The driverless truck is coming, and it’s going to automate millions of jobs | Hacker News Reader

The driverless truck is coming, and it’s going to automate millions of jobs

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447 pointsrottencupcakes455 comments

My father is a truck driver. He made his living driving vehicles and doing heavy lifting and menial work. Truck driving is just the latest evolution in his "career" and I'm ever grateful to him for battering his body in various ways to ensure I had every opportunity available to myself.

We talk a lot about his job. It's not fun. He works long hours, a lot of it is mundane driving, and he sits idle a lot of the time.

I think he would be the first to agree that automation of his job is inevitable and likely necessary, given the dangers of truck driving. Hurling a multi-ton vehicle to and fro is a dangerous task at the best of times.

But therein lies the rub. We are just now reaching the point where we as a society are getting comfortable with automated cars. I think people will be less comfortable with the idea that the truck next to them has no human in it, and could experience some kind of glitch with catastrophic consequences. HN readers will understand that these cars are still a ways away, since the last 10% of the work required for true automation will take a lot longer to develop.

Trucks are way more complicated to drive. Once they're up to cruising speed, they're easy. But it's everything leading up to that point which is hard. Dealing with gear changes, airbrakes, load shifting, other vehicles that will inevitably cut you off, and much more.

And then when you get to your destination, manoeuvring a 50' trailer is no easy task, even for a trained driver like my dad.

It will happen, and it should happen. But it won't be easy, nor soon. Of course, I'd be happy to be wrong, and I'm sure my dad would be too.

I wouldn't be surprised if they start out with "last mile" drivers to deal with off-highway driving.

But the last mile is where driverless trucks are most useful. For long haul, you can just use trains.

Tell that to the companies that ship items long-haul via trucks. It confuses me too, but somehow, I guess the economics work out.

> For long haul, you can just use trains.

RoLa (Rollende Landstraße) as we call this in Germany, or just transporting the flatbed carriages, requires a SHITLOAD of manual work, unlike containers where you don't even need people on the locos in the yard anymore.

Not to mention that long-haul-via-rail is only viable in the US... in Europe, it virtually doesn't exist anymore. It just isn't profitable due to various external conditions:

1) train track pricing is prohibitively expensive

2) freight trains don't get priority over passenger trains - quite the contrary. If you have any time-sensitive stuff, better transport it via road instead.

3) rail tracks are massively overbooked. One single delay and the entire system grinds to a screeching halt.

4) there is no such thing as cross-Europe locomotives/conductors. There might be multi-system-capable locos, but there is not a single loco on the market able to serve the entire fragmented European railroad technology.

There may be "just" 15/25 kV AC + 1k5/3kV DC, but every country needs their own roof collectors because they're NOT compatible (some countries don't even have roof collectors, but 3rd rails or sideway rails for the low-voltage DC stuff, and the DC stuff usually doesn't pack a lot of power so you can't really use them for any heavy load), but the real tech problem is the load of bollocks called signalling/security system, every country has their own, including Germany alone with FOUR popular systems (classic form signals, light-based signals, LZB/PZB and ETCS, in addition to various customizations in Eastern Germany and the S-Bahn tracks).

Not to mention the conductors which have to know all the signalling systems AND all the languages (compared to aviation where English is the standard worldwide), and they need to be expensively re-certified...

Yeah, ETCS, I hear you, but ETCS is a joke that would require literally hundreds of billions to retrofit across the major transit routes in Europe, but that won't happen - we Europeans haven't even managed to get our freight carriages to silent brakes yet!

5) There are still restrictions like maximum train lengths and the plain fact that European freight carriages only carry a pneumatic line for the brakes, but no data lines for controlling middle/back locos - so there's no technical way of extending train lengths because there's simply no loco combo capable of pulling >700m length heavy freight carriages with 3 locos on the front and no way to control a pushing loco in the back of the train. Simple physics, the good old screw coupling just can't support more load. There are alternatives (C-AKv coupling, it's high load AND compatible with the old coupling) but once again a retrofit would cost billions (see #4)...

Trains might be more efficient from an environmental and human-resources POV, but they're fucked up on any economic scale - and politicians all over Europe don't give a single fuck, instead they are all letting their rail systems rot to pieces and squeeze every tiny penny from the rail companies to fix up their even more rotten state budgets!

> 2) freight trains don't get priority over passenger trains

Freight trains get priority here and it still doesn't make sense to ship by train. Rail is pretty limited by the huge size of our country, and they need to be able to ship to tiny random stores all over the place. It makes more sense to send one truck that can stop anywhere there's a road than send it out via train and then transfer to a local truck, which might be sitting unused the rest of the time.

> Rail is pretty limited by the huge size of our country

Quite the contrary, the US is better suited for rail than the rest of the world, at least for cross-country moving of goods (one single area of law, no customs crap to deal with, the only thing I'm not sure is signalling and interoperability of locomotives on rail systems in different states).

Trains are perfect for inter-city travel, the first/last mile should be handled with trucks unless the facility is so large that it can source or sink a huge number of trains (e.g. automobile, steel factories, coal mines, fossil power plants).

How long do you imagine it takes to unload a single car or two cars in a given city and move on to the next city? Once that "last mile" is handled, what else is that truck going to do until the next train shipment arrives? It'll sit doing nothing. If it moved on to another city, it could have just been loaded somewhere else and didn't need to be loaded at last mile.

Trains have several single points of failure for a larger load. When there is a problem, all of the load is affected, it takes longer to repair, and problems with both the rails and the trains happen regularly. And trains have more complex maneuvering than trucks; switching lines is a non-trivial time-consuming matter and operators have a tough job just on the existing lines.

The fact remains we don't have enough rail to service most of the country, and nobody is paying for new rail, not to mention the issue of fitting more track on the existing land and bridges used for rail. Demand has been increasing steadily on rail, and only so much traffic can possibly run on the rails - which are shared with passenger trains, btw. To switch to trains you'd be adding 230% more traffic to the rails.

> Once that "last mile" is handled, what else is that truck going to do until the next train shipment arrives? It'll sit doing nothing

If you're a responsible freight truck company, you want to avoid this situation at all costs. There's always cargo that wants to be shipped - the only scarce resources are drivers and tractor units, and some companies even let multiple drivers share the tractors to maximize the usage of their tractors (that really depends on the company though, there are also companies where every driver "owns" his tractor).

> The fact remains we don't have enough rail to service most of the country, and nobody is paying for new rail

Yes, indeed. The beginnings of the stock markets actually were railroad construction companies, but these days the financial markets only care about the next big unicorn and not about creating something with real long term value, which a train track certainly is given that, once the track is laid, the land belongs to the company and the only major investments required are 50-year overhauls and regular maintenance. It's a shame.

> RoLa (Rollende Landstraße) as we call this in Germany, or just transporting the flatbed carriages, requires a SHITLOAD of manual work, unlike containers where you don't even need people on the locos in the yard anymore.

Isn't using containers much more efficient anyway, instead of moving the whole truck?

> Isn't using containers much more efficient anyway, instead of moving the whole truck?

The core problem is that freight companies in Europe standardized on the Euro Pool Palette (EPAL) but ISO containers worldwide use the non-metric US measurement system - thus leading to waste of space and potential safety issues (sliding palettes due to slack space on the floor).

Trucks, however, are fitted to the metric system and can safely transport EPALs, so you've got next to no alternative.

ETCS is coming - it may take twenty years to be rolled out everywhere but it will happen. In the meantime they're focusing on the strategic routes first. These things take time, but it is happening.

> 2) freight trains don't get priority over passenger trains

Interestingly in the northwestern u.s. (and I suspect throughout the western u.s.) the main rail corridors prioritize freight.

Discovered this while, as a regular Seattle - Portland traveler, I found myself stationary while lumber rolled by. Amtrak's leases are subordinate to the freight lines.

Actually you can't, for a lot of goods. Reason is that the railroad won't give you the same guarantees and trackability a truck will.

Example: you have refrigerated items (let's say a shipment of fresh fruit) that has to be maintained at a constant temperature and you want it delivered to your customer on Thursday when you ship Sunday night.

Truck: not a problem, and you can easily get updates all the time from dispatch (or if there is a GPS unit on the truck, immediately).

Railroad: maybe they will get it there, maybe they won't.

If the railroad puts a refrigerator unit on your boxcar and it breaks down, too bad - they won't reimburse you. A trucking company will.

> If the railroad puts a refrigerator unit on your boxcar and it breaks down, too bad - they won't reimburse you. A trucking company will.

Insurance?

> Insurance?

If the thing you insure against actually happens, premiums go up to the point of it being uneconomic.

> Railroad: maybe they will get it there, maybe they won't. > If the railroad puts a refrigerator unit on your boxcar and it breaks down, too bad - they won't reimburse you. A trucking company will.

Sounds like both of those are more to do with shit rail companies than inherent downsides of rail (or upsides of trucking)?

Just in time delivery by rail works in Europe, perhaps because the track is maintained to a high standard and can be relied upon, and the timetable adhered to to avoid delaying passenger trains.

Sorry to burst your bubble here -- but the railroads were doing exactly that since the days of refrigeration via blocks of ice. ( http://californiabountiful.com/features/article.aspx?arID=56... )

> Now retired after more than 30 years in the produce business, Wolf noted that farmers began growing iceberg lettuce in the region just prior to the 1930s. The demand for the hearty lettuce variety soon took off through the use of refrigerated rail cars.

In Australia this isn't the case - the infrastructure doesn't service a lot of the land area.

> But the last mile is where driverless trucks are most useful. For long haul, you can just use trains.

And yet the highways are full of semi trailers...

IIRC because more of the highway cost is subsidized by the taxpayer, not necessarily because the cost is actually lower...

In the US, especially outside of the northeast, most interstate highways are not tolled, so users of the road don't pay any more for its maintenance than non-users do. But someone is still paying for it. Taxpayers who don't use the roads are effectively subsidizing those who do.

By contrast, railways usually own their rails and are obliged to maintain them themselves, and thus have to fold those costs into the price.

This is really unfair.

Trains can't haul produce and other refrigerated product.

The Juice Train can, as does the "Salad Shooter" train. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Juice_Train

This was my thought as well. That a new 'tugboat captain' or 'harbor pilot' type role emerges for last mile driving.

But here’s the question: Do these ‘last mile’ drivers sit in the cab? Or operate the rigs from thousands of miles away, like drone pilots, with displays showing 360 degrees around the rig and access to all of its sensors?

Last mile driving may not look anything like truck driving.

Or, alternatively, do they wait at truck stops on the edge of town and meet the trucks as they come in (much like harbor pilots meet container ships at port entrances)?

I don’t think so. Once you’ve already automates a truck, you have a lot more information to convey than what’s out the windshield, and you are liberated from needing to turn a steering wheel or push foot pedals.

There’s no reason to build a cab into the truck that is only used for the last mile. Telepresence will do just fine.

If that's the case, then why aren't cargo ships already automated to this extent? It seems like automating a container vessel would be even easier - there are far fewer things to run into on the water (even in a busy port) than there are on a busy highway.

Pirates? You need a crew on cargo ships regardless of whether they are automated or not.

Crews generally aren't armed to begin with and with no humans to capture and ransom or threaten to change the ships course the amount of booty they could make off with is really limited. Most pirate attacks target hostages anyways. For engineering you could have small crews fly out to any one ship that's experienced engine trouble.

I would bet because the wage paid is insignificant compared to maintenance of the vessel and that the maritime laws would be further complicating such a scenario.

Not so much maintenance as capital costs, I think. Giant cargo vessels can't be replaced as often as trucks either. But drone ships are certainly coming, it's a very trendy topic in the trade publications. I'd give it 10 years.

