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The Poor ROI of Autonomy (2020)

152 points by Danieru 4y ago

balaselvam 4y ago
This is a fantastic read. But don't agree with the conclusion. It's myopic. Few problems I have with this, - The cost saving of 600K/truck/year is low relative to the cost saving with lower autonomy. When improving efficiency in any operations system, the ROI keeps getting lower and lower with further improvements. Does not mean that the investment is not worth doing - The efficiency principle of software relies on scale. There's no reason to build autonomous vehicles at all if you own a single truck but this makes sense when you have a large fleet. That's why software earns with scale. 600K/yr is a single truck saving. It becomes significant over the scale of trucks and the years. The unit economics is wonderful to go through. Appreciate the research!
- rflrob 4y ago
  From TFA: > The hardest 1% of the technical problem, automating the surface streets and interchanges, would end up being worth only about $600/truck/yr. Level 4 truck autonomy has less value than a daily coffee. Note that savings is $600, not $600,000. For a $100K truck, that’s 0.6% per year. Not nothing, but they’re happy to let someone else do the Herculean effort to get to L4. For each programmer on a team that could do it in a year for, say, $240K in comp, you’d need 400 truck-years ($40M worth of trucks for 1 year) to make it a break even proposition. How many programmer-years do you think it would take to build L4 autonomous trucks? How many programmer-years have FAANG alone (leave out auto manufacturers or taxi apps) spent over the last decade on autonomous driving?
  - bluGill 4y ago
    Autonomous trucks are just some minor differences from Autonomous cars. No auto manufacture dares risk someone else come out with an autonomous car that is enough safer than human drivers that governments mandate it. This is mostly about all the patents needed to make it work that the first mover will get. As such all car companies are investing in this to ensure if someone makes it works they will have it too, or at least enough useful patents that they can get a good licensing deal. I think Tesla is the only company attempting this alone, all the other car manufactures are just in some form of partnership with others. These partnerships are known to include the big truck manufactures. I suppose there are a few car companies not investing in this (either tiny, or not selling cars in western countries).
myroon5 4y ago
Unmanned Remotely-Supervised Truck questions: I wonder how latency is handled. I wonder how close nearby you'd still want the remote driver since someone across the world would have at least hundreds of milliseconds in delay communicating back and forth Also, what happens in periods of disconnectivity? It seems like you'd still need some autonomous capability then, although it might be lessened to only needing to pull over?
- upbeat_general 4y ago
  This is pretty simple, there’s really no need to give direct steering/throttle control. As an option, it’s good to have, but any real system will default to higher level commands, e.g. drive to this location, pull over, etc.
- int0x2e 4y ago
  For Starsky's engineering / demo purposes - they could limit themselves to a few safe routes with good connectivity. Just use a couple of cell modems from different networks, maybe add a satellite backup to be extra safe and you should be safe enough if the truck can do basic collision avoidance and lane-keeping. For the future, the good news is that the world is already headed towards a state where roads come with high-speed connectivity infrastructure for vehicle-to-vehicle, vehicle-to-infrastructure and vehicle-to-x communication. Building reliable, high-speed connectivity to the road makes a lot of sense if you want autonomy to really take off.
- bluGill 4y ago
  If they have to have an office in every state that is no problem. Except maybe Alaska there are enough cities that you can open an office in every state very quickly and hire people to live there. In fact work from home might even be useful. I could well see them hiring remote people with a "must live within 100 miles of X small town and have a reliable car". 95% of the time they will work from home, but that other 5% they use their car to drive to wherever the stuck truck is and figure out how to get out of trouble.
mgoetzke 4y ago
Great and detailed article. I agree with the comment from balaselvam though. On the way towards full autonomy (whenever that might be achieved) you will get there incrementally (like Tesla is trying to do, their constant delays/promises notwithstanding). At some point highway driving will be ok, but even for highway driving it is absolutely imperative to have a very good understanding of how to drive, the level of autonomy needs to be quite advanced. Otherwise you can quickly end up in a situation where unforeseen traffic guidance, debris, loss of communication will result in a situation where the truck does not react well enough. I doubt it is really possible to design a system for 'just' highway driving of such high quality that no intervention is required within the reaction time of a remote operator without actually trying to fully solve it. This could be limited to highways of course, but a loss of connection in city regions would then automatically mean the truck would have to stop where it is (in the middle of the road with hazards on) I do like the remote operator scenario for start and end quite a lot though as it would ease the incremental inclusion of autonomy into the truck economy and offer higher safety with machines this big.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
magic_hamster 4y ago
Well written and very detailed. However, it's only focused on the effects of autonomy on currently operating manned fleets. The real question is what a new business will look like surrounding autonomous trucks. Autonomous vehicles aren't built to convert businesses - they're built for safety, convenience, and for businesses we haven't seen yet.
eschluntz 4y ago
I'm curious - after Starsky shut down, who else is actively working on autonomous (or at least remote) trucking?
- grandmczeb 4y ago
  Lots - Waymo, TuSimple, and Aurora are the top three IMO.
  - bobsomers 4y ago
    Meanwhile, at TuSimple: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ymD8_DGwP50 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ymD8_DGwP50
- mainframed 4y ago
  Volvo Trucks
- wilg 4y ago
  In theory, Tesla.
- freemint 4y ago
  Daimler Truck https://northamerica.daimlertruck.com/autonomous/ https://northamerica.daimlertruck.com/autonomous/
- defrost 4y ago
  Rio Tinto - operating remote trucks since 2015 > Mining giant Rio Tinto is running pits at its Yandicoogina and Nammuldi mine sites, with workers controlling the driverless trucks largely from an operations centre in Perth, 1,200 kilometres away. > Josh Bennett manages the mining operations at Yandicoogina mine north west of Newman and is closely involved with running 22 driverless trucks on the site. That was then and much has happened since. > In 2018, each truck was estimated to have operated on average 700 hours more than conventional haul trucks, with 15% lower costs – delivering clear productivity benefits. They also take truck operators out of harm’s way, reducing the risks associated with working around heavy machinery. [1] https://www.abc.net.au/news/2015-10-18/rio-tinto-opens-worlds-first-automated-mine/6863814 https://www.abc.net.au/news/2015-10-18/rio-tinto-opens-world... [2] https://www.riotinto.com/en/about/innovation/automation https://www.riotinto.com/en/about/innovation/automation
