3 ms·

A truck has a huge amount of kinetic energy and when accidents happen they are usuallly not pretty. Couple that with the fact that US trucks AFAIK are not requi

A truck has a huge amount of kinetic energy and when accidents happen they are usuallly not pretty. Couple that with the fact that US trucks AFAIK are not required to have several safety features required elsewhere in the world, such as the underrun protection (metal bars) and that self-driving technology is far from proven at scale, maybe it's prudent to be a little bit careful. Edit: after a quick Google, Embark Trucks[1] claims that they are the first to have driven 100k miles. That's a factor of 10 less than what Waymo claims to have driven. And there will be smaller outfits that will want to cut corners to get a piece of the pie. [1] https://embarktrucks.com/ https://embarktrucks.com/

hparadiz 3y ago
Assertions about safety are irrelevant. This is not what this law is addressing. Furthermore anyone who has used even automatic lane tracking knows their concentration falls off rapidly when they aren't actually driving so a "safety" driver is a misnomer since it's likely in the event of an accident they won't realize in time. You're just adding another victim if there is an accident at all.
harles 3y ago
Waymo has driven 20m+ autonomous miles btw. [0] The 1 million mile number appears to be rides with external passengers, but the first sources I found lead to dead links, so who knows. Anyways, quite a difference. I’m not sure where the threshold should be set for proving safety. I recall the number for provable safety being something like 20bn+ miles, so no one is close if it’s set there. [0]: https://waymo.com/waymo-driver/ https://waymo.com/waymo-driver/