If you were able to dispense with the cab and any human interfaces/amenities, that would cut out a big chunk of weight and drag. It would look radically different but just think of all of the components on a truck that are only there for the driver. No need for a cab, AC system, heater, pedals, steering wheel and linkages, airbags, seats, pretty much all of the glass and windows, doors, etc. The added sensors, telemetry, and computational requirements necessary for an autonomous vehicle suddenly don't look so pricy compared to the savings of removing a huge chunk of the vehicle, nonstop operation or maintenance, no salary for the driver, lower insurance costs, lower fuel costs, and other assorted savings. Really it's looking like more and more of an inevitability in my opinion. Once the control problem is solved, I doubt it'll be more economical to continue putting a trucker behind the wheel.

Of course if you need to provide all of that to allow for someone to drive it manually around town a lot of those benefits are gone. Who knows, there will probably be some transitional period where all automated trucks are still equipped for manual control but I doubt it'll stay that way for long.

The automated part of the journey could be done by a driverless / cab-less / HID-less prime mover which drops the trailer(s) / cargo containers off at an interchanged where they are picked up by human driven vehicles for the last mile.

Even if we remove all the facilities for a driver, i likely you would still need a human guard.

Although thinking about it, the guard could travel in a separate vehicle, and could be responsible for overseeing an entire convoy of trucks at one time.

I don't know what became of it, but at one point there was a DARPA initiative to do just that for military convoys. The reasoning was that automated trucks would allow soldiers to treat the convoy as a "dumb herd" that would follow and be overseen by a squad of heavily armed and armored "sheepdogs". This would improve protection for soldiers, while simultaneously improving the efficiency of battlefield logistics.

Definitely can't remotely operate a 40 ton truck. Wireless network latency is a bit high even under ideal conditions, and latency spikes could easily cause disastrous accidents.

You can continue to rely on the automated systems for avoiding collisions. The intelligence is more with dealing with the decisions that the AI can't make.

If you can pilot flying killing machines half the world away, you can definitely control a slow moving truck remotely.

There's not much to run into in the air...

I don’t think you’re going to be “driving” such trucks. I think you’ll be making decisions. For example, when you reach a yard and need to back it into a loading bay, you may draw a path on a map of the yard, taking into account obstacles that are there at that moment. The truck will handle the turning, backing up, and so on.

Likewise, you may be monitoring city traffic and choosing alternate routes. But you won’t be driving with one foot on the brake pedal and your hands on the steering wheel.

You could make massive gains just by not having to stop and rest drivers. I suspect the drivers will be on-board but able to relax or sleep until getting close to the destination. That lets all trucks drive 24hr straight through to their destinations.

>Or operate the rigs from thousands of miles away, like drone pilots, with displays showing 360 degrees around the rig and access to all of its sensors?

Any driverless technology that requires a constant wireless internet connection is a non-starter.

As I said elsewhere, I do not think a constant wireless connection will be an issue, because I don’t think you’ll be operating the truck remotely the way a hobbyist operates an RC car. The truck will brake when a car, pedestrian, or bicycle cuts it off, and do it better than you could.

You are there to route it around traffic jams, talk to the foreman on site, and choose the loading bay.

Even if you had a reliable high-bandwidth/low-latency connection, the truck will be better than you are at handling things that requires instant response. You are there to make decisions.

That's true, it requires a higher level of skill from the AI though.

The video stream bandwidth and requirement for near-zero latency will make remote control very challenging, if not impossible. I'd say the last-mile driver will be in the truck.

It actually talks about that in the article:

We still need to create on- and off-ramps so human drivers can bring trucks to the freeways where highway autopilot can take over.

Interesting...

They may have humans do all the manoeuvring within the distribution hubs long after they've automated all of the street driving.

Shifting and braking, though, seem to me like the kind of thing that automata should be good at. And I suppose that, once most of the cars on the road are autonomous, the streets will be much more truck-friendly.

Sort of reminds me of a Harbor Pilot[0]. A person who holds unique knowledge of how to operate a large vehicle in a particular piece of confined geography.

0: http://www.insidejobs.com/careers/harbor-pilot

Neat!

I doubt a "hub driver" will earn a 6-figure salary, but manoeuvring a semi truck two or three trailers is definitely a skilled job that many (most?) people are not capable of learning to do well.

The geometry- and mechanically- related tasks seem like they would be ripe for automation. For example, the trailer reversing problem is related to the inverted pendulum problem, which is easily solvable by automated systems.

The judgement for when to stop with an unsafe load and wayfinding at the last 100 yards of a route are indeed tasks that I'd prefer to leave to a human for the time being. Maybe we'll have 'dock pilots' like we do for large cargo ships?

Build a robot that balances this broomstick was a sophomore-level engineering course at my university. xD

The article actually mentions that initially we will need human drivers to get the trucks on and off the freeway:

"We still need to create on- and off-ramps so human drivers can bring trucks to the freeways where highway autopilot can take over."

I was referring more to the inner-city manoeuvring, and within loading/unloading zones. Getting a trailer lined up with the loading dock isn't an easy task at all. It can be automated, but it's the variability between load length, weight, and the loading dock's surroundings that make it difficult.

A comment below talked about harbour pilots. That seems like a great idea.

Lexus automated the most hated driving maneuver for all car drivers - parallel parking, and Google's had decent success w/their self driving Prii fleet... it's hard, safety would be the #1 concern, but w/enough human brainpower and some decent hard realtime OS-es, it should be more than doable.

But my point, and the one made by the article as I understand it, is that you wouldn't even have to do any of that initially. The vast majority of the driver's time is spent just cruising on the highway. That's the part you want to work on automating first, both because it provides the greatest cost savings, and because it's the easiest to solve technically.

>>Trucks are way more complicated to drive.

An Australian friend of mine told me that the trucks that carry load from Australian mining fields are almost fully automated, and have been for a while now. So perhaps it's not that complicated?

They may have been thinking of trucks within the mine site, which is still quite new? (http://mobile.abc.net.au/news/2015-10-18/rio-tinto-opens-wor...). I'm pretty sure we don't have any automated trucks on Australian roads.

This is mostly internal to mine sites, and the areas serviced have restricted or no public traffic.

> Trucks are way more complicated to drive. Once they're up to cruising speed, they're easy. But it's everything leading up to that point which is hard. Dealing with gear changes, airbrakes, load shifting, other vehicles that will inevitably cut you off, and much more.

The mechanical aspects of controlling a large truck and accounting for the variables is probably the easiest part of the problem.

Things involving humans (vehicles cutting you off, pedestrians, etc.) are part of the general class of problems that I'm assuming all automated vehicles are working on and are much harder.

Mechanical aspects, may be easy. Modeling human behavior and reacting to it, not so much.

I suspect it will still be years before much of trucking is automated. Why? It's not just the take crap from point A to point B, it's also being responsible for making sure what was ordered is actually loaded. It will be years before, say, the laborers at Earth Bound Farms south of Salinas (supplies large quantities of "organic" produce all up and down the west coast) automates their work staff or actually has their schedules down tight.

Trucking and hauling is full of inefficiencies, and those that suffer the most are the drivers. A pickup/dropoff that takes too long because the people at the origin/destination are lazy/slow/don't care/behind has a ripple effect.

And, one could argue "but automated trucks, what schedule?", there will still need to be a human present, regardless. I suspect said human will be restrained by rules similar to what drivers experience now.

But we've already got automated warehousing systems that work pretty well -- I'd imagine these wouldn't be too hard to extend to load and unload trucks. In fact, I wouldn't be surprised to find out that they already can.

Where is the money going to come from for produce suppliers, some on thin profits, to automate where hiring a bunch of seasonal laborers is less overhead, maintenance, etc.

if an automated solution ends up being cheaper than manual laborers, then some lending institution will be happy to lend the money for the transition. any players that avoid the transition will likely get obviated by the competitors that capture and pass on the cost savings.

It's going to come from automation costs dropping and seasonal (and other) labor costs rising in real terms, so that the cost effective approach is automation. Same as everywhere else.

It is coming from another Uber company. Or maybe a new brunch of Uber.

Specifically, the automation of long haul trucking, comparable to what large tanker ships do, may be more feasible. The last mile, scheduling, and the rest, is a horrid mess. A family member is in the business and I live in an area where ag work is prevalent and know people who have worked in such.

Agreed here. I don't think anyone reasonable is suggesting the local delivery trucks are going to get automated any time soon.

But the long-haul interstate runs? I see this happening faster than any automated passenger cars, and once it starts it's going to rapidly take over that industry. Probably starts with convoys with a couple human tenders until the tech is proven.

It won't be a perfect fit for all types of trucking (say, delivery drivers), but many loads can certainly be transported place to place without a person needing to babysit it. Example: I imagine Amazon would love to be able to move loads around distro centers with automated trucking.

> the laborers at Earth Bound Farms south of Salinas (supplies large quantities of "organic" produce all up and down the west coast)

Why on earth did you pick them out so incredibly specifically and put scare quotes around organic? Doesn't seem relevant.

I wonder what the accident rate of professional truck drivers is compared to other passenger class drivers. Certainly the outcome of an accident is potentially a much higher level of mayhem.

Not exactly what you're asking for, but related. In accidents where both a large commercial truck, and a car were involved:

"the car was the encroaching vehicle in 89% of headon crashes, 88% of the opposite-direction sideswipes, 80% of the rear-end crashes, and 72% of the same-direction sideswipes."

http://www.trucking.org/ATA%20Docs/News%20and%20Information/...

Now you need to take into account how many cars vs how many trucks were on the road in the period that yielded those numbers. Only then you can obtain the propensity of car drivers vs truck drivers to get into accidents.

Not sure I understand...these are only accidents in which both a car and truck were involved.

The definitive thing you would want, I assume, is "at-fault accidents per xxx miles driven" for all accidents, segmented by vehicle type.

Yeah, that one makes sense. Because if 1 truck has 30 cars around it, chances are that a car will screw up before a truck.

Sure, but unless the car running into the truck _prevents_ the truck from being at-fault in a different accident further down the road, that doesn't really matter.

Yes. Truckers have to deal with a sort of standard "road safety dilemma" all the time, which can be boiled down to this:

A trucker is driving a 40 ton truck at 65mph. A passenger car with a family of four cuts in front of it, and the distance is closing fast.

A passenger car takes roughly 315 feet to come to a complete stop. A fully loaded truck takes 525 feet. The trucker now has to make a decision.

A) Do I slam on the brakes and keep going straight, and completely obliterate the car in front of me and the family inside it?

B) Do I cut off to the side, running over the rail, flipping the truck, killing myself, and possibly any other vehicles or pedestrians around, behind, or coming in the opposite direction of me?

The robot trucker could of course decide on B), but there are unknown variables about the extent of the resulting damage. This risk increases with merging between lanes or on/off ramps both by passenger vehicles, the truck itself, and motorcycles.

A dedicated lane would make this fantastically safer, but who will pay for it?

I am convinced. Ban trucks.

Don't forget C) attempt B and jacknife your truck across several lanes killing the occupants of the car that runs into the side of your trailer...

or, apply full brakes, apply full audible warning and swerve at the last possible moment, while calling the emergency services to put them on alert.

But how common is your scenario ?

I consider this a more critical failure :

The Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration suspects that as many as 28% of commercial truck drivers have sleep apnea.

The Sleep Medicine Division surmised that nearly a 250,000, persons fall asleep while driving each day of the year.

Nearly half of semi-truck drivers have admitted to actually ‘drifting off’ while driving a long-haul route.

https://www.hg.org/article.asp?id=29866

> But how common is your scenario ?

