3 ms·

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 -

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
Remote drivers could also drive 24/7, in shifts.
- lazide 4y ago
  Normal drivers do this right now on some routes. Someone sleeping in the sleeper while the other person drives.
smcl 4y ago
You're assuming that L4 is possible and that this incredible technology would be available for merely $200k per truck. I can't fault your optimism, but I think this might be a little out of step with reality.
- zmgsabst 4y ago
  What would make that impractical? We’re talking a rack of GPUs for $50k. Nothing about the problem suggests that automated driving can’t be done with a rack of GPUs per vehicle. We have tractors self-driving and doing real-time analysis on a field of view to decide how to treat plants with a lot less compute than that.
  - smcl 4y ago
    This isn't just about the cost of a rack of GPUs. I think you're severely underestimating the difficulty of self-driving, it's still not certain that we'll safely and reliably make autonomous, self-driving cars and trucks. And the cost in R&D to make such a breakthrough, assuming it is possible, is a complete unknown. Slapping an extra $50k on the sticker price of an average truck (which is what I think we both googled to discover it's $150k) and doing some rudimentary maths doesn't result in an answer to the question of whether self-driving trucks are possible, affordable or practical. It just tells you whether some finger-in-the-air numbers you selected sum to >0.
    - Thlom 4y ago
      Seems like everyone have completely forgotten everything else a trucker does except driving the damn truck on the highway. They assist with loading and unloading the goods, make sure the goods are adequately stacked and strapped and obeying laws and regulations (at least in my country truckers must have a bunch of certificates to be allowed to transport dangerous goods), handle paper work (this is probably the easiest problem to solve) and probably a lot of other stuff I know nothing about. In addition to automating the driving, you must offload these activities to warehouse workers and others who ship/receive goods. The autonomous truck also have to be able to handle all kinds of tight and busy city streets, badly thought out warehouse terminals and a million other things that is an annoyance for a trucker but a huge problem to automate.
      - zmgsabst 4y ago
        I had a mental model of trucks going from waiting lot to waiting lot on the freeway, and going the last couple miles either by switching cabs or having local drivers take over. I think you reduce a lot of the challenge with freeway-only driving between large staging lots adjacent to industrial areas and allowing humans to do the “hard” part of the first + final mile.
        labcomputer 4y ago
        In fact, the NY State Throughway already has something like this, but for a different purpose: Combining and separating double-bottom trucks (which are allowed on the Throughway, but not on many local roads around it).
  - stevehawk 4y ago
    those tractors don't have to avoid other vehicles or pedestrians, they don't have to obey traffic laws, they don't have to be on the lookout for road maintenance, closures, detours, etc. that's not even close to a fair comparison.
    - frosted-flakes 4y ago
      And they have a driver in the cab to take over whenever something goes wrong.
jfim 4y ago
That's assuming that there's zero R&D. In practice, the fixed costs of R&D in the AV space are pretty large. If for example it takes 500 engineers that cost 250k per year to make the trucks self driving, then you're spending 125M per year just in engineer salaries. That's of course excluding any of the costs spent on things like data storage (cameras and lidars generate a ton of data), compute (ML eats a ton of processing), data labeling, mapping, vehicle testing, fleet management, regulatory compliance, etc.
- zmgsabst 4y ago
  Sure — it’s looking at the unit cost. There are 2M semi-trucks in the US, so if half are automated (1M), you can spend $1B per year for $1k per truck per year. Which doesn’t substantially change my calculations. That’s my point: the unit costs are so ridiculously good that pulling $10k/yr in tech overhead, or $10B/yr total, you’d still come out ahead in 5 years. Phrased another way: we can spend $100B across a decade to develop automated trucking, and the consequence would be our automated trucks break even in three to five years instead of two to three years, after amortizing the R+D. I didn’t assess the operations because I couldn’t find a good metric on how much that costs now - and hand waved fleet maintenance, testing, regulation, etc as approximately the cost of the current burdens for those things.
  - jfim 4y ago
    Oh, I agree with you, the numbers are mind boggling. Just in the US, there are 3 trillion miles driven per year, so even capturing a small part of that (be it through automating long haul trucking, goods delivery, or robotaxi applications) and getting any kind of per mile/per hour revenue makes some pretty large numbers. It's just that the AV players absolutely need to operate at scale, as their fixed costs are really high compared to a traditional trucking company.
    - zmgsabst 4y ago
      I’m not sure that R+D needs to be at the operator versus manufacturer level. For instance, manufacturers not operators bear the R+D cost of better diesel engines. You can retain (relatively) small fleets if the manufacturer is amortizing the cost of technology across vehicles sold.

