the young already believe that? It's anecdotal but I know someone that worked temporarily at a trucking company at the reception of their office. She's been told by the staff that they have quite a bit of trouble recruiting drivers. She didn't saw that many that came for an interview, but one of them didn't even had a driver license for trucks. They did an interview for someone that couldn't even do the job yet. I can't see how legislation can be changed in 10 - 20 years either. Uber is 10 years old and still have trouble in MANY markets, not only against the laws but also against Taxi drivers. Even automatic trucks won't solve everything, thus companies that will use them will need both drivers, and a strike would be much worse to them than for Uber right now. What about airplane and trains? Why do they still have drivers if automating them is much easier (and already actually done)? Personally I can't see this industry no longer needing drivers for at least 30-40 years. Which isn't too bad with the current shortage of younger drivers.