Anecdotally, the 3 truckers i've known have complained about it. I now drive very carefully around trucks.

Swerving at the last minute is a non-option because it means turning sharply, which jackknifes the truck. Turning while braking is worse because turning while either braking or accelerating compromises steering. You can try to brake until the last moment and then take off the brakes and try to turn, but again possible jackknife, the wheels could have locked up to the brakes, and now that you're traveling slower you will actually turn slower, so it's harder to cut the wheel and go around. All of this within a few seconds.

You have to either try to slow down and blow the horn, or get out of the way and blow the horn. Some people are lucky and either swerve away from the truck at the last moment, or their car only gets marginally crunched.

One hacker friend of mine's car actually got thrown nearly into the opposite lane of traffic on the highway with the same scenario. Recovery took a while. I think he's still got pain and limited mobility.

I don't doubt the cut-ins but I mean, how common is the disaster part?

Not as often as truckers having incidents through tiredness etc. I'd warrant.

> You can try to brake ....

We're talking about "The computer ...."

Of course, being automated allows for much more advanced braking schemes.

I haven't seen a jackknifed lorry in a very long time, I thought that had been solved with anti-lock brakes.

For this reason alone I would trust autonomic trucks much more than human driven counterpart. I must admit, I've drifted away few times as well while driving passenger car over long, boring highways..

Given that an automated truck will follow a certain safety framework, it's interesting to contemplate if there might be automated truck pirates.

Jam mobile connectivity, run the truck off the road by herding it with other vehicles, then break in and run-away with the goods or the entire trailer for that matter.

This is one of many reasons we will still need humans present, if only in a guard capacity.

Meanwhile, cargo ship companies are looking toward automation and remote control to get humans off the water. Pirates aren't scared of humans being on board, and in some cases they prefer it, because a human crew is worth more ransom.

this can be deferred to local security companies with nation-wide contracts.

If a cargo was valuable enough, a driver's life would only be a collateral damage. Furthermore, all (non military or security) personnel training programs I've encountered specifically highlights, that in a case of armed robbery, do not resist, obey and do not escalate conflict in any other manner while trying to call help unnoticed.

Granted, but a human guard nevertheless presents a problem for robbers.

Do you take the guard hostage? Do you kill them? Will they themselves be armed? Will they put up a fight, training or no training? If you try aggressively to bring their vehicle to a halt, will they concede immediately (as an autonomous vehicle likely would), or will they try ramming your vehicle?

A human guard is an unknown quantity, and any crimes you commit against their person are in a different league to the theft of the cargo.

Your house sits empty all day and nobody robs it. Video cameras work pretty well for this if it becomes a problem. Great to live in a country with rule of law.

Trucks routinely carry cargo worth many thousand times the value of the average household's possessions.

You can also do that with a human in the truck. I'm not convinced that it will happen more often with automated trucks.

Most humans will keep driving, even without mobile connectivity. Also, destroying electronic witnesses isn't (yet) murder.

>A passenger car takes roughly 315 feet to come to a complete stop. A fully loaded truck takes 525 feet.

How does this change if truck design and "per-axel" fee incentives were rationalized[1][2] to instead maximize the number of axles? Doubling the number of axles reduces road damage by 94%. Currently semi trucks account for 6% of vehicle miles driven[3] and 99% of all traffic damage to roads.

But would this measure also improve braking distance and safety?

[1] http://www.nytimes.com/1989/07/26/business/economic-scene-be... (erroneously states that damage scales as the cube of axle weight; it scales as the fourth power or even the sixth(!) power on weak roads)

[2] https://truecostblog.com/2009/06/02/the-hidden-trucking-indu...

[3] http://www.princeton.edu/~alaink/Orf467F13/FreightFacts&Figu...

Braking distance is a factor of speed, weight, brakes, tires and road surface. A 40 ton truck can only stop so fast with rubber tires on typical brakes on a typical highway road surface.

Race cars are designed to stop faster than passenger cars. Their brakes are huge, they're designed with exotic components to transfer heat to air faster, designed to take higher heat for longer, the cars are designed to flow air over the brakes, and they cost much more and don't last as long, and have advanced computerized systems to optimize brake utilization. They also have pretty big tires (usually for power transfer, not braking). Their tires are also grippier on a given surface at a higher tire temperature, so they cost more and don't last as long, and work best on dry flat surfaces. They strip all the weight out of the car to decrease the amount of force working against the tires and brakes. Even the suspension and shell is designed to increase tire, and thus brake, traction. They stop really goddamn fast - 93 feet for a Ferrari F430 Scuderia, from 60mph.

Trucks are designed to carry 40 tons up and down hills, survive tire blow-outs, brake system failures, and more miles than 1000 F430s will ever see, on all kinds of road surfaces and temperatures. It is possible to improve the brake time, but it would probably cost so much you might as well ship your produce in a Ferrari. Halve the weight they carry to reduce braking distance and now we have to have twice the trucks to carry the same loads, but you still have a vehicle 10x heavier than other vehicles with dynamics that simply can't move around like the lighter ones. More accidents would be guaranteed.

> Race cars are designed to stop faster than passenger cars. Their brakes are huge, they're designed with exotic components to transfer heat to air faster, designed to take higher heat for longer, the cars are designed to flow air over the brakes, and they cost much more and don't last as long, and have advanced computerized systems to optimize brake utilization.

A lot of that isn't to brake faster but to keep the brakes from overheating from constant high use during a race that can last a couple hours or more. For normal emergency use you can drop a lot of that because they only need to be used extremely hard rarely and they'll have time to cool.

In other words, look at aircraft, not at racecars. What you have described is practically the only mode of operation for wheelbrakes there ("brakes catch fire during emergency braking? No biggie, just keep an eye on them while they cool.").

Brake heating is not a real issue with emergency braking, only with frequent braking which race cars do. That's why "upgrading" to "big brake" systems on passenger cars is usually a waste of money and reduces performance: unless you're driving on a track where you have to brake a lot, and the cumulative braking keeps the brakes hot, you're not helping. Even worse, the brake pad compounds used for race cars are different, and are designed to maintain performance even when very hot, whereas passenger car brakes have to have great performance when cold.

The bottom line is: a single panic stop on the highway isn't limited by your brakes on a passenger car, it's limited by your tires. The more friction your tires have with the road, the faster you'll slow down.

So yes, if you want a 40 ton truck to stop faster, it's completely doable: just increase the amount of rubber in contact with the road. Adding more wheels will do that quickly. However, more tires means more rolling friction which means less fuel economy and fuel economy is critically important to long-haul trucking. Also, adding more axles causes maneuverability problems in the city. Notice that on standard trailers, the rear axle set can be moved forward and back. They set them in the rearward position for long hauls, and in the forward position for shorter hauls.

If there's no driver in the equation (no monthly salary to pay), I guess the the incentive will shift towards having more, smaller trucks.

Not necessarily. More, smaller trucks will mean your transport costs will go up because you get less economy of scale. Eliminating the driver helps mitigate that of course, but going to smaller trucks then eliminates the savings you got by eliminating the driver. Having more, smaller trucks would be more versatile however, if you don't need to transport full truckloads of cargo between certain points.

Also, drivers as I understand it aren't paid monthly salaries, they're paid by the mile.

The article mentions driverless trucks would drive slower, at 45mph, wouldn't this make a key difference in this scenario, eg a much shorter breaking distance. Also, a driverless vehicle has one option a manned vehicle doesn't - self destruction to save life, eg drive off the side of the road and crash (assuming it could determine that no one was there)

>. Also, a driverless vehicle has one option a manned vehicle doesn't - self destruction to save life,

Don't they?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/30,000_Pounds_of_Bananas#The_i...

That'd be a disaster on single-lane roads. Even with human trucks and their help (signalling if road is clear, driving on the shoulder when possible etc), it sucks to overtake them. If trucks were limited to 70km/h, there'd be much more need to overtake them. Which would either cause either traffic congestion or more drivers doing reckless things. Let alone that non-driverless trucks/buses/campers/etc would be stuck behind them forever.

I imagine they would start out only on multi-lane, limited-access highways. The small number of entry and exit points would make it much easier to program the truck. Such roads carry the bulk of long-distance truck traffic anyway.

Once you get away from highly populated and developed areas, there're lots of single-lane roads. Let alone that single-lane roads are used as backups when inevitable accident happens on multilane. Of course, there's not as much traffic in such areas as in those with multi-lane highways.

Well, the current tests with self-driving trucks are almost exclusively by european carmakers on German roads – where 2 to 3 lanes are common about everywhere, and trucks are limited to 80km/h or 100km/h anyway.

It's difficult enough for driverless cars to know where the lines on the road are. I don't think we can expect in the near future to be able to not only detect pedestrians, but to have an idea what series of events may happen during an avoidance maneuver. There's a lot of things to go wrong.

However, stopping distance in real-world scenarios is wayyyy farther than in practice runs, because even a second faster braking by the driver can save a hundred feet. So robotic braking (that we have today in passenger cars) could improve the distance a lot. But...

Trucks are still 10-20x heavier than passenger cars, and there are practical upper bounds to the size of their brakes and the g's they can pull. If a passenger car normally stops in 388 feet at 65mph (not uncommon) and it would stop at 196 feet at 45mph, a truck at 45mph would stop in 265 feet. So yes, the truck could in theory stop faster than the passenger car.

But passenger cars don't just slam on their brakes in front of trucks (often). They also just drift right the heck into the truck. Perhaps mechanisms could be developed to safely merge away, and they'll probably be developed in passenger cars first. But there's no denying that a dedicated roadway would not only save repair costs for passenger-vehicle-only roads, it would remove the risk of colliding with passenger vehicles no matter whose fault it was.

Robot chooses A) and also immediately uploads footage to the DA Idiot that caused roadwreck is sued for that (I'm pretty sure there are specific laws against causing massive damage. In my country at least, there are.)

Soon, people learn that they are responsible for acting, well, responsibly.

There's a real possibility that once driverless trucks become widespread, human behavior will change as well. A very aggressive driver may take advantage of the fact that an automated truck will brake for them, and start routinely cutting off trucks, whereas today they'd be a little more respectful. Even pedestrians could start crossing a highway where they shouldn't and know they could get away with it.

The next step in this progression is that trucks report cars being purposefully a danger to them, with video evidence.

I think the worry also is that at some point, hundred years into the future someone somewhere might write the code where the truck will go "I'm carrying 1 million dollars worth of cargo which would be destroyed if I drive into the ditch, but the cost of litigation for smashing into this small car that clearly broke the law and will be at fault in this situation is smaller - continue program;".

A robot trucker will never do (B). The car put itself there and can presumably get itself out again. More importantly, swerving will lead your truck to jackknife and roll in unpredictable ways and cause who knows how much extra damage.

As I've said before about smaller autonomous vehicles, they'll be programmed to always choose the option which is most defensible in court. I will be amazed if we ever see an autonomous vehicle on public roads which does something more complicated than "come to a complete halt as fast as possible while steering for the clearest area of asphalt."

There are situations where the safest course of action is to accelerate, or maintain speed, while maneuvering. I'm sure we'll get there if the trend of automating individual driving tactics continues.

"And then, your honour, the truck accelerated and struck a busload of orphans!"

"Case closed."

(I agree but humans are dumb and companies have to cover their asses.)

'Truckers have to deal with a sort of standard "road safety dilemma" all the time...'

I think you mean that truckers FEEL like they deal with that dilemma all the time. If they ACTUALLY dealt with an A or B dilemma, they would routinely end up in situation A or B: running over a passenger car or flipping the truck. It happens SOMETIMES, but infrequently.

