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There is also the off-highway challenges, you still have all the same requirements as full car automation in dense districts, except now you're in a long and wi
by ehnto 5y ago
There is also the off-highway challenges, you still have all the same requirements as full car automation in dense districts, except now you're in a long and wide truck managing a highly-destructive amount of tonnage. Sure the majority is on the highway, but your trailer has a destination, and your truck a depot, and it's often somewhere dense and busy. I think for full automation soon, it could only happen for specific routes and operations that have set themselves up on the highways with minimal challenges off-highway. Like grain hauling.
You could have the trailers dropped off at depots by bots and taken into town by drivers, but at that point you're building infrastructure specifically for highway hauling and still using local trucks for the last mile, you may as well have built a rail network.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- ovao 5y agoThe infrastructure around both long-haul and last-mile or LTL truck transport is already a thing, so in some circumstances the game doesn’t change that much under this model. Train transport is unfortunately extraordinarily complicated in comparison. It’s a great option in some cases, but a totally non-viable option in many others.
- ehnto 5y agoIt's true, the other upside to the road network is that it already exists, and so private companies can use it now not after a long period of lobbying to get rail introduced when it does make sense.
- gscott 5y agoIt would make more sense to put rfid tags into those rubber reflectors and put those on the freeways and have trucks follow those then do all of the work for full self driving, cheaper too. A human driver can take over for the last mile. The truck would read the rfid tags and each would have a database entry of the gps of each tag.
- ehnto 5y agoYou still need full self driving I think. Car cuts you off, tire flat where and when does it pull off? Load gets unbalanced, wind shear throws you off line, road ragers, unexpected hazards, unmarked construction zones, weather and road condition changes.. you get it. I think the remote driver is going to be too slow to respond in the majority of cases where circumstances are unexpected. What about load too, not having enough drivers to respond to incidents at peak wouldn't really be acceptable. I think it's useful to note that we haven't even fully automated trains yet, which should show that even when most variables are accounted for you still need a robust detection and decision engine at the helm.
- matt_heimer 5y agoIf low latency, high bandwidth satellite internet becomes common couldn't there be a remote pool of drivers that monitor and take over when needed?
- v-erne 5y agoThat's very interesting way of looking at it - we do not need to fully automate cars to put millions people out of work. If we just create automated assistants (similar to plane autopilots) that takes care of 80% of work we can then create remote driving centers for people (drone pilots) that take over when thinks go wrong. Add some specialized road patrols to handle the on ground problems (changing tires) and driving truck as a job will go from one of the most popular jobs to an outlier.
- d1sxeyes 5y agoLove the idea, but this sounds exceptionally difficult to legislate for and regulate properly. Who is liable in case the remote operator makes a mistake? What if the remote operator does not make a mistake, but the connection is not stable? Do the remote operators need full HGV licences? Could they be outsourced to a third party? A third party in another country?
- v-erne 5y agoAnd what happens when air traffic controller make mistake? Or the terminal malfunctions? This somehow did not limit air travel boom. Those are really minor problems when there are thrillions to be made.
- d1sxeyes 5y ago> And what happens when air traffic controller make mistake Then the human pilots in control of the aeroplanes try not to crash into each other.
- Ekaros 5y agoYou don't even need satellite internet... Realistically power might be biggest issue. Otherwise you can just bury some fiber next or under the road and then use terrestrial solutions. Probably with decent beam forming directionally over the road you don't even need that many base stations.
- bonestamp2 5y agoMaybe they should just automate the long sectors and then a human jumps in the cab to drive the truck for the last few complicated miles. The humans would probably prefer that too (for the most part) since they could go home every night.
- behringer 5y agoThat's exactly what will happen but who's going to pay a trucker 95k a year to park trucks 8 hours a day 5 days a week?
- IMTDb 5y agoWalmart, apparently. They'll employ less truckers than now since each one will be able to handle more trucks, but they'll need some.
- behringer 5y agoLast mile delivery looks to be about half that, around 50k/year.
- bonestamp2 5y agoIf everything else was in place for this to work, I don't think you'd have to pay someone $95k to do it. To me, the $95k pay rate has a lot to do with the time on the road and away from home. Walmart might have to pay $95k for that now, but as autonomous driving takes on some of those miles, the human pay will likely go down (adjusted for inflation).
- heavyset_go 5y agoIf they have to share roads with other drivers or the roads are unprotected from the elements, people, animals, debris, etc, you'd still need human-level intelligence to prevent harm or catastrophic loss.