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Comment by hacker_9 | Hacker News Reader

Well as someone who uses the motorway to go to and fro from work everyday; I welcome these 'driverless' lorries, as the human lorry drivers really do not know what they are doing most of the time and I have to constantly watch out for them.

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As a cyclist using a main road I feel a lot safer around lorries than around cars. Their drivers tend to know what they're doing and give you plenty of room. For one incident that was entirely my fault the lorry driver slammed the brakes, got out of the cab, checked I was ok and gave me a cheery "don't do that mate, you'll die". Contrast that with car drivers who will speed off even after hitting you.

Yeah it is different on the motorway though. It's much more boring driving and lorry drivers get tired, do other things, etc. I see them swerving a lot more than cars.

This may be because their livelihood depends upon their driving licence.

Is that really the case they don't know what they're doing, or more that they drive it all the time, so they know the limitations under normal conditions. (which of course can be fatal if anything unexpected happens, so an accident by definition) People do it all the time in all kind of jobs. They also do it with their own cars. (think how big the parking space had to be the first time you drove a car compared to space after a few years)

Either way, automated lorries will be better. Unless the designers + lawmakers say: hey they don't get into accidents see, now we can improve throughput by letting them go faster...

What's wrong with that?

What's wrong with increasing the speed? I'd rather the speed stayed constant and accidents went down than see speed going up and accidents staying constant.

> I'd rather the speed stayed constant and accidents went down than see speed going up and accidents staying constant.

By that logic we should all be driving cars around at horse speeds.

Considering that car accidents are at least close to the #1 cause of preventable death in the western world...hell, maybe we should. There are lots of ways to handle reasonably high-speed, long-distance transit without giving every individual human or small handful of humans their own high-speed rolling projectile.

It's important to consider whether increased speed does in fact cause accidents. Let's use data to determine an acceptable speed rather than arbitrarily decree "speed kills".

Are you implying that there is a scenario where higher speeds could result in fewer accidents? How could that work at current driving speeds? All the data we have right now about people driving shows that speed indeed kills. You have to consider both automated truck crashing into and being crashed by somebody - and that's usually going to be a human driver.

From my observations a major source of traffic clustering on 2 lane UK A and M roads is lorries overtaking each other. This seems to happen because some lorries drive at 50 mph and others at 60 mph. If all lorries were to drive at precisely the same speed they would rarely have cause to leave the slow lane and clustering of cars would be reduced.

They could go slower. For long haul routes the truck could drive 24hrs straight, or longer, so driving slower could result in huge fuel savings while still getting to the destination on time.

A car cruising on a highway at 50 mph (80 km/h) may require only 10 horsepower (7.5 kW) to overcome air drag, but that same car at 100 mph (160 km/h) requires 80 hp (60 kW).[1]

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drag_(physics)#Drag_at_high_ve...

If you run them close together, you lower drag.

Hopefully they can be programmed to not attempt to overtake another lorry on a hill, with a relative speed of less than 1 mph.

Hopefully driverless lorries wont overtake each other on dual-carriage ways.

But they are helping drivers not to fall asleep. At least thanks to them there is some action going on.

>and I have to constantly watch out for them.

That is called defensive driving, and you should be doing that.....

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