In reality the situations where other drivers do something stupid are probably much better handled by the self-driving truck, which doesn't panic, doesn't feel a fight-or-flight response, doesn't overstate the gravity of the situation... doesn't do anything except assess what to do next without emotion.

> Things involving humans (vehicles cutting you off, pedestrians, etc.) are part of the general class of problems that I'm assuming all automated vehicles are working on and are much harder.

The more mass you have, the longer your braking distance and the more sluggish the reactions. While the problem is the same, and the mechanical differences easily modelled, light vehicles get away with lower accuracy and higher latencies, because they don't need to plan ahead so far.

But it's still simple math. More weight, be more aggressive with brakes.

If human truck drivers can do it, then a computer truck with a 360 model of the environment around it can do it more efficiently right.

I don't understand the problem here really. Computers are way better at logical computation than humans and that's all we require here.

Yes, but there are more problems to consider here. With some types of cargo, applying maximum brakes can actually damage it(think livestock for example). You also don't want the truck to be going into panic mode and applying maximum brakes for a plastic bag or a small animal. I'm afraid that our current technology can at best tell that there is something there, but it won't be able to tell what - humans at the moment are much better at visual recognition. It's just a concern at the moment, but I think it's an important one because it can lead to some serious accidents when the technology launches.

have you not been following the developments of self driving cars? Like the story of how google cars had problems gauging the intent of bike riders that were themselves stopped to let the car pass ... it looked like they were about to take off, so the car was too conservative and didn't move until the bike changed what they were doing. And then, once that condition was experienced and identified, it was fixed for all google cars in the entire fleet.

I'm pretty sure the car will be able to identify and plastic bag ... not to mention a simple cargo manifest that would apply parameters about how the cargo is to be dealt with.

My point is that all of these are "simple" problems. Oh the truck will identify a plastic bag. Oh the truck will have a cargo manifest and drive accordingly.

But these are all new technologies. Our visual recognition libraries are nowhere near ideal. I said this elsewhere but I will say it here too - our best of the best software can't tell a zebra and a sofa in a zebra print apart. I'm pretty sure that all that LIDAR is seeing is a spherical object on the road, it has no idea what it is.

The same with the cargo manifest - it sounds simple, but no one has a system like this. It would need to be made and implemented, and it takes time and effort - I'm not saying that it's impossible, far from it, but it's one more obstacle to overcome to make this possible.

> I said this elsewhere but I will say it here too - our best of the best software can't tell a zebra and a sofa in a zebra print apart.

Really? I find this surprising. Do you have any links or sources? I'd like to learn more.

There was a few articles about this exact issue on HN previously, a cursory search returns at least one of them:

http://rocknrollnerd.github.io/ml/2015/05/27/leopard-sofa.ht...

Fascinating, thanks for sharing!

Are the lower masses not offset by higher speeds though?

The article mentions 45mph as the most efficient speed for a truck. I can imagine the regulators demanding a pretty low speed for automated trucks.

Are you sure they're more complicated for computers? Because some stuff that strains humans, like 360° attention and complicated sequential activities, computers can do with ease. Also computers are not limited to having senses inside the cab. Load shifting? BigDog is an example of computers figuring how to balance a shifting load. Google cars handle being cut off (most of the time).

Google cars are going no more than 25 mph and are lightweight. Different thing all together.

Here is the big thing - the driverless truck has to operate in a uncontrolled environment that can result in human death. Who is the responsible party? The trucking company? The software developer?

Additionally we are talking situations where a computer can't have any reaction interruptions for hours and hours. No reboots. No garbage collection pauses. No panics.

Can this be done? Maybe. But at what cost? It might be that the best role for the computer is helping a truck driver be safer -- not to replace the truck driver.

I'm walking down a busy road with traffic passing me at ~30mph at the moment. Anecdotally, the last 4 cars have had one person in the car who has either been texting on a mobile phone, applying makeup, eating breakfast, and playing with the radio. Do you think the reaction time of the guy who's texting his boss saying he's late would be faster or slower than the driverless car that was in a long garbage collection, if I were to step in front of him?

You do have a point on liability, and I don't have an answer better than a centralised pool of money that everyone pays in or out of.

Yeap. And if one of them hits you, they are liable. How many software developers want to be held criminally responsible for deaths?

Some times we get so fascinated by technology, that we forget that the technology has to fit within human society.

Remember the whole concept of product/market fit - if the market rejects the product: it doesn't matter how "cool" the technology is.

>How many software developers want to be held criminally responsible for deaths?

Nope. Short of gross negligence in design, that seldom happens in any engineering field.

How many people were criminally charged in the Challenger disaster? None.

7 people died in the challenger disaster. 30,000 people die each year in car related fatalities. Completely different order of magnitude.

Additionally, going up on a rocket is a fundamentally risking proposition done by adults.

Having a driverless vehicle that glitches, applies power instead of brakes, and kills a bunch of pretty young girls.... well that makes the 5 oclock news and 11 oclock for many, many days.

People get charged with crimes.

How many criminal charges were filed against individual engineers for any those 30,000 fatalities last year? How many were convicted? None and none.

You're illustrating my point for me quite nicely. Frankly, I can't think of a criminal conviction, even at the corporate level, for design flaws in the auto industry without going all the way back to the Ford Pinto.

Additionally we are talking situations where a computer can't have any reaction interruptions for hours and hours. No reboots. No garbage collection pauses. No panics.

You mean, just like existing ones? It's not like we're still driving purely mechanical cars. Current production vehicles already have plenty of software managing stuff.

I think it could help that loading docks could be highly integrated with the truck systems. Backing in to the place where you unload is complicated, but the owners would be willing to invest in putting in sensors, special paint, whatever else is necessary to make that as automated and error free as possible.

We've gotten used to huge commercial airliners flying on autopilot. Granted they have humans on board, but ask any pilot how much flying they do. Even helicopters can be put on autopilot after take-off. That's what the helicopters that run from Macau to Hong Kong many times a day are doing. I can see ironing out the kinks - pedestrians, roadblocks, car stops in front abruptly, etc... I would think you could have a truck lane only like the ones for buses entering the Lincoln Tunnel in NYC, and perhaps a guardrail that could have sections removed to open it up for traffic during less traffic times?

Honestly, I'm not sure that most people understand the extent to which commercial airline flight is automated. For example, most people are shocked when I tell people that pilots are required to let the plane auto-land under very bad visibility conditions.

Jeez, I admit I am, was now, one of those people!...changes flight to train ticket... ;)

> "most people are shocked when I tell people that pilots are required to let the plane auto-land under very bad visibility conditions."

As a commercially-rated pilot I would be shocked, too - since few airport runways are certified for Cat III landings, and that's only under restricted wind speeds.

And even after autoland in fog, a pilot still taxis up to the gate.

If everything was smooth and regular, trucks wouldn't have a problem. However, the roads, and the warehouse yards, are not.

A fully loaded truck traveling 55mph (on some roads they are allowed 65 or even 75) can weigh 80,000 lbs or more (in Canada under certain circumstances, 139,500 lbs).

That is a tremendous amount of force that must be handled properly 100% of the time, through rain, hail, sleet, snow - and with smaller cars weaving in and out of traffic all around them.

It's already not handled 100% of the time. I'll settle for 75% less freeway blocking by crashed big rigs.

I am hopeful that robots can fix it, but most likely it will take a little bit longer... robot trucks will save on fuel, brakes, and tires, as they can be programmed to minimize sudden acceleration and taking a turn too quickly (scrubs rubbers off the tires).

Having driven in winter weather I can honestly say it will be a while . . before they are ready to take over. As for tire wear , there are small firms that look for very experienced driver's to cheat the scales . . this is how its done if they are overweight , think ( steel coils ) they time it so they hit the scales at night . . the driver goes into the scale and positions the rear trailer wheels on one side . . up on the curb registering a lower weight on the scale.

At least long-distance trucks can have routes optimized for automation (be it via embedding sensors to aid in bad weather or optimizing a lane for trucks, etc.) for the long segments and then at the city limits (or thereabouts) set-up truck "depots" to have human drivers board the truck and give them override to manoeuver through more difficult city or rural last-segment roads and streets.

I think the flaw here is assuming that the systems around the truck will stay the same - including the truck form factor. Without the required creature comforts of the tractor, you free up a lot of energy (heat/cool) and space (bed/TV etc...) in the cab.

I can also see traffic lanes being created to support commerce, special easement areas for trucks at stops that don't have to support showers/food/bathrooms etc... reducing overall cost.

All of this comes at cost to human workers - but it's inevitable.

> All of this comes at cost to human workers - but it's inevitable.

I disagree. Specifically, you are assuming that the human workers will quietly accept their fate.

Not quietly, no, but it's no less inevitable.

History is full of jobs that have been automated away, and few of those historical examples offered a more obvious and large payoff.

I do notice you are avoiding my central point:

With railroads, there is not an economic incentive for automation.

One commentator suggested that driverless trucks would have to be separated from human drivers. Railroads have this thing called "tracks"

Another suggested the wonderful advantage of a driverless truck not getting into accidents. Railroads have an excellent safety record.

Driverless trucks as a way to reduce the need to spend money on humans. Railroads need only 2 humans for 100+ unit train that is equivalent to 300 or so trucks. ( 1 railcar = 3 truckloads https://www.chrobinson.com/en/us/Logistics/Intermodal-Rail/C... )

Trains are 10x more ( http://grist.org/article/freight-trains-19th-century-technol... ) more energy efficient than trucks.

What is the economic model to use driverless trucks? Sure the trucking industry will push for this. But the railroad industry has so many natural advantages.

>What is the economic model to use driverless trucks?

Road goes to more places than train tracks.

You dont really need more than that...

What is the economic model to use driverless trucks?

The same as for trucks with drivers (only cheaper) and those already control much of the transportation business.

Butlerian Jihad! You shall not have thinking machines.

"I think the flaw here is assuming that the systems around the truck will stay the same"

That's an interesting point. I wonder if self-driving trucks will tend to be smaller, because there's less incentive to amortize the wages of the driver by making his/her truck as large as possible.

> And then when you get to your destination, manoeuvring a 50' trailer is no easy task, even for a trained driver like my dad.

I wonder if there will be a more specialised role for human drivers here akin to pilots in ports. Companies at the scale able to invest in the tech might have the trucks arrive at a queue near regional hubs and have wet-ware do the 10 minutes of fiddly driving after clearing off the Smart car debris.

If I had to bet, that's the way I see it playing out.

In the states, many distribution centers are located next to major transportation arteries, whether rail or interstate highway. In addition, many of the places they ship to are also located on major arteries. It wouldn't be a huge stretch to have automated trucks you load on one end, they drive to the other (using 98% highway driving), then park in a waiting area until a human finishes the job by parking them.

The interesting edge cases here would be accidents, construction, and detours. Whatever you deploy should be able to handle those without human intervention. Otherwise we could end up with every accident site also having 100 automated trucks at a dead stop waiting on drivers to show up. That'd be ugly.

I wouldn't be surprised. This is where a huge amount of real-world automation ends up; it ends up being much more practical to only automate the 90% of the job that can be done by a simple automaton, and mechanical-Turk the rest. Then you save 90% of the labour costs AND 90% of the R&D costs for the automation.

The article says so. The plan is to have human drivers in each city drive the "last mile" from the interstate freeway exit to the destination. The current autonomous technology is only effective on freeways, so having human drivers drop the truck off at the interstate, and pick it up again solves the temporary problem of not having 100% effective automation of city driving/trailer parking.

If I were younger and not married, I could totally see taking a job as a trucker and guiding it on and off the highway, and doing coding or whatever in the meantime. It'd be a chance to go different places and have some adventure, while continuing to do another job that I love.