BartjeD 4y ago
I believe the conclusion that ROI is poor is misleading: Imagine a new truck company created by one or more tech giants. A) Using state of the art tech. B) Assuming mostly full autonomy. C) Factor in the cost savings. Conclusion is this company would very largely outperform traditional trucking companies in terms of profitability. And it would be extremely scalable. If that holds then it follows that autonomy is simply the last component necessary to be able to disrupt the trucking industry as is. The real question is to what degree autonomy is needed to be able to start doing this.
- metadat 4y ago
  Uber Freight has already been working on this for years. https://www.uber.com/us/en/freight/ https://www.uber.com/us/en/freight/ (p.s. not an endorsement, I'm personally not a fan of Uber due to their tendency to play the role of Bad-Actor against both their gig-economy workers and customers, even seeking out and leveraging political corruption. Really low standards for ethical code of conduct.)
- lazide 4y ago
  So if we assume the math checks out, the math checks out? Huh? Autonomous trucks only have a chance if cash is dirt cheap, maintenance on the equipment is low, but labor is very expensive. Which… isn’t what is happening now or likely for awhile.
  - zmgsabst 4y ago
    But the math does check out: - truck new: $150,000 - cost of electronics: $50,000 - maintenance: $10,000/yr (over non-automated) - efficiency factor: 2x - wages saved: $75,000/yr So putting it together: $200,000 setup but $65,000/yr saved, before counting efficiency. Adding in that drivers can only drive 11/24 hours (legally), you get $130,000/yr saved and drop your initial capital outlay in half. Automated trucks pay for themselves in just a few years — if not immediately, due to cutting your fleet in half.
    - leereeves 4y ago
mainframed 4y ago
Great article, but I think the conclusion is a bit off. We also need more research into autonomous driving, to be able to drive trucks safely on highways. And automating that part you see as highly profitable. So, if anything, the article shows how important more research into this topic is, especially if we would factor in the two disproved assumptions, you mention in the last section. Second, I think it is a bit naive to think that truck manufacturers/tech companies will just sell trucks for a similar fix price to traditional trucking companies. I think they will either - lease them at an expensive rate (getting most of the additional margin, since they also deliver the value) - offer them as a service, such that trucking companies only manage contracts (also expensive) - found their own new companies or buy trucking companies to handle the contracts
- atoav 4y ago
  One thing that seems off to me about autonomous trucking is the following: Imagine a chain of autonomous trucks on a highway — isn't this basically a less energy efficient, less capacity version of a train that pushes a part of the costs onto public infrastructure? Granted, trucks can also cover the last and the first mile(s) with much more flexibility, but a well designed system that allows you to quickly move containers from trains to trucks and vice versa could do just that as well. Also: while this might not be as relevant within the US, on the rest of Earth truckers often also handle the customs at national borders and need to interact with certain laws. E.g. last week Bavaria, Germany banned trucks from taking non-highway routes to Austria. Not sure how an autonomous vehicle would honor this, or how police would be able to stop them. The mechanisms for doing all the things beyond just driving are just not there.
  - freemint 4y ago
    > Imagine a chain of autonomous trucks on a highway — isn't this basically a less energy efficient, less capacity version of a train that pushes a part of the costs onto public infrastructure? Imagine a chain of autonomous trucks on a highway powered by overhead wires. https://www.openenlocc.net/editorial/ https://www.openenlocc.net/editorial/
  - 4y ago
senectus1 4y ago
I work for a Mining company that has autonomous dumptrucks (among other things), and the autonomy has proven its ROI quite nicely. So much so that we are expanding its use and automating more things like light vehicles and drill rigs etc. Its not cut and dry / black and white, there has been some loss in efficiency in some areas but that is a learning process and we're constantly reviewing and updating. For us its about economy of scale, and given we control our mine sites 100% its a bit simpler than fwy's and hwy's etc.. we dont get inattentive drivers and drunk drivers and teenagers in blinged up ricerboxes. The value its added has shown me that autonomy on the public roads is definitely going to be a thing and probably very soon. I would expect insurance companies to be the biggest drivers... offering discounts to vehicles that are not driven by humans. follow by municipal councils, who will notice that the more autonomous vehicles there are, the fewer accidents there will be and the better traffic flow is thereby reducing the need for road expansions and traffic management upgrades.
- stevesimmons 4y ago
  > the more autonomous vehicles there are ... better traffic flow Won't this better traffic flow be offset by new congestion from AVs using the capacity of public roads as free car parks? aka the Jevons Paradox
  - ben-schaaf 4y ago
    This is the case for all transit, known as induced demand. Increase the number of lanes on a road and you'll get as bad if not worse traffic than before as the increased capacity results in more people driving.
Theodores 4y ago
As I read the article I keep thinking of trains and how two steel rails solve the autonomous driving problem in a way that AI cannot beat.
m463 4y ago
I'm just surprised that most trucks don't have backup cameras.
- smilekzs 4y ago
  Where would you install them? - Back of the day cab? You may as well look out of the window. Even then the following point applies (somewhat). - Back of the sleeper? What are you looking at, front of the dry van / reefer I guess? Hardly useful that way... - Back of the trailer? The trailer might not even be yours. I guess you could make a kit that clips onto the door handle or bumper? But then you'd be looking at... the dock gate, most of the time. Again, not very useful. This can go on and on, but I think what you really want is a drone directly overhead.
  - kwhitefoot 4y ago
    All that is needed is a regulation that says that all new vehicles must have it. There is no technological problem in doing it that cannot be solved with today's technology.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - bluGill 4y ago
    > Back of the trailer? The trailer might not even be yours. This is easy. Just put an Ethernet connector between the truck and the cab and put a "security camera" on the trailer. The only part of this that we don't have already is the Ethernet connector which is currently going through ISO to get a standard connector: it needs to not vibrate loose, but still break away if the trailer comes unhooked (in particular when the driver forgets to disconnect it while disconnecting the trailer) I put security camera in quotes because you need something a little more robust that the camera you buy at best buy. This is the case, and maybe the lens, mostly it is the same thing. in any case you can buy these off the shelf today, but the truck/trailer connector won't be compatible with one from a different manufacture.