leereeves 4y ago

Remote drivers could also drive 24/7, in shifts.

lazide 4y ago
Normal drivers do this right now on some routes. Someone sleeping in the sleeper while the other person drives.

smcl 4y ago

You're assuming that L4 is possible and that this incredible technology would be available for merely $200k per truck. I can't fault your optimism, but I think this might be a little out of step with reality.

zmgsabst 4y ago
What would make that impractical? We’re talking a rack of GPUs for $50k. Nothing about the problem suggests that automated driving can’t be done with a rack of GPUs per vehicle. We have tractors self-driving and doing real-time analysis on a field of view to decide how to treat plants with a lot less compute than that.
- smcl 4y ago
  This isn't just about the cost of a rack of GPUs. I think you're severely underestimating the difficulty of self-driving, it's still not certain that we'll safely and reliably make autonomous, self-driving cars and trucks. And the cost in R&D to make such a breakthrough, assuming it is possible, is a complete unknown. Slapping an extra $50k on the sticker price of an average truck (which is what I think we both googled to discover it's $150k) and doing some rudimentary maths doesn't result in an answer to the question of whether self-driving trucks are possible, affordable or practical. It just tells you whether some finger-in-the-air numbers you selected sum to >0.
  - Thlom 4y ago
    Seems like everyone have completely forgotten everything else a trucker does except driving the damn truck on the highway. They assist with loading and unloading the goods, make sure the goods are adequately stacked and strapped and obeying laws and regulations (at least in my country truckers must have a bunch of certificates to be allowed to transport dangerous goods), handle paper work (this is probably the easiest problem to solve) and probably a lot of other stuff I know nothing about. In addition to automating the driving, you must offload these activities to warehouse workers and others who ship/receive goods. The autonomous truck also have to be able to handle all kinds of tight and busy city streets, badly thought out warehouse terminals and a million other things that is an annoyance for a trucker but a huge problem to automate.
    - zmgsabst 4y ago
      I had a mental model of trucks going from waiting lot to waiting lot on the freeway, and going the last couple miles either by switching cabs or having local drivers take over. I think you reduce a lot of the challenge with freeway-only driving between large staging lots adjacent to industrial areas and allowing humans to do the “hard” part of the first + final mile.
      - labcomputer 4y ago
        In fact, the NY State Throughway already has something like this, but for a different purpose: Combining and separating double-bottom trucks (which are allowed on the Throughway, but not on many local roads around it).
- stevehawk 4y ago
  those tractors don't have to avoid other vehicles or pedestrians, they don't have to obey traffic laws, they don't have to be on the lookout for road maintenance, closures, detours, etc. that's not even close to a fair comparison.
  - frosted-flakes 4y ago
    And they have a driver in the cab to take over whenever something goes wrong.

jfim 4y ago

That's assuming that there's zero R&D. In practice, the fixed costs of R&D in the AV space are pretty large. If for example it takes 500 engineers that cost 250k per year to make the trucks self driving, then you're spending 125M per year just in engineer salaries. That's of course excluding any of the costs spent on things like data storage (cameras and lidars generate a ton of data), compute (ML eats a ton of processing), data labeling, mapping, vehicle testing, fleet management, regulatory compliance, etc.

zmgsabst 4y ago
Sure — it’s looking at the unit cost. There are 2M semi-trucks in the US, so if half are automated (1M), you can spend $1B per year for $1k per truck per year. Which doesn’t substantially change my calculations. That’s my point: the unit costs are so ridiculously good that pulling $10k/yr in tech overhead, or $10B/yr total, you’d still come out ahead in 5 years. Phrased another way: we can spend $100B across a decade to develop automated trucking, and the consequence would be our automated trucks break even in three to five years instead of two to three years, after amortizing the R+D. I didn’t assess the operations because I couldn’t find a good metric on how much that costs now - and hand waved fleet maintenance, testing, regulation, etc as approximately the cost of the current burdens for those things.
- jfim 4y ago
  Oh, I agree with you, the numbers are mind boggling. Just in the US, there are 3 trillion miles driven per year, so even capturing a small part of that (be it through automating long haul trucking, goods delivery, or robotaxi applications) and getting any kind of per mile/per hour revenue makes some pretty large numbers. It's just that the AV players absolutely need to operate at scale, as their fixed costs are really high compared to a traditional trucking company.
  - zmgsabst 4y ago
    I’m not sure that R+D needs to be at the operator versus manufacturer level. For instance, manufacturers not operators bear the R+D cost of better diesel engines. You can retain (relatively) small fleets if the manufacturer is amortizing the cost of technology across vehicles sold.