It's not unlike many college kids taking a job as a security guard and "watching monitors" while doing their homework, etc. (Another thing that I considered, but never actually did.)

Of course, there's a lot more training for truck driving, but I don't see that as a major barrier, given the benefits of extra pay and travel.

You don't get the point. You won't be traveling inside that truck. You will only drive trucks in and out of your city.

I see the evolution of automated vehicles as slowly taking more and more mental load off humans. e.g

1) Automated gears and obstacle detection - we already have this. 2) Have the truck stay in one lane and maintain distance - We're close. This means humans stay in truck and solve the hard problems when encountered. (Kind of like pilots) 3) Automated port to port driving without humans. 4) Destination to destination driving without humans.

I bet the human driver doesn't even need to be physically in the truck.

We already fly military aircraft remotely, I don't see why a truck that's packed with cameras and sensors can't be driven safely by a human in an office somewhere.

> I think people will be less comfortable with the idea that the truck next to them has no human in it, and could experience some kind of glitch with catastrophic consequences.

Unless the truck somehow acknowledges adjacent vehicles in a comforting way. I don't know what that would look like, but it would probably be coupled with advertising and data collection (no law against filming all the cars around you and what they are doing).

>>And then when you get to your destination, manoeuvring a 50' trailer is no easy task, even for a trained driver like my dad.

My first airplane journey was fascinating. As some one who doesn't know how to drive a car, and is struggling trying to learn it, I was spell bound when I watched the pilot taxi the huge airplane to the terminal.

Well airplanes aren't even regular shaped and size of the human taxi'ing the plane to the plane is very small. Yet the pilot could precision park to the terminal.

The fact is no matter how hard it seems, if you've been doing it day in and out, it looks like just another job at the end.

The demonstration in Europe shows that driverless trucking is right around the corner. The primary remaining barriers are regulatory.

What about the roads themselves? I'm curious how an autonomous truck will handle a snow-covered highway, fog, potholes, and tight corners caused by narrow roads, bad parking, snow banks, etc. This is a way of life where I live (Boston area).

The article about the Russian driverless van (cited by @ommunist) talks with the experts, who are by no means 100% convinced this is "right around the corner": (1)

Industry players are aware that just one serious accident on the roads involving a driverless car could set back their development by decades.

“Everyone has come to understand that the technology is 90 percent ready, but even when it’s 99.99 percent ready, it still won’t be launched,” says Gol, whose product is currently being tested in various scenarios and weather conditions.

“Until we can teach [artificial] intelligence to learn the nuances of things that can occur unexpectedly on the roads … what will happen if transparent glass is being carried across the road, what if there’s a paper bag that the system perceives as a rock,” the system isn’t ready, he said.

“We need a mathematical revolution to overcome that 0.01 percent,” says Gol. “We all understand perfectly that to have just one accident involving autonomous transport will have a huge fallout in society – the technology could be closed down completely for another 50 years. It’s a huge responsibility,” he added.

1. https://ninja.oximity.com/article/Russia-ready-for-driverles...

> Industry players are aware that just one serious accident on the roads involving a driverless car could set back their development by decades.

It'd be awfully "convenient" for the truckers & taxi drivers if this were to happen... I predict a dirty tricks campaign with one or two engineered "accidents" to safeguard their industries.

Vehicles, autonomous and current ones, will need incredibly reliable security to prevent remote hacking.

Yes, because computers and software aren't buggy by themselves without human intervention.

It's not a question of whether they're buggy, but whether they are better than human drivers despite the bugs

Sadly, humans are buggy when it comes to assessing risks and their own competence, so autonomous vehicles need to be a huge amount better than human drivers in order to win out.

That isn't the question in the context of my post. I was responding to someone speculating that truck drivers would "engineer" one or two crashes to protect their industry, as if that isn't going to happen anyway.

One accident might set back consumer driving for 50 years, but not commercial. The safety record simply needs to be much better than human drivers, which shouldn't be too hard, because one driver is already taken out of the equation. And there are billions upon billions to be saved, in our corporatocracy of the USA, it WILL happen. Bad roads shouldn't be too much of a problem, they can just use humans on the bad roads, the bulk of our highways are in good shape. Snow is an issue, yes, but remember that they will have the highways perfectly GPS mapped, great reaction time, and commercial vehicles can have big ugly shrouds to keep cameras clean. There is also the possibility of hiring temporary human drivers for the worst snow days, but I don't see that happening because I honestly think the robots can have a much better safety record in snow. The plastic bag/rock thing could be a problem, that could be partially solved by just assuming it's a rock, pulling over to the side and waiting for a remote human to identify it, and clearly mark the truck as autonomous so the humans on the road know to expect different behavior from it. That's not a perfect solution, but we have thousands of the smartest people working on it - there is enough money at stake, it will be solved.

Public and political perception need to consider autonomous commercial trucking to be safe, rather than safer.

"Safer than human drivers" all too easily becomes "we can't control when these robot trucks my crash into a mother driving her kids to school," when you put it into the political regulation arena.

So it's all fine when a lorry rear ends and pancakes a car because the driver fell asleep?

No, but if a driver falls asleep it's clearly their fault, if they survive the accident they will be charged with manslaughter. If a driverless truck rear ends a car because of a glitch or a mechanical fault where it didn't see the car in front for some reason, then I can only imagine the corporation recalling all of them at huge cost, and possibly paying millions of dollars in damages. I think the point is that when humans crash the responsibility is easy to establish, but we have no framework to work with once computers crash(and they will). And no, "they are still safer than humans" is not a valid defense when someone dies.

The company making the vehicles will be responsible for any damages, and paying a massive insurance premium I'm sure. There will be legal consequences for gross negligence and anyone damaged will be made whole. I don't see how that's any different than the system we have now.

And the emotional appeals cut both ways. How long before the parents of a child killed by a drunk or sleeping truck driver say "Why was he driving anyway? Why wasn't he replaced by a machine that wouldn't drink a six pack and nod off while at the wheel?"

That's partly an effect of being on HN.

In non tech circles - the vast majority of the world - people are pretty famous for measuring risks by perception and not statistics.

The idea of a robotic truck taking away jobs while also being a risk to life? America would take up mass transit before it buys into that system.

Man I can see the headlines and political/ emotional arguments now. Godless SV tech priests rob Americans of the last few jobs they have. 1% and automation, no job left behind.!

It's useful to remember that People refused seat belts until the argument was irrefutable. Hell doctors didn't wash hands regularly until it was drilled into their heads that they were infecting patients.

And when it come to automated personal care - I bet that People will utterly, vociferously, oppose the loss of their agency in controlling their means of movement.

People have romanticized the man and the horse, the man and the bike, the car - but it's because it's a matter of controlling that power.

Selling that to the American public and the world at large is a multi generational effort.

Maybe the American reaction will be like that, but my feeling is that if that happens, then China will take advantage of it by pushing automated driving while ignoring the emotional arguments (authoritarian governments have their advantages in this kind of things...)

And then, the rest of the world will have to follow so as not to be left behind an industrial revolution...

America is not a single unified entity. All it takes is one trucking business to outcompete another for all the trucking companies to follow suit in the following decade.

As for individuals, the government might gives tax breaks or ban the things. I think it is most that likely early adopters will use them and brag to everyone how much they save on fuel and airline tickets and how more (work, reading, video games, etc... ) they can do while travelling. Of course there will be holdouts, but they will be quickly outnumbered.

Eventually so few manual drivers will be on the road that they are the exception and 99% of the accidents will be their fault. Then states will start banning driving manually.

Think Monsanto, not Ford/GM.

And why would I want more places I can work, at least when I drive I am not expected to be working.

Your inability to dictate where and when you work will not dictate my ability choose where and when I will work.

Also Monsanto has nothing to do with anything here, unless you care to explain.

> How long before the parents of a child say ... "Why wasn't he replaced by a machine?"

The ultimate point being that the answer might be "decades." It might take that long for the prevailing opinion amongst the public and/or politicians to change that way. And it is affected by the actual accidents involving automated vehicles in the short term.

> and paying a massive insurance premium I'm sure

Nah, it'll be much cheaper than what they pay for humans since the bots will be in far fewer accidents and insurance companies actually care about statistics.

I think you might be surprised - companies would be insured against a total recall due to software/hardware failure, which would far exceed the cost of any accident a computer could get into, so I guess the premiums might stay relatively high.

> Companies would be insured against a total recall due to software/hardware failure

I don't think that's true at all. Recalls are a manufactures problem, the local trucking company is just going to have normal auto insurance just as with his human drivers.

When a recall does happen how do the trucking companies keep on trucking?

I mean surely this happens now, how do they solve this problem?

I guess airline companies are insured against loss of profit in case their airplanes get recalled and they have to do without. And probably the cost of renting airplanes from other companies so that they can keep on going.

It doesn't happen. For that to happen every trucking manufacture would have have to recall every truck and that's simply never happened. Recalls are generally more along the lines of part Y has an issue, bring the truck in and we'll replace that part.

The same will be true of automated trucking, parts will be recalled, and companies will have multiple different trucking manufactures to choose from so the notion that all the trucks will be recalled just isn't realistic.

Nobody is saying this is logical. The point is that people will use this as a hyped-up political foothold to point out why automated drivers are "unsafe" as well as "taking our jobs".

Fun fact: automated elevators were considered to be "unsafe" and "taking our jobs", too. Somehow we got past that one!

Oh, I absolutely think we will get past this line of thinking. Automated driving is the future. I just don't think it will be a smooth transition.

And elevators sometimes kill people, yet few people are afraid of them.

Admittedly, deaths are very rare, especially per-trip, 27 per year or 0.00000015% per trip -- self driving cars should be able to get into that level of safety, current automotive fatality rates are around 1 in 100M (or .000001%/mile)

http://articles.latimes.com/2011/dec/15/news/la-heb-elevator...

> political foothold

Driver's union versus transportation industry. I have a hunch which way the politicians will sway.

No, but at least from the PoV of public perception the situation is easier to deal with in a way that allays fear.

In your example that one drive is taken off the road. That drive is not a problem, and people assume that the remaining drivers are, for the most part, fine and unlikely to make the same mistake.

In the automated truck example you can't take that one driver off the road because barring equipment failure they are all the same driver and just as likely to make the same mistake.

If one human driver kills in such a manner, people will distrust that one human driver (or at worst that one trucking company, if bad training or other compliance issues are suspected), if one automated truck kills in such a manner people will distrust all automated trucks.

Human beings don't have the ability to just attain knowledge and experience by a software updated, autonomous vehicles do. Yes, every autonomous truck on the road may be controlled by the same software exhibiting the same behaviors, but unlike a human they can all automatically be updated with new behaviors and share experiences with each other.

This is precisely the goal of IBM's Watson if you will remember, an individual doctor only has their own experience - Watson can aggregate data from a virtually infinite number of data points and that knowledge and experience is shared across the network.

Will accidents happen? Yes. But we can learn from them and the collective as a whole benefits, not one individual instance.

Likely it will be even better than you describe. Multiple competing companies all with their own software copying what the other teams are doing right. When one fails the others will continue on with lessons learned.

Probably a lot like software development today except with a lower threshold for error, and hopefully the appropriate increase QA.

I agree. As probably does everyone here.

Now convince the herd that is the general public, who don't really understand the technology, don't have time for a long explanation, and tend to react with instincts and emotions that haven't had much by way of firmware upgrades for quite a few generations.

> Public and political perception need to consider autonomous commercial trucking to be safe, rather than safer.

No, safer than humans is the bar.

That should be the bar, because it's the morally correct one. But public opinion is far from rational, and corporate interests would choose the suboptimal route if they could get away with it.