  - m463 4y ago
bsder 4y ago
The one thing I don't understand is: "Why don't we make all trucking semi-local?" It would seem with modern automation that you could place relay stations at roughly 250 mile spacings so a driver can pick up a trailer near home, drive 4 hours out, drop off trailer, pick up new one, drive 4 hours back home, drop off trailer, and go home. This seems like a much easier nut to crack than autonomous driving. Real estate in a lot of flyover country in America is really cheap. And it has other advantages like gasoline and service are at specified points. Basically, treat trailers like IP packets. What am I missing? (I suspect some sort of CapEx/OpEx accounting tomfoolery that means everybody wants everybody else to take the risk of actually owning things.)
- ludston 4y ago
  You're missing the points of failure and the complexity of dealing with them. If the truck supposed to be servicing one leg of the journey has a breakdown, or the driver goes on sick leave, suddenly every container that was to pass via that leg is now stuck. Instead of having 1 spare long haul truck that can do the full journey, you have to have a spare truck per leg (Or you have to send your redundant truck on a long-haul drive to replace the broken truck, and then have them work overtime to catch up with the backlog of containers) You also lose throughput by introducing potential handover delays. You end up with a bloated admin that is continuously having to fix a shifting constraint as certain legs become bottlenecks, etc.
- birdman3131 4y ago
  We have had this ability for years and refuse to properly expand it. Stick everything over say 50-100 miles on train.
  - ElevenLathe 4y ago
    Part of the justification for the insane expense of the interstate highway system (besides the dubious defense benefits) was that it would act as a check on usurious rates by the railroads. Yes, we could just regulate or nationalize the railroads (that the public largely created via huge land giveaways and other benefits) but it's more American to counter the flaws of one big business welfare program with another: subsidizing auto infrastructure as a giveaway to Detroit and the oil companies.
victor9000 4y ago
With all the hoopla that went into self-driving cars, why do we still not have self-driving trains? Operating on a fixed track reduces the problem space quite a bit, no? So if the technology can't get there for trains, then it will never get there for cars.
- _delirium 4y ago
  The problem of automating trains is easier, but train labor requirements are already very low compared to truck requirements, so there isn't much of a win there. A typical freight train has a 2-person crew carrying 200+ TEU containers.
- Animats 4y ago
  It's been done for trains. But they're already down to one person for a huge train, so the payoff isn't huge.
  - jhy 4y ago
    And that one driver now carries all the responsibility. To automate them out, you need 100% accuracy which closes in on impossible to achieve. Any lack of perfection would be down to the automator. So it's a very scary piece to take on when there's no human in the loop left to hold the bag when something goes wrong.
    - MaxBarraclough 4y ago
      > To automate them out, you need 100% accuracy which closes in on impossible to achieve. I don't follow. As Animats indicated, there are already plenty of autonomous trains that work fine.
      - Gare 4y ago
        Those are usually "closed" systems, that don't have to deal with unpredictable events that often.
Animats 4y ago
And then they went bust.[1] Because their slow-growth business model and the VC model didn't fit. [1] https://medium.com/starsky-robotics-blog/the-end-of-starsky-robotics-acb8a6a8a5f5 https://medium.com/starsky-robotics-blog/the-end-of-starsky-...
- troelsSteegin 4y ago
  I don't understand why vC's would think this way: "While this is a lower margin business than software’s traditional 90%, we expected to be able to get to a 50% margin in time. It took me way too long to realize that VCs would rather a $1b business with a 90% margin than a $5b business with a 50% margin, even if capital requirements and growth were the same. And growth would be the same. The biggest limiter of autonomous deployments isn’t sales, it’s safety." In either case, returns are gated on fleet deployments, and the teleoperator approach seems more likely to deploy sooner at scale. Is it that VC's in this case were not investing in logistics, but in AI?
  - redwood 4y ago
    That math doesn't add up. If growth were truly the same many would prefer the more than 2x gross profit dollars. However in many cases the growth profile is different between such different models
  - O__________O 4y ago
    Believe concept you’re missing is Opportunity Cost: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opportunity_cost https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opportunity_cost You cannot say all things are equal, then x5 the total revenue of a company with significantly lower margins and say you’re comparing apples to apples. Like to like comparison would be six companies each making one billion of which half have a 90% margin, other half having a 50% margin. If you only have the capital to invest in three, which would you pick, assuming all other factors were identical?
    - kuhewa 4y ago
      Capital requirements are the same in the hypothetical
freemint 4y ago
We are incredibly far away from autonomous trucks. I am not aware of a single truck that you can buy that offers assisted (as in you press a button) lane switching. There are lane keeping assistants and assistants which use cameras to check whether switching lanes is unsafe due to other vehicles on the road. Waymo seems to be working on it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z09jND0G6HQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z09jND0G6HQ but the fact that this 20 second maneuver is warranting a video in their eyes should tell you how complicated it is.
- ProllyInfamous 4y ago
  It seems like AI truck driving, at least hub-to-hub, is already pretty well solved. Here's a test example (in Germany) that incorporates electric trucks which only need enough onboard energy to deliver "the last mile" : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_3P_S7pL7Yg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_3P_S7pL7Yg
  - freemint 4y ago
    Those trucks are human driven.
bigbacaloa 4y ago
Sounds like trucking companies should build a network of well located cheap rooming houses for overnight stays for truckers and scrap overnight cabs. They could even put them next to fuel stops and open the eateries to the public. They could be called truck stops.
bschne 4y ago
Aside: I love this kind of break-down of the low-level economics of a certain industry/business. Does anyone have any good references for others?
xiphias2 4y ago
Autonomous driving is like alphago/alpha zero: without the algorithms it's really hard to solve, but when the algorithms are ready and mature, it will be easy to do and open source. So far the biggest winners are companies outsourcing the time of being ready to retailers: Tesla and Comma.AI
- notahacker 4y ago
