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Comment by jpatokal | Hacker News Reader

"Failing"? Can you name a company with profit margins better than Google? Here's one: Union Pacific.

http://fortune.com/2015/06/04/union-pacific-railroad/

The problem with trains is the last mile: you obviously can't drive them to every store etc that needs a delivery. But the process of loading and unloading containers from ships to trains (and trucks) at ports is getting more and more automated as well.

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I mean the market forces are failing us, not that train companies are.

Then of course a transportation company with 20% profit margin is very likely the result of market failure...

Throw the fraction of the money used for promoting and developing self-driving and platooning, coupled with the cost of building roads to public transport, trains, tracks and ships and you will have a much more efficient albeit less cool system.

Tangential, but letting (semi) self-driven convoys on the road is quite irresponsible, imagine the headlines if they were to get in an accident.

Is it irresponsible if the self-driving truck is believed to be as safe or safer than a human driver? Humans get into accidents quite frequently.

If they did it for the sake of this challenge then it is an added risk imo, so yes (the real alternative is no human operated traffic at all). Some people believe a controlled car hack on a highway is safe, or at least not substantially more dangerous than everyday highway business, some car just break down on the commute.

The last mile is where automated trucks are least likely to work, though. They have to deal with local streets, pedistrians, cyclists, poor roads, unmarked roads, all the things that are most difficult for automated vehicles.

Fortunately, autonomous trucking doesn't have to solve many of the tricky last mile problems before it becomes immediately economically advantageous. You could imagine local depots just outside of the city center where platoons pull into to switch from autonomous to human drivers.

Truckers would only have to work inside a local area rather than deal with the logistics of long haul routes and drive challenging surface streets rather than the soul numbing monotony of long interstates.

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