Did cars or trains need to be perfectly safe? Even modestly "safer" autonomous vehicles would save thousands of lives every year and provide priceless benefit to society, giving us millions of productive hours and giving people that can't drive (the elderly and handicapped) new independence.

I agree re: the rock/bag, err on the side of caution because any potential delays will be dwarfed by the overall savings of autonomous vehicles and lead to safer driving for other road users.

Wanna know the great thing about humanity? We have almost solved this problem, twice:

http://www.redorbit.com/news/science/1112882857/new-scanning...

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/231041901_Portable_...

Why do you think a truck driver is more expensive than an autonomous driving system? Have you priced enterprise software lately? It's not like you'll pay a flat-rate one-time fee and have your robotic driver available to you. You'll end up paying based on your vehicle capacity, on the annual mileage, on the annual driving time, possibly even on the market cap of the purchasing company. Then you'll pay annual costs for support of the software.

Beyond a mandate from the government, I have a hard time seeing the trucking industry giving all their profits over to google, tesla, gm, mercedes, and co.

Once the technology is built, it would make sense for the tech company to price their solution somewhere between $0 and whatever the status quo costs. Then they will want to sell as much of the tech as possible, so the pricing will be such that it is prioritized by the trucking companies.

Is there any evidence that a technology with billions of dollars in potential would not be used if it was only 99.99% ready? I feel like lots of dangerous stuff has been deployed when it was nowhere near 99% in the past, and I'm not sure why this technology would be any different. People talk about it like it's a lot different, but how safe are regular cars? Nuclear power? Coal power? Honestly I don't even know what the state of the science is on cell phones causing brain cancer anymore because I decided that I didn't want to know.

Why does everyone think we'll be smarter on waiting to deploy driverless cars until they are safe, given our history of doing the exact opposite for the last couple hundred years?

Consider the politics of wiping out the biggest employer in 29/50 states. Can you imagine the backlash that even one death would cause?

Looks like on-the-job deaths for coal miners in the US are around 30 per year. I imagine the backlash for even one death would be relatively minor. Anyways, eliminating the biggest employer isn't necessarily a net negative. Unless (until) these trucks can load/unload themselves, repair themselves, schedule themselves, etc., there's a lot of work still to be done by people.

Hell, I can see ways that automated driving can result in a net increase in jobs. Example: if a truck can drive more hours in a day, it'll do more miles per year, requiring more frequent maintenance, requiring more repair mechanics than we currently have. Another: if you're not limited by drivers needing to sleep, you might be able to do a better job of scheduling deliveries to arrive around the clock, requiring more people to be around around the clock.

I'm not saying either of these WILL happen, I'm just saying that automated trucking doesn't HAVE to be a net-negative thing in terms of jobs.

Yes but those 30 deaths are people knowingly working a job that society understands is dangerous, not a family in a minivan driving to grandma's house that was unlucky enough to be in the wrong part of the highway at the wrong time.

That is a huge difference to most people.

> not a family in a minivan driving to grandma's house.

A total of 3,660 people died in large truck crashes in 2014. Sixteen percent of these deaths were truck occupants, 68 percent were occupants of cars and other passenger vehicles, and 15 percent were pedestrians, bicyclists or motorcyclists. The number of people who died in large truck crashes was 16 percent higher in 2014 than in 2009[1]

One incident would hardly compare to the ~3000 non-trucker deaths ever year due to the trucking industry. I don't think it would be all that tough to find the grandma of one of those 3000 to show up in court in defense of automation. It will be MADD all over again.

[1] http://www.iihs.org/iihs/topics/t/large-trucks/fatalityfacts...

I agree. I was just pointing out it's a fallacy to compare coal miner's deaths to deaths caused by automated trucking. Whatever happens my only prediction is that it will be messy and polarizing :-)

Thanks for bringing data and scale to the conversation...

I rather see it in the following terms: some profits are up for grab, who's best positioned to take them?

I don't live in the US so I might have an inaccurate perception of everyone's leverage. However, truckers seem rather disorganised, compared to superstore chains. If big stores eat up 30% of the savings, and offer the remaining 70% to their customers as lower prices (minus a couple % spent in lobbying of course), I would guess they'd had their way. Ditto for Amazon, Alibaba etc.

Look at Chinese importations: politicians sometimes make big protectionist talks to their constituents, but take no measure effective enough to annoy lobbies. And I think importations represent more jobs than transport.

What Uber did to cabbies, Driverless truck fleets will do to truck drivers

Company interests generally outweigh individual interests in America. Besides, we live in a global economy, so putting off technology that is profitable (by a huge margin) today only ensures more American job losses as companies can't compete with foreign competitors. I predict that the driverless car revolution, whenever it happens, will be the issue that pushes Universal Basic Income to the forefront of the political landscape.

It would definitely be deployed at 99% ready because that would likely mean "safer than people". The quote talks about how we are at 90% but going from 99.99% to 100% for deployment would need a mathematical revolution. Really going from 90% to 99% will also need a revolution. At least on the order of deep learning.

Safer than people is not 99%. The accident rate is around 74 per 100 million miles (and fatalities is 1.13).

It's unclear exactly how to turn that into a percentage, but no matter how you do it it's way way more than 99%.

Say an accident takes 5 minutes, and people drive 30 miles/hour. Then that works out to 99.999% for humans. If you use the numbers for fatalities then it's 99.99999%.

That's not even in the same ballpark as 99%.

The average odds of a human-driven vehicle getting in an accident per 600 miles of driving is about 0.13%, according to the NHTSA. What's crazy to me is that, by the numbers, 99.99% safety would already be 13x better than our current situation. Imagine cutting traffic deaths down by a factor of 13. And that's still not good enough.

I think we need to get over the idea that computers are perfect, especially with regards to how artificial intelligence works. There will always be a situation that is unaccounted for, especially in our non-deterministic universe. It may be uncomfortable to think that a life was taken due to an error in processing, but I feel no better about having a child of mine in a car with a barely experienced friend driving and making many more errors in processing.

I don't know what 99% means in this context, but humans are pretty terrible drivers, so I'd be cool with robot-driven automobiles as soon as possible. If the accident rate is below that of humans then it's ready in my opinion.

They were talking about highways exclusively. Using regular drivers to pick up trucks from highway exits and drop them off at entries. Its in the article.

It is likely that fewer cyclists will get crushed like a grape under a semi that's instrumented for self-driving. If it works better, the technology will be launched somewhere in the world, and economic pressure will spread it.

I think the opposite effect would happen and it would be safer for cyclists. There are already cars being equipped with pedestrian and cyclist detection. Sensors can see all around the truck vs the driver view having many deadspots. The computer could be forced to slow down or use safe passing distance while drivers have the free will to break those laws.

Also the computer probably doesn't have a bias against cyclist in the first place.

I'm agreeing with you: Fewer cyclists would die due to automated trucks.

Cyclists tend to avoid freeways.

You can find quite a few videos on YouTube of cyclists on freeways. There is a video from a couple years ago of a bunch of cyclists holding up traffic on the freeway in Austin because they felt like riding on the highway.

I drive in Austin EVERY day. They tend to prefer less-traveled roads. Thanks for the downvote for posting actual facts that I know from first-hand experience.

I can see many road hazards being handled much better by a computer. Depending on what technology is used, fog could have no effect on what the truck can perceive. Also keep in mind that the trucks could talk to one another, notifying each other of road hazards/debris on segments of road.

"What about the roads themselves? I'm curious how an autonomous truck will handle a snow-covered highway, fog, potholes, and tight corners caused by narrow roads, bad parking, snow banks, etc."

It won't; at least, it won't need to handle narrow roads, bad parking, snow banks, etc.

The autonomous truck need not drive the whole route that a human driver does now. Drive down the Ohio Turnpike and you will see numerous parking lots with UPS trailers parked in them, right alongside the highway. All you need is an autonomous truck to drive the trailer down the turnpike. Humans can drop it off at the turnpike and pick it up. It could deal with typical weather events, or just look at the weather forecast and stay parked if the weather looks like it will be bad.

The highways are cleared shoulder to shoulder a day or two after most snows so the autonomous trucks wouldn't lose too much yearly time due to bad weather. You could keep humans around to drive the more urgent shipments.

Would it still be an advanced net if you had humans in the trucks as a 'backup', with the autonomous driving doing 90% of the 'boring' driving down the highways? Humans would still drive the last mile (ha!).

Would that be significant safer and more efficient to make it worthwhile?

If you limit autonomous driving to the main freight routes on the highway, I can see self driving vehicles happening a lot sooner than I previously expected. Like 20 years sooner.

> Would it still be an advanced net if you had humans in the trucks as a 'backup', with the autonomous driving doing 90% of the 'boring' driving down the highways? Humans would still drive the last mile (ha!).

You're exhibiting the AI effect [0]. Could you program the software that makes vehicles drive around "boring" roads? Of course it's advanced.

> I can see self driving vehicles happening a lot sooner than I previously expected. Like 20 years sooner.

Self driving vehicles are already a thing. They're driving around the bay are all the time [1]. They'll be "happening" in the delivery market much sooner than 20 years, like in the next 5. The state of California has already started the regulatory process [2].

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AI_effect#AI_is_whatever_hasn....

[1] https://www.google.com/search?q=self+driving+vehicle+spotted

[2] https://www.dmv.ca.gov/portal/dmv/detail/vr/autonomous/auto

> You're exhibiting the AI effect

At first I had no idea what you're referring to, but then I realised the confused stemmed from my typo. I meant to ask whether it was a significant advancement, not an advanced net/AI.

I know self driving cars are a "thing" already, but only in very limited and constrained circumstances. Last time I checked, Google's can only drive on roads where they've meticulously already mapped out everything from the height of the curb to the exact location of the traffic lights. That's not to discount their work, but it's still in the very early stages of the self driving dream of having a car that can drive you anywhere while you watch a movie.

Self driving cars technology is AI. It is an advancement, a very significant one that will save many, many lives every day. Self driving cars are not in an early stage. Self driving technology is already worth in the billions. See the GM acquisition of Cruise. These cars have driven hundreds of thousands of miles on real roads that other people are also driving, probably including to a movie theater. You are discount the work and you're doing it from a place of complete ignorance.

Woah. I'm not quite sure where the negative sentiment came from - I'm not trying to discount anyone's work, and there's definitely no ignorance. Maybe I'm not optimistic, but I'm definitely not being ignorant.

> Self driving cars technology is AI. It is an advancement

If you go back up the comment chain that I was replying to, you'll note that I don't dispute (or even talk about) whether self driving cars is AI or not - I don't really care to take part of that conversation.

I was commenting on whether if you put self driving tech in trucks if it 'can only' self-drive on the highways, and require human drivers to drive the final mile, is that a significant enough improvement to make it worthwhile deploying it?

I know we've made a significant amount of progress when it comes to this sort of stuff, but we're so much further away from the dream of ubiquitous self driving cars (or even where human-driven cars are illegal or have their own financial/legal drawbacks). I know (Google's) self driving cars have driven x-thousand miles, which is crazy impressive, but they've only done that on like .1% of US roads[0]. They also have trouble driving in varying conditions, like rain or construction or whatever. I can't see ubiquitous self driving cars for consumers really happening in the next 20-50 years.

I can see, however, this bits and pieces of this tech make its way into cars (like Tesla's autopilot, or the self-parking features) a lot sooner than that. Or into trucks driving down the highway. And then Uber/GM/whoever launches self-driving transport in select cities on select routes, and then all over the city, and then in every main city.

[0] Totally made up number, but I assume you'll get my point.

I think that will be the near future; we've already done the exact same thing with airline pilots, who spend most of a flight on autopilot (hence the expression). This allows them to do long shifts with much lower mental pressure.