  The training set, regulatory compliance hurdles and implications are a bit more complicated than teaching your computer how to play a perfect information game or even chucking text at it until it's reasonably competent at chat.
- bismuthcrystal 4y ago
  So the problem is hard until it isn't? Nice analysis...
elzbardico 4y ago
As I read this kind of stuff, I can't help but feel guilty of how our profession is so cavalier in being an allied of capital against labor.
- sacrosancty 4y ago
  Labor doesn't want to be laboring. It's better in the long term to remove the need for labor than to have people trapped in labor but "ally" with them. We get to enjoy being programmers instead of farm laborers because previous generations succeeded in using capital to win against labor.
  - TomSwirly 4y ago
    What do you expect to happen to these laborers? Will they get to retire in comfort because our society is so rich? Heck, no. America's philosophy is if you don't work, you don't eat. The people investing the capital to replace the workers are doing this so they can capture the money that used to go to the workers. And that's what will continue to happen.
    - int0x2e 4y ago
      You may be assuming that the ones benefiting from automation are happy to live in a world where they are hated by almost everyone, and at best kept safe by using some private army. Imagine living in a world where "eat the rich" is not a fringe idea but a campaign promise... I would argue the rich would much prefer to let everyone live at some <low but "okay"> standard of living than have a few more zeros on their bank totals and live in constant fear. I think the world shown in the movie Elysium portrays this reality and its possible outcomes better than I can do. Not the be the best movie ever, but it got this part pretty well in my mind...
      - jfk13 4y ago
        > I would argue the rich would much prefer to let everyone live at some <low but "okay"> standard of living than have a few more zeros on their bank totals and live in constant fear. I suspect many of the rich don't feel they are yet rich enough for this reasoning to be applicable to them.... and each year as they get richer, their subconscious goalposts move a little further.
mdorazio 4y ago
I work with two companies developing true autonomous trucks and the conclusions in this article are dated and not accurate in light of the bigger picture. 1) The model most are working toward is "hub to hub" not point to point. As in, A human driver drives the truck from the warehouse or port to a hub on the highway outside the city surface streets. Then they get out of the truck and pick up another one that needs to go back into the city. The truck then drives itself on the highway to another hub near its destination where another human driver completes the trip. This works in multiple ways - it allows human drivers to deal with the hard part of automation while also avoiding the terrible away from home lifestyle, and it allows you to have dedicated autonomous trucks for on-highway separate from your human-driven fleet (you can swap the trailers instead of using the same cab). You'll see these hubs start cropping up in a couple years. 2) On-highway autonomy is not that far away anymore. It's definitely not a "next year" thing, but mid-late decade is a near certainty based on the current state of the tech. That's a long time for people used to software, but not a long time compared to the lifecycle of a truck. 3) There seems to be an implicit assumption in this write-up that autonomous systems will remain horribly expensive, which isn't true. They're expensive today because each generation of development is effectively custom built in small quantities. Just like Starsky said their camera system would drop in price with scale, a "ready for production" generation of autonomous driving kit in a few years will likely be close to 1/3 the current kit cost, which has very large impacts on the total ROI calculation. I don't want to make it sound like there aren't big challenges left to solve - there are - but there's also a reason so much investment money has flowed into this space. The ROI does make sense, just not on the original hype-cycle timeline that a lot of people reported.
- algo_trader 4y ago
  I agree with your analysis. Autonomy also dove-tails very well with the inevitable electrification (reduced maintenance, higher up time, higher capex lower opex, etc) DO you have any opinions on etrucks-battery-swapping?
  - mattferderer 4y ago
    Not my area but seems like if you swab cabs you would be able to keep your fleet either on the road or charging & getting maintenance. > The charge time offers time for maintenance & switching trailers > Charge times keep dropping & miles per charge keep increasing > Batteries currently make up almost half the price of a car. Battery prices are dropping though. Not sure about cab prices. Also these cabs might be very cheap without human comforts in comparison to the battery, so if battery ends up being bulk of cost, you might gain little value there. Anyways just 2 random cents from someone who finds interest in this but doesn't actually know anything.
TheDudeMan 4y ago
Remotely-driven trucks sounds terrifying.
ThePadawan 4y ago
> The truck then drives itself on the highway to another hub near its destination where another human driver completes the trip. This works in multiple ways - it allows human drivers to deal with the hard part of automation while also avoiding the terrible away from home lifestyle, and it allows you to have dedicated autonomous trucks for on-highway separate from your human-driven fleet (you can swap the trailers instead of using the same cab). You'll see these hubs start cropping up in a couple years. That makes sense, but just sounds like a worse version of freight trains to me. (Edit: This didn't reply to the correct comment)
- throwaway0a5e 4y ago
  Just not needing to deal with "the railroad" would be a huge plus all else being equal. They're like the DMV of shipping.
- LightRailTycoon 4y ago
  The "advantage" is that we all get to pay for the rails instead of just the railways.
aliyeysides 4y ago
I used to own an OTR trucking company. The biggest issue for us other than finding drivers like the article mentions were the FMSCA regulations around the duration a driver is permitted to drive on a given day. We would be forced to stop a few miles short of a dropoff location because the driver ran out of driving time and was forced to enter the sleeping berth to rest. Companies like Amazon solve for this by driving in teams of two per truck so you can swap drivers, but finding even a single driver for us was a challenge. I'm curious what the current state of regulations say for autonomous trucks. If they are not capped on drive time then that alone would be a huge win for companies.
- algo_trader 4y ago
  If we get autonomous hub-to-hub, what does that mean for companies serving the first/final mile? Do they keep trucks longer since they do less mileage? Do they start billing by the hour? Does their schedule become less pre-booked and simply on-demand?
BMc2020 4y ago
I so hoped this would be about HPs purchase of Autonomy: Autonomy was acquired by Hewlett-Packard (HP) in October 2011. The deal valued Autonomy at $11.7 billion (£7.4 billion). Within a year, HP had written off $8.8 billion of Autonomy's value. HP claimed this resulted from "serious accounting improprieties" and "outright misrepresentations" by the previous management.

152 points by Danieru 4y ago

This is a fantastic read. But don't agree with the conclusion. It's myopic. Few problems I have with this, - The cost saving of 600K/truck/year is low relative to the cost saving with lower autonomy. When improving efficiency in any operations system, the ROI keeps getting lower and lower with further improvements. Does not mean that the investment is not worth doing - The efficiency principle of software relies on scale. There's no reason to build autonomous vehicles at all if you own a single truck but this makes sense when you have a large fleet. That's why software earns with scale. 600K/yr is a single truck saving. It becomes significant over the scale of trucks and the years. The unit economics is wonderful to go through. Appreciate the research!

rflrob 4y ago
From TFA: > The hardest 1% of the technical problem, automating the surface streets and interchanges, would end up being worth only about $600/truck/yr. Level 4 truck autonomy has less value than a daily coffee. Note that savings is $600, not $600,000. For a $100K truck, that’s 0.6% per year. Not nothing, but they’re happy to let someone else do the Herculean effort to get to L4. For each programmer on a team that could do it in a year for, say, $240K in comp, you’d need 400 truck-years ($40M worth of trucks for 1 year) to make it a break even proposition. How many programmer-years do you think it would take to build L4 autonomous trucks? How many programmer-years have FAANG alone (leave out auto manufacturers or taxi apps) spent over the last decade on autonomous driving?
- bluGill 4y ago
  Autonomous trucks are just some minor differences from Autonomous cars. No auto manufacture dares risk someone else come out with an autonomous car that is enough safer than human drivers that governments mandate it. This is mostly about all the patents needed to make it work that the first mover will get. As such all car companies are investing in this to ensure if someone makes it works they will have it too, or at least enough useful patents that they can get a good licensing deal. I think Tesla is the only company attempting this alone, all the other car manufactures are just in some form of partnership with others. These partnerships are known to include the big truck manufactures. I suppose there are a few car companies not investing in this (either tiny, or not selling cars in western countries).

myroon5 4y ago

Unmanned Remotely-Supervised Truck questions: I wonder how latency is handled. I wonder how close nearby you'd still want the remote driver since someone across the world would have at least hundreds of milliseconds in delay communicating back and forth Also, what happens in periods of disconnectivity? It seems like you'd still need some autonomous capability then, although it might be lessened to only needing to pull over?

upbeat_general 4y ago
This is pretty simple, there’s really no need to give direct steering/throttle control. As an option, it’s good to have, but any real system will default to higher level commands, e.g. drive to this location, pull over, etc.
int0x2e 4y ago
For Starsky's engineering / demo purposes - they could limit themselves to a few safe routes with good connectivity. Just use a couple of cell modems from different networks, maybe add a satellite backup to be extra safe and you should be safe enough if the truck can do basic collision avoidance and lane-keeping. For the future, the good news is that the world is already headed towards a state where roads come with high-speed connectivity infrastructure for vehicle-to-vehicle, vehicle-to-infrastructure and vehicle-to-x communication. Building reliable, high-speed connectivity to the road makes a lot of sense if you want autonomy to really take off.
bluGill 4y ago
If they have to have an office in every state that is no problem. Except maybe Alaska there are enough cities that you can open an office in every state very quickly and hire people to live there. In fact work from home might even be useful. I could well see them hiring remote people with a "must live within 100 miles of X small town and have a reliable car". 95% of the time they will work from home, but that other 5% they use their car to drive to wherever the stuck truck is and figure out how to get out of trouble.

mgoetzke 4y ago

Great and detailed article. I agree with the comment from balaselvam though. On the way towards full autonomy (whenever that might be achieved) you will get there incrementally (like Tesla is trying to do, their constant delays/promises notwithstanding). At some point highway driving will be ok, but even for highway driving it is absolutely imperative to have a very good understanding of how to drive, the level of autonomy needs to be quite advanced. Otherwise you can quickly end up in a situation where unforeseen traffic guidance, debris, loss of communication will result in a situation where the truck does not react well enough. I doubt it is really possible to design a system for 'just' highway driving of such high quality that no intervention is required within the reaction time of a remote operator without actually trying to fully solve it. This could be limited to highways of course, but a loss of connection in city regions would then automatically mean the truck would have to stop where it is (in the middle of the road with hazards on) I do like the remote operator scenario for start and end quite a lot though as it would ease the incremental inclusion of autonomy into the truck economy and offer higher safety with machines this big.

deleted 4y ago
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magic_hamster 4y ago

Well written and very detailed. However, it's only focused on the effects of autonomy on currently operating manned fleets. The real question is what a new business will look like surrounding autonomous trucks. Autonomous vehicles aren't built to convert businesses - they're built for safety, convenience, and for businesses we haven't seen yet.

eschluntz 4y ago

I'm curious - after Starsky shut down, who else is actively working on autonomous (or at least remote) trucking?

grandmczeb 4y ago
Lots - Waymo, TuSimple, and Aurora are the top three IMO.
- bobsomers 4y ago
  Meanwhile, at TuSimple: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ymD8_DGwP50 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ymD8_DGwP50
mainframed 4y ago
Volvo Trucks
wilg 4y ago
In theory, Tesla.
freemint 4y ago
Daimler Truck https://northamerica.daimlertruck.com/autonomous/ https://northamerica.daimlertruck.com/autonomous/
defrost 4y ago
Rio Tinto - operating remote trucks since 2015 > Mining giant Rio Tinto is running pits at its Yandicoogina and Nammuldi mine sites, with workers controlling the driverless trucks largely from an operations centre in Perth, 1,200 kilometres away. > Josh Bennett manages the mining operations at Yandicoogina mine north west of Newman and is closely involved with running 22 driverless trucks on the site. That was then and much has happened since. > In 2018, each truck was estimated to have operated on average 700 hours more than conventional haul trucks, with 15% lower costs – delivering clear productivity benefits. They also take truck operators out of harm’s way, reducing the risks associated with working around heavy machinery. [1] https://www.abc.net.au/news/2015-10-18/rio-tinto-opens-worlds-first-automated-mine/6863814 https://www.abc.net.au/news/2015-10-18/rio-tinto-opens-world... [2] https://www.riotinto.com/en/about/innovation/automation https://www.riotinto.com/en/about/innovation/automation