I'm even imagining 24 hour drivers, who let the truck drive autonomously at night on quiet roads at low speeds while they sleep and live in the truck. A bit like lonely spaceship pilots from science fiction.

i think this is a likely first application. you can boost schedules and efficiency massively by simply allowing a truck to drive itself to the next waypoint overnight (maybe not even the whole night -- just to the next safe stopping area) when the driver would normally be sleeping. if there's an emergency, simply stop and pull over and alert the driver.

this is probably also much easier to sell to existing industry and government. you're not eliminating drivers at all, but instead making their jobs easier and profits higher. having zero autonomous trucks on the road during the day is also a PR positive. no road tripping families put at risk, etc.

I can't wait for the day that putting 0 human drivers on the road is a PR positive, because no road tripping families are put at risk.

not going to happen in the US. you may not like it, but that has nothing to do with reality.

Reasoning pls

They started truck automation in mining and container terminals in ports. Areas with no other traffic and the possibility of active guidance (beacons along/embedded in the route and so on.)

Highways are the next obvious use. I could see automated trucks driving down the transcanadian highway for example or similar long interstate stretch.

I gotta say though, if we're going that way, why not go intermodal, add a RR right of way through the interstate with a double-track, operate automated freight trains and automated transshipment terminals. Just load the trailer onto the train and go. I know rail isn't sexy but it'd make sense in terms of carbon footprint (trains could be multimode diesel-electric/electric depending on corridor.) And most of that rail net could be fully automated.

Roads are really expensive. Adding rail lines is cheaper to build and operate so a dedicated automated truck lane seems like a poor idea. If anything building 100+ MPH rail for long trips like this seems like a great investment until you adjust for actual traffic levels.

They don't need to build new roads, they just need to add cones to mark off a lane on an existing highway.

Rail suffers a lot from inflexibility and the massive redundancy required to survive the occasional track maintenance. Trailer-on-railroad does not really improve on that. A true logistics moonshot would have to go all the way to "roadgoing, powered railcars" that could platoon on that double-track and maybe opt into some form of power delivery (overhead line?) where available, switching on the fly between rubber/air and steel wheelsets as required.

The beauty of this expensive approach is that it would not only obviate waiting for a train going in the right direction and the requirement for mode switching terminals (those are just the fair weather sailing benefits), but also eliminate the inherent fragility of highly interdependent railroad schedules. Where conventional rail quickly breaks down completely, road can gracefully degrade towards a massive traffic jam slowly grinding forward on some dirt road fallback route.

There is a lot of intercity driving that could be rendered unnecessary with an automated intercity system.

This may also make the shift easier on the current labor pool, as they could migrate to local delivery work.

> If you limit autonomous driving to the main freight routes on the highway, I can see self driving vehicles happening a lot sooner than I previously expected. Like 20 years sooner.

It is 100% certain without any doubt whatsoever that this is how it will start. It will start with dedicated interstate roads (or lanes) just for driverless trucks, and then cars.

After some time all freeways will be 100% driverless. I don't anticipate mixed use (driverless + drivers) ever happening.

Local roads (i.e. uncontrolled access) is many many decades away.

Can you elaborate on why you don't see mixed use ever happening? Do you think its regulatory, liability or technological... or maybe some combination of the three?

Because it will never be needed.

The steps go like this:

Driverless car in a dedicated lane. That will be first since it's much easier to build than local driving or mixed long distance. It also covers the most important need (i.e. much less economic reason to make one for local use).

Lots more people see how great that is, so more cars (and trucks) will be rapidly added. That lane will reach capacity, so more lanes will be added.

Within 5 to 10 years driverless long distance will be the norm, and long distance driver cars will be rare. (All the cars will be have mixed modes, with the driver taking over for local streets.)

Every new car will advertise that it includes diverless mode as a feature.

All this will happen so fast there won't be time to perfect a mixed use car.

By the time they do perfect a local driverless car virtually all cars on the market will already have long-distance driverless mode. And the ones that don't will probably get retrofit kits.

So at no point will mixed long distance ever be a thing - by the time the technology is able to do that, there won't be any cars that need it.

> I don't anticipate mixed use (driverless + drivers) ever happening.

but it already has?!

I mean there are already self driving cars being tested on public roads. Technically not driverless, but almost.

Those cars are not able to handle general purpose driving.

Say you are on a one-way road, and at the bottom of it an ambulance is blocking the road - so you need to back all the way out of the road (or u-turn).

No driverless car today can handle such a situation. There are many more real-world examples. The cars today are just demos, not usable products.

Add the severe driver shortage that has been taking place in the tucking industry for about 7 years plus and it will happen even sooner.

Well I find it always incredible that the point of self driving cars that is most needed is the hardest part and least likely to occur anytime soon, that is driving in bad to very bad conditions.

though with the prevalence of texting while driving maybe cars will not necessarily need to always drive but simply take the needed emergency action

> The autonomous truck need not drive the whole route that a human driver does now.

Exactly. They'll be more like trains than trucks as we know them; they'll simply have more tracks available.

Makes sense. Do the hundreds of straight highway miles driverless, then transfer to human driver for tricky last bits. Dumb question - why not use trains?

The article is talking about automation once the truck is on the highway.

"We still need to create on- and off-ramps so human drivers can bring trucks to the freeways where highway autopilot can take over."

Reliable self-driving highway trucks are indeed quite far off. And the OP does at least admit that entry/exit ramps would need to be massively upgraded to support peloton-style semi-automation. Full automation would require a huge investment in road maintenance that many jurisdictions currently skimp on. At some point we'd be far better served to seriously invest in a high-capacity high-speed railroad network. It could move people and freight far more efficiently and could be far more easily automated than automated semis, which are really just a kludge on the current overbuilt and undermaintained highway system. The money follows the infrastructure you have. If we have to rebuild our highway infrastructure to accommodate self-driving trucks maybe we should rethink whether those trucks are the right way to ship goods over long distances after all.

A very useful visual to add next to this is "The Most Common Job In Every State"[0] map from NPR's Planet Money. As soon as I was aware of the research in autonomous driving I was pretty confident trucking would be the first industry hit. Until I saw that map I had no sense of how major of a disruption this could be.

[0] http://www.npr.org/sections/money/2015/02/05/382664837/map-t...

It's not just the jobs. Self-driving trucks will transform an industry where large amounts of humans are necessary into (yet another) industry where capital is the only thing that matters. Once trucks are self-driving, larger companies will gain the advantage and one of the main economic sectors dominated by small to medium companies will become dominated by large international businesses.

Disruption nothing, this is going to be an economic apocalypse for huge swathes of the country. We've never seen an automation wave like this one. It's exciting times to be alive for sure but I'm also legitimately worried if we're going to be able to handle it as a society, if anything is going to tip us into needing basic income, this could be a serious contender.

It's not even just the trucking, it's truck stops, highway diners, tiny motels all over the place, there is a massive amount of infrastructure that was built because of and for truck drivers and their needs, and that's still not it because there are tons of small town economies built on the last job that pays well without a college education that more or less anyone can do.

Yeah, it's not like this has happened ever before. We definitely need basic income. It will solve all the problems.

No it won't, and it will come with a few of it's own (getting American's past the bootstrap narrative is probably the biggest single one) but it is a step in the right direction.

That being said if you can think of another example where we put 3.5 million people out of work nearly overnight along with an entire support system built on their salaries and needs, I'd love to hear it. The only similar thing I could think of would be the rise of automation in American factories, and even then that didn't replace EVERY human with a machine, and carried with it a certain PR cost for the companies involved, whereas I think a shipping company removing humans from their trucks would have a PR boon, not bust.

UBI has nothing to contend with the boostrap narrative. You just shift the target. Rather than pulling yourself up by your bootstraps to not starve or die of exposure, you pull yourself up by your bootstraps to do anything at all beyond basic survival with a roof and bread. You want a car? Go work for it. You want TV? Go work for it. Etc.

UBI is only meant to reduce the demand for total income enough that people can recreationally work for things they want, because there isn't enough work to go around for all the things they need. If you wanted to live on a UBI without additional income, you could spend your days at parks or libraries, but by design you should not have the income to be purchasing luxury goods - if you want those you can seek work for them, and because of the drop in labor demand UBI causes, you should still be able to find something.

No, people will just slack because they can buy bread. We already saw this in the soviet block.

The human brain works on incentives. Remove the incentive the human is in free fall.

The simple fact is that a tiny fraction of our population can create a lot more wealth than the rest of them doing all the busywork they could possibly do, and this is only going to get worse as automation continues to increase. We need to rethink the idea that you need to contribute to eat because it simply isn't true anymore. Now, we can either start giving people what they need to live because they're humans and shouldn't be left to freeze to death, or we can roll tanks on the neighborhoods with the most have nots and keep up the crime, keep the property values low, and generally treat people like crap. I give it 50/50 either way at this point because so many people are so married to this idea that the only way you should be kept alive is if you're a benefit to someone else and I'm sorry, but in the wealthiest nations on the planet with celebrities and CEO's raking in billions, you'd think we could manage to find some cash somewhere to keep people alive if for no other reason than we CAN do it.

I have a hard time believing under any economic system Americans would be content with bread when their neighbor is eating steak. That is the whole basis of the consumerist culture that powers a good portion of American capitalism.

And the Soviets are a terrible example. Centrally planned economies of course destroy all individual incentives to accel or improve.

But if you seriously think the only way economic systems like the US's can function is by threatening starvation and exposure to incentivize working, then what is the point of progress to begin with if we are stuck in the same vicious cycle regardless? All progress is effectively meaningless if at the end of the day you are still laboring to not die of hunger.

And the Soviet's didn't have bread to begin with. Their people starved not because of "free" stuff, but because there was "no" stuff so long as the central planning existed and was as inept as it was (that, or intentionally restricted).

>And the Soviets are a terrible example. Centrally planned economies of course destroy all individual incentives to accel or improve.

Which economy is not centrally planned? We have more and more central planning every year.

The Soviet Union did not collapse because of central planning. It collapsed because everyone was lazy and stole shit from the factories. No productivity, no quality. People were drinking at work and were utterly incompetent. This is what happens when you remove the incentives for improvement. If you guarantee people they can eat, no questions asked, they just stop caring after 10-15 years. They just forget to care, this is the new reality for them. No repercussions, why even bother. Who are you to tell me to work harder? Why should I work at all? I am ENTITLED to your money so I can buy food.

And when the proletariat smells they can get other people's money, will they stop at just a pinch, so they can buy the very basic necessities? Or will they go and protest and push for more money in 15 years? Those fucking 1%-ers! They are not better than me. Who said they are better than me? Why should they have all this money. I need to feed my kids! And for booze.

The Soviet Union collapsed because they distributed everything to everyone, the problem was it was all terrible and the supply was insufficient due to any one of many things such as problems in distribution, corruption in the suppliers, etc. People who were stealing were by and large doing so out of desperation, which is already happening now in multiple areas around the US and elsewhere.

The vast majority of people when given access to a basic amount of money (not benefits, not stamps, just money) will spend it in such a way as to NOT cause them additional misery via drugs, alcohol or by starving their children. Yes, some will but the "welfare queen" is a myth perpetuated by people who stand to benefit from the social systems being cut back. They exist but it's such a vanishingly small percentage that they might as well not exist, in comparison to the total welfare budget it's a rounding error.

I've never heard of one person protesting against the rich saying that we should all be equal. I used to think that's what they were saying, but in actuality people who want equality want equality of opportunity, not equality of result, and to say that a kid growing up in rural Kentucky with the best of circumstances available there has the same opportunity as a kid in the suburbs of San Fransisco is laughable on it's face.