BartjeD 4y ago

I believe the conclusion that ROI is poor is misleading: Imagine a new truck company created by one or more tech giants. A) Using state of the art tech. B) Assuming mostly full autonomy. C) Factor in the cost savings. Conclusion is this company would very largely outperform traditional trucking companies in terms of profitability. And it would be extremely scalable. If that holds then it follows that autonomy is simply the last component necessary to be able to disrupt the trucking industry as is. The real question is to what degree autonomy is needed to be able to start doing this.

metadat 4y ago
Uber Freight has already been working on this for years. https://www.uber.com/us/en/freight/ https://www.uber.com/us/en/freight/ (p.s. not an endorsement, I'm personally not a fan of Uber due to their tendency to play the role of Bad-Actor against both their gig-economy workers and customers, even seeking out and leveraging political corruption. Really low standards for ethical code of conduct.)
lazide 4y ago
So if we assume the math checks out, the math checks out? Huh? Autonomous trucks only have a chance if cash is dirt cheap, maintenance on the equipment is low, but labor is very expensive. Which… isn’t what is happening now or likely for awhile.
- zmgsabst 4y ago
  But the math does check out: - truck new: $150,000 - cost of electronics: $50,000 - maintenance: $10,000/yr (over non-automated) - efficiency factor: 2x - wages saved: $75,000/yr So putting it together: $200,000 setup but $65,000/yr saved, before counting efficiency. Adding in that drivers can only drive 11/24 hours (legally), you get $130,000/yr saved and drop your initial capital outlay in half. Automated trucks pay for themselves in just a few years — if not immediately, due to cutting your fleet in half.
  - leereeves 4y ago

mainframed 4y ago

Great article, but I think the conclusion is a bit off. We also need more research into autonomous driving, to be able to drive trucks safely on highways. And automating that part you see as highly profitable. So, if anything, the article shows how important more research into this topic is, especially if we would factor in the two disproved assumptions, you mention in the last section. Second, I think it is a bit naive to think that truck manufacturers/tech companies will just sell trucks for a similar fix price to traditional trucking companies. I think they will either - lease them at an expensive rate (getting most of the additional margin, since they also deliver the value) - offer them as a service, such that trucking companies only manage contracts (also expensive) - found their own new companies or buy trucking companies to handle the contracts

atoav 4y ago
One thing that seems off to me about autonomous trucking is the following: Imagine a chain of autonomous trucks on a highway — isn't this basically a less energy efficient, less capacity version of a train that pushes a part of the costs onto public infrastructure? Granted, trucks can also cover the last and the first mile(s) with much more flexibility, but a well designed system that allows you to quickly move containers from trains to trucks and vice versa could do just that as well. Also: while this might not be as relevant within the US, on the rest of Earth truckers often also handle the customs at national borders and need to interact with certain laws. E.g. last week Bavaria, Germany banned trucks from taking non-highway routes to Austria. Not sure how an autonomous vehicle would honor this, or how police would be able to stop them. The mechanisms for doing all the things beyond just driving are just not there.
- freemint 4y ago
  > Imagine a chain of autonomous trucks on a highway — isn't this basically a less energy efficient, less capacity version of a train that pushes a part of the costs onto public infrastructure? Imagine a chain of autonomous trucks on a highway powered by overhead wires. https://www.openenlocc.net/editorial/ https://www.openenlocc.net/editorial/
- 4y ago

senectus1 4y ago

I work for a Mining company that has autonomous dumptrucks (among other things), and the autonomy has proven its ROI quite nicely. So much so that we are expanding its use and automating more things like light vehicles and drill rigs etc. Its not cut and dry / black and white, there has been some loss in efficiency in some areas but that is a learning process and we're constantly reviewing and updating. For us its about economy of scale, and given we control our mine sites 100% its a bit simpler than fwy's and hwy's etc.. we dont get inattentive drivers and drunk drivers and teenagers in blinged up ricerboxes. The value its added has shown me that autonomy on the public roads is definitely going to be a thing and probably very soon. I would expect insurance companies to be the biggest drivers... offering discounts to vehicles that are not driven by humans. follow by municipal councils, who will notice that the more autonomous vehicles there are, the fewer accidents there will be and the better traffic flow is thereby reducing the need for road expansions and traffic management upgrades.

stevesimmons 4y ago
> the more autonomous vehicles there are ... better traffic flow Won't this better traffic flow be offset by new congestion from AVs using the capacity of public roads as free car parks? aka the Jevons Paradox
- ben-schaaf 4y ago
  This is the case for all transit, known as induced demand. Increase the number of lanes on a road and you'll get as bad if not worse traffic than before as the increased capacity results in more people driving.

Theodores 4y ago

As I read the article I keep thinking of trains and how two steel rails solve the autonomous driving problem in a way that AI cannot beat.

m463 4y ago

I'm just surprised that most trucks don't have backup cameras.

smilekzs 4y ago
Where would you install them? - Back of the day cab? You may as well look out of the window. Even then the following point applies (somewhat). - Back of the sleeper? What are you looking at, front of the dry van / reefer I guess? Hardly useful that way... - Back of the trailer? The trailer might not even be yours. I guess you could make a kit that clips onto the door handle or bumper? But then you'd be looking at... the dock gate, most of the time. Again, not very useful. This can go on and on, but I think what you really want is a drone directly overhead.
- kwhitefoot 4y ago
  All that is needed is a regulation that says that all new vehicles must have it. There is no technological problem in doing it that cannot be solved with today's technology.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- bluGill 4y ago
  > Back of the trailer? The trailer might not even be yours. This is easy. Just put an Ethernet connector between the truck and the cab and put a "security camera" on the trailer. The only part of this that we don't have already is the Ethernet connector which is currently going through ISO to get a standard connector: it needs to not vibrate loose, but still break away if the trailer comes unhooked (in particular when the driver forgets to disconnect it while disconnecting the trailer) I put security camera in quotes because you need something a little more robust that the camera you buy at best buy. This is the case, and maybe the lens, mostly it is the same thing. in any case you can buy these off the shelf today, but the truck/trailer connector won't be compatible with one from a different manufacture.
- m463 4y ago

bsder 4y ago

The one thing I don't understand is: "Why don't we make all trucking semi-local?" It would seem with modern automation that you could place relay stations at roughly 250 mile spacings so a driver can pick up a trailer near home, drive 4 hours out, drop off trailer, pick up new one, drive 4 hours back home, drop off trailer, and go home. This seems like a much easier nut to crack than autonomous driving. Real estate in a lot of flyover country in America is really cheap. And it has other advantages like gasoline and service are at specified points. Basically, treat trailers like IP packets. What am I missing? (I suspect some sort of CapEx/OpEx accounting tomfoolery that means everybody wants everybody else to take the risk of actually owning things.)

ludston 4y ago
You're missing the points of failure and the complexity of dealing with them. If the truck supposed to be servicing one leg of the journey has a breakdown, or the driver goes on sick leave, suddenly every container that was to pass via that leg is now stuck. Instead of having 1 spare long haul truck that can do the full journey, you have to have a spare truck per leg (Or you have to send your redundant truck on a long-haul drive to replace the broken truck, and then have them work overtime to catch up with the backlog of containers) You also lose throughput by introducing potential handover delays. You end up with a bloated admin that is continuously having to fix a shifting constraint as certain legs become bottlenecks, etc.
birdman3131 4y ago
We have had this ability for years and refuse to properly expand it. Stick everything over say 50-100 miles on train.
- ElevenLathe 4y ago
  Part of the justification for the insane expense of the interstate highway system (besides the dubious defense benefits) was that it would act as a check on usurious rates by the railroads. Yes, we could just regulate or nationalize the railroads (that the public largely created via huge land giveaways and other benefits) but it's more American to counter the flaws of one big business welfare program with another: subsidizing auto infrastructure as a giveaway to Detroit and the oil companies.

victor9000 4y ago

With all the hoopla that went into self-driving cars, why do we still not have self-driving trains? Operating on a fixed track reduces the problem space quite a bit, no? So if the technology can't get there for trains, then it will never get there for cars.

_delirium 4y ago
The problem of automating trains is easier, but train labor requirements are already very low compared to truck requirements, so there isn't much of a win there. A typical freight train has a 2-person crew carrying 200+ TEU containers.
Animats 4y ago
It's been done for trains. But they're already down to one person for a huge train, so the payoff isn't huge.
- jhy 4y ago
  And that one driver now carries all the responsibility. To automate them out, you need 100% accuracy which closes in on impossible to achieve. Any lack of perfection would be down to the automator. So it's a very scary piece to take on when there's no human in the loop left to hold the bag when something goes wrong.
  - MaxBarraclough 4y ago
    > To automate them out, you need 100% accuracy which closes in on impossible to achieve. I don't follow. As Animats indicated, there are already plenty of autonomous trains that work fine.
    - Gare 4y ago
      Those are usually "closed" systems, that don't have to deal with unpredictable events that often.

Animats 4y ago

And then they went bust.[1] Because their slow-growth business model and the VC model didn't fit. [1] https://medium.com/starsky-robotics-blog/the-end-of-starsky-robotics-acb8a6a8a5f5 https://medium.com/starsky-robotics-blog/the-end-of-starsky-...

troelsSteegin 4y ago
I don't understand why vC's would think this way: "While this is a lower margin business than software’s traditional 90%, we expected to be able to get to a 50% margin in time. It took me way too long to realize that VCs would rather a $1b business with a 90% margin than a $5b business with a 50% margin, even if capital requirements and growth were the same. And growth would be the same. The biggest limiter of autonomous deployments isn’t sales, it’s safety." In either case, returns are gated on fleet deployments, and the teleoperator approach seems more likely to deploy sooner at scale. Is it that VC's in this case were not investing in logistics, but in AI?
- redwood 4y ago
  That math doesn't add up. If growth were truly the same many would prefer the more than 2x gross profit dollars. However in many cases the growth profile is different between such different models
- O__________O 4y ago
  Believe concept you’re missing is Opportunity Cost: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opportunity_cost https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opportunity_cost You cannot say all things are equal, then x5 the total revenue of a company with significantly lower margins and say you’re comparing apples to apples. Like to like comparison would be six companies each making one billion of which half have a 90% margin, other half having a 50% margin. If you only have the capital to invest in three, which would you pick, assuming all other factors were identical?
  - kuhewa 4y ago
    Capital requirements are the same in the hypothetical

freemint 4y ago

We are incredibly far away from autonomous trucks. I am not aware of a single truck that you can buy that offers assisted (as in you press a button) lane switching. There are lane keeping assistants and assistants which use cameras to check whether switching lanes is unsafe due to other vehicles on the road. Waymo seems to be working on it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z09jND0G6HQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z09jND0G6HQ but the fact that this 20 second maneuver is warranting a video in their eyes should tell you how complicated it is.

ProllyInfamous 4y ago
It seems like AI truck driving, at least hub-to-hub, is already pretty well solved. Here's a test example (in Germany) that incorporates electric trucks which only need enough onboard energy to deliver "the last mile" : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_3P_S7pL7Yg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_3P_S7pL7Yg
- freemint 4y ago
  Those trucks are human driven.

bigbacaloa 4y ago

Sounds like trucking companies should build a network of well located cheap rooming houses for overnight stays for truckers and scrap overnight cabs. They could even put them next to fuel stops and open the eateries to the public. They could be called truck stops.

bschne 4y ago

Aside: I love this kind of break-down of the low-level economics of a certain industry/business. Does anyone have any good references for others?

xiphias2 4y ago

Autonomous driving is like alphago/alpha zero: without the algorithms it's really hard to solve, but when the algorithms are ready and mature, it will be easy to do and open source. So far the biggest winners are companies outsourcing the time of being ready to retailers: Tesla and Comma.AI

notahacker 4y ago
The training set, regulatory compliance hurdles and implications are a bit more complicated than teaching your computer how to play a perfect information game or even chucking text at it until it's reasonably competent at chat.
bismuthcrystal 4y ago
So the problem is hard until it isn't? Nice analysis...

elzbardico 4y ago

As I read this kind of stuff, I can't help but feel guilty of how our profession is so cavalier in being an allied of capital against labor.

sacrosancty 4y ago
Labor doesn't want to be laboring. It's better in the long term to remove the need for labor than to have people trapped in labor but "ally" with them. We get to enjoy being programmers instead of farm laborers because previous generations succeeded in using capital to win against labor.
- TomSwirly 4y ago
  What do you expect to happen to these laborers? Will they get to retire in comfort because our society is so rich? Heck, no. America's philosophy is if you don't work, you don't eat. The people investing the capital to replace the workers are doing this so they can capture the money that used to go to the workers. And that's what will continue to happen.
  - int0x2e 4y ago
    You may be assuming that the ones benefiting from automation are happy to live in a world where they are hated by almost everyone, and at best kept safe by using some private army. Imagine living in a world where "eat the rich" is not a fringe idea but a campaign promise... I would argue the rich would much prefer to let everyone live at some <low but "okay"> standard of living than have a few more zeros on their bank totals and live in constant fear. I think the world shown in the movie Elysium portrays this reality and its possible outcomes better than I can do. Not the be the best movie ever, but it got this part pretty well in my mind...
    - jfk13 4y ago
      > I would argue the rich would much prefer to let everyone live at some <low but "okay"> standard of living than have a few more zeros on their bank totals and live in constant fear. I suspect many of the rich don't feel they are yet rich enough for this reasoning to be applicable to them.... and each year as they get richer, their subconscious goalposts move a little further.

mdorazio 4y ago

I work with two companies developing true autonomous trucks and the conclusions in this article are dated and not accurate in light of the bigger picture. 1) The model most are working toward is "hub to hub" not point to point. As in, A human driver drives the truck from the warehouse or port to a hub on the highway outside the city surface streets. Then they get out of the truck and pick up another one that needs to go back into the city. The truck then drives itself on the highway to another hub near its destination where another human driver completes the trip. This works in multiple ways - it allows human drivers to deal with the hard part of automation while also avoiding the terrible away from home lifestyle, and it allows you to have dedicated autonomous trucks for on-highway separate from your human-driven fleet (you can swap the trailers instead of using the same cab). You'll see these hubs start cropping up in a couple years. 2) On-highway autonomy is not that far away anymore. It's definitely not a "next year" thing, but mid-late decade is a near certainty based on the current state of the tech. That's a long time for people used to software, but not a long time compared to the lifecycle of a truck. 3) There seems to be an implicit assumption in this write-up that autonomous systems will remain horribly expensive, which isn't true. They're expensive today because each generation of development is effectively custom built in small quantities. Just like Starsky said their camera system would drop in price with scale, a "ready for production" generation of autonomous driving kit in a few years will likely be close to 1/3 the current kit cost, which has very large impacts on the total ROI calculation. I don't want to make it sound like there aren't big challenges left to solve - there are - but there's also a reason so much investment money has flowed into this space. The ROI does make sense, just not on the original hype-cycle timeline that a lot of people reported.

algo_trader 4y ago
I agree with your analysis. Autonomy also dove-tails very well with the inevitable electrification (reduced maintenance, higher up time, higher capex lower opex, etc) DO you have any opinions on etrucks-battery-swapping?
- mattferderer 4y ago
  Not my area but seems like if you swab cabs you would be able to keep your fleet either on the road or charging & getting maintenance. > The charge time offers time for maintenance & switching trailers > Charge times keep dropping & miles per charge keep increasing > Batteries currently make up almost half the price of a car. Battery prices are dropping though. Not sure about cab prices. Also these cabs might be very cheap without human comforts in comparison to the battery, so if battery ends up being bulk of cost, you might gain little value there. Anyways just 2 random cents from someone who finds interest in this but doesn't actually know anything.

TheDudeMan 4y ago

Remotely-driven trucks sounds terrifying.

ThePadawan 4y ago

> The truck then drives itself on the highway to another hub near its destination where another human driver completes the trip. This works in multiple ways - it allows human drivers to deal with the hard part of automation while also avoiding the terrible away from home lifestyle, and it allows you to have dedicated autonomous trucks for on-highway separate from your human-driven fleet (you can swap the trailers instead of using the same cab). You'll see these hubs start cropping up in a couple years. That makes sense, but just sounds like a worse version of freight trains to me. (Edit: This didn't reply to the correct comment)

throwaway0a5e 4y ago
Just not needing to deal with "the railroad" would be a huge plus all else being equal. They're like the DMV of shipping.
LightRailTycoon 4y ago
The "advantage" is that we all get to pay for the rails instead of just the railways.

aliyeysides 4y ago

I used to own an OTR trucking company. The biggest issue for us other than finding drivers like the article mentions were the FMSCA regulations around the duration a driver is permitted to drive on a given day. We would be forced to stop a few miles short of a dropoff location because the driver ran out of driving time and was forced to enter the sleeping berth to rest. Companies like Amazon solve for this by driving in teams of two per truck so you can swap drivers, but finding even a single driver for us was a challenge. I'm curious what the current state of regulations say for autonomous trucks. If they are not capped on drive time then that alone would be a huge win for companies.

algo_trader 4y ago
If we get autonomous hub-to-hub, what does that mean for companies serving the first/final mile? Do they keep trucks longer since they do less mileage? Do they start billing by the hour? Does their schedule become less pre-booked and simply on-demand?

BMc2020 4y ago

I so hoped this would be about HPs purchase of Autonomy: Autonomy was acquired by Hewlett-Packard (HP) in October 2011. The deal valued Autonomy at $11.7 billion (£7.4 billion). Within a year, HP had written off $8.8 billion of Autonomy's value. HP claimed this resulted from "serious accounting improprieties" and "outright misrepresentations" by the previous management.