You think that one morning drivers will wake up and will be laid off? You think that will happen in a year? In 10?

This is not grounded in reality.

Does the pace really matter? The coal miners of the Kentucky and related areas have had decades and way too many are still dying of drug overdoses while waiting for their 'next big break.'

Correct, nothing like this has ever happened before.

Social Security for everyone.

A very interesting map, but:

"The prominence of truck drivers is partly due to the way the government categorizes jobs. It lumps together all truck drivers and delivery people, creating a very large category. Other jobs are split more finely; for example, primary school teachers and secondary school teachers are in separate categories."

... I really wish they'd collapsed some of those categories, could have been even more revealing.

Then again, teachers are probably on their way to being (at least semi-)automated as well...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Pq-S557XQU

Let's hope.

Even free services such as Kahn Academy blow many teachers out of the water in terms of really teaching things.

The nanny aspect of teachers will be hard to replace though.

>The demonstration in Europe shows that driverless trucking is right around the corner. The primary remaining barriers are regulatory. We still need to create on- and off-ramps so human drivers can bring trucks to the freeways where highway autopilot can take over. We may also need dedicated lanes as slow-moving driverless trucks could be a hazard for drivers.

So, right around the corner except for billions in infrastructure investment.

I'm quite certain that this--like many other things related to autonomous vehicles--will happen. But they're decades further away than 75% solutions lead many people to think.

Depots on the highway where loads are transferred to human-driven trucks, and dedicated lanes for slow-moving driverless trucks? Might as well put the trailers onto a train, and build out the rail network (where needed) to be as extensive as the highway network. We've already got plenty of driverless trains around.

There are plenty of highways that already have a ton of trucks driving slowly in the right lane. Many routes will need changes to take advantage of this technology, but not all. The on- and off-loading areas will probably need to be created in many places, but that's a lot easier than adding a whole lane.

I wish. Unfortunately, even though that is the better option, it is more risky: everyone (meaning businesses in this case) already pay taxes to support roads, thus using them, even if it's less efficient, is "free". Plus, all businesses are connected to a road. Compared to building and maintaining infrastructure for a rail network, where you're limited to customers you've built rail to. So I'd wager the "last mile" would likely continue to be truck based, even if rail use exploded.

To be fair though, the rail networks here in North America are seen as the most developed freight networks in the world (I wish we had more passenger service though; my daily commute to KU and back is a pain): 2863 Gt-km (NA), 2451 (China), 2351 (Russia), vs 391 (EU).

How much do you think it costs to convert a truck to an automated truck?

How much do you think the salary of a truck driver is?

How many years does it take for the automated solution to be more cost effective?

Most of the truck freight carried on highways should be on railroads instead. It's economically and environmentally far more efficient.

The reason it is still carried on highways is because the highways are heavily subsidized while the railroads are not.

For example, most of the reason for expensive highway maintenance is the fatigue damage cause by trucks. Fatigue damage goes up as the cube of the weight, and the weight fees charged trucks don't remotely pay for it.

> the weight fees charged trucks don't remotely pay for it.

Source?

Don't have one. I just recall reading years ago that the fatigue damage cause by trucks loaded to the legal weight limit was 9,000 times that of a passenger car (and trucks are often overloaded). The flexing of the roadbed causes it to crumble away after a while. You can feel the roadbed go down when a truck passes.

The main damage passenger cars do is erosion from snow tires.

I was able to find this from the Congressional Budget Office

> Estimates of pavement damage by trucks, the largest per-mile external cost of truck use, range from about 5 to 55 cents per mile depending on the weight of the truck, the number of axles over which its weight is distributed, and where it operates....

https://www.cbo.gov/sites/default/files/112th-congress-2011-...

The fuel tax is 30 cents/gallon of diesel, which for an 18-wheeler getting a typical 6 mpg is about 5 cents / mile.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fuel_taxes_in_the_United_State...

So at the absolute highest end of that estimate you need to increase fuel taxes to $3/gallon, i.e., double the price of fuel to ~$6/gallon. That would make trucking 40% more expensive (since that's the fraction of operating costs devoted to fuel).

http://www.thetruckersreport.com/infographics/cost-of-trucki...

And a more realistic number might be closer to 20% or 30% more expensive. This would change things on the margins, but it's not clear to me that it would be transformative in pushing transport to trains.

20 to 30% is quite a bit. And road repairs are only part of the cost subsidy to trucks. Property taxes are assessed on the tracks, but not on the highways, for another.

Certainly 30% is a big impact if it's your day job, but it's unlikely that the transportation infrastructure of the US would be dramatically different. (After all, gas prices had $2/gallon fluctuations that persisted over many years without much impact.) Also worth pointing out that the OP article lists labor as 75% of the cost (which is very different than the source I used).

I'd be very glad to see truck taxes/fees adjusted to better match reality. If that means less truck and more trains, all the better. Still, it's not clear to me that trains don't also get implicit subsidies (that are just less discussed because trains don't inspire as much politics), or that the positive externalities of trucks are important, or whatever.

20-30% is huge. And when trucking is no longer a huge source of employment, the political will to assess realistic taxes on the environmental/ infrastructural costs of trucking might increase. No worries of truckers staging protests that tax increases will come out of their paychecks.

Yeah, damage to roads goes up superlinearly with weight.

I think it's to the fourth power with axle weight.

That sounds familiar, but I couldn't remember with enough confidence to say. But yeah, trucks are really disproportionately bad for the roads.

One question (I didn't read the article, but it just popped in my mind while thinking of driverless trucks).

Is anyone working on driverless trains? If not, why not? I understand that the impact would be less huge, but at the same time the problem domain is arguably more tractable. In my hometown we have a fully automated underground train line which has been working flawlessly (i.e. no accidents) for almost 10 years now, but according to Wikipedia it looks like ATO (Automatic Train Operation: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automatic_train_operation) is currently deployed only for urban transport, while proper railways, even the Japanese ones, seems to use only ATC (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automatic_train_control) which from what I understand provides support to a human driver but still needs one to operate.

(edit: typos)

"The average age of a commercial driver is 55 (and rising every year), with projected driver shortages" and "The loss of jobs representing 1 percent of the U.S. workforce will be a devastating blow to the economy" don't really add up. There is more and more jobs that young people don't want to do and this is probably one of the best examples. They have to be automated or at some point we won't have anyone to do them. In addition, this is going to take more than 10 years to get both regulations and road improvements to make this happen, so based on the current average age, a lot of them will be near/past retirement.

Immigration is another way to solve this.

Very true, but I guess my argument is that the author is wrong in terms of this being a devastating thing to our current workforce.

If you were 55+ with your only qualification being that you could drive a truck and that niche was automated away, this would absolutely be devastating to you.

Just a thought: What if they only replace retiring/stopping/dying drivers with a driver-less alternative and close off the profession for others?

That would probably be better. In reality, however, a business will go for the cheaper (or required-by-law) option and will more heavily towards humans or automation

To be honest, if I'm 55+, I'm probably not too worried that self driving trucks without attendant drivers might be permitted on some major trunk routes a few years after my retirement

> Dealing with gear changes, airbrakes, load shifting, other vehicles that will inevitably cut you off, and much more.

Awhile back there was a post about the early experience of a young and enthusiastic programmer. The take away phrase, in response to someone sending nonsense input, was "Some people just want to watch the world burn."

I can see assholes trying to make sure that an automated truck can't change lanes, or get to the exit it needs to reach, etc.

I myself have at times intentionally walked too close to the robotic carts that move supplies to workstations at my work, just to hear them stop and beep for a few seconds.

> The take away phrase, in response to someone sending nonsense input, was "Some people just want to watch the world burn."

That's a big line in the batman movie "the dark knight". While it could have originally came from elsewhere, I'd be willing to bet it came from the movie.

>I can see assholes trying to make sure that an automated truck can't change lanes

3.5 million truck drivers in the US alone. I suspect that would be your pool of assholes, and I'm not sure I would blame them.

At first maybe, but people get used to things. Sabotage by replaced workers and luddites is nothing new (just look at the origin of the word luddite). And I wouldn't be surprised if laws are passed that create heavy penalties for interfering with self-driving vehicles.

It's an interesting thought, but I don't think this will be a significant problem. The inevitable combination of laws, surveillance, and social norms will, as it does now, keep the vast majority of people from doing random asshole acts like this.

The self-driving trucks will, by definition, be equipped with omnidirectional, high resolution 3d cameras. Who was that guy who kept cutting off our truck? Well, we could 3d print his face and license plate if you'd like. Also, the trucking industry will run to lawmakers the very first time this happens, and they are a very strong lobby. Finally, it's just a shitty thing to do, and everyone will understand that. Much like shining a laser at a plane is almost universally reviled, there will be social consequences for being that guy who torments driverless trucks.

By the way, "robotic carts that move supplies to workstations"? Is this a common thing? Can you say where you work?

This is a thing: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WPj794EtJqU

I work at a manufacturing company.

The carts are like little flat bed trucks, and they do one thing: move empty and full bins from station to station, and the warehouse. They have rollers on the flatbed part, that push bins over to the hole in the wall at a station. The hole in the wall has similar rollers. They follow a set route along the wall of a hallway that's used by people and the carts.

What is a person supposed to do when another human tries dangerous things while one is driving? I think the smart move there would be to record the incident and have it reviewed for police, or for PR content.

I believe the post you are talking about is "Mr. Fart's favorite color". https://medium.com/@blakeross/mr-fart-s-favorite-colors-3177...

Future teenagers version of cow tipping.

>or get to the exit it needs to reach

Often while driving i get the feeling im the only one who realizes if you miss an exit, you can just get off at the next exit...

Going your preferred route is never more important than driving safely. People never seem to consider this when they cross several lanes of traffic to make a turn or get off at an exit.

Exactly. I think this is one of the most important things I've taught my teenage son about driving.

Louis CK does a bit about this thats pretty funny

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CQSRPMFDTSs - only 1 minute long, no swearing

Mentioned in the article, but there's a pretty big trickle down effect that will crush other businesses. Roadside motels, for example. And while trucks will still need fuel, I don't think the current economics of truck stops work if you just sell gas.

Maybe a surprise for the government as well, less tax revenue since the new drivers will drive in a more fuel efficient way, and probably require a smaller overall fleet (no need for sleep). Currently, an average truck pays ~$15k/year in road/registration/use taxes.

It's going to be a very visible adjustment for everyone.

It's basically going to decimate the blue-collar workforce. "short term disability" is already increasingly the new stopgap between gaps in social welfare for unemployed and underemployed blue collar workers.

If driverless trucks become the new norm, expect major jumps in SSDI rolls, unless we institute some form of basic income.

http://apps.npr.org/unfit-for-work/

The author forgot to mention that it will be Russian, and produced by KAMAZ. http://sputniknews.com/science/20151006/1028104950/kamaz-dri... . Mind the muzzak on 0:51 in video.

UPD: it appears Russians also have Gazelle for small business already driverless and capable to drive on Russian "roads" in rural regions. https://ninja.oximity.com/article/Russia-ready-for-driverles...

I don't expect drivers to go away immediately. Instead, I expect their wages to drop 50% overnight - but they will still be required to be on the truck: to fill the tank, to clean something, to be there and guard it against theft, etc.

I keep saying this over and over and over to my more "the market will figure it out" co-workers and I just can't seem to get through to them.

This is literally more than 20% unemployment in less than 5 years.

Society will either crumble or completely change how it views unemployment.

> This is literally more than 20% unemployment in less than 5 years

First of all - what? It's not 20%, nor is it happening in 5 years... Neither of those numbers make any sense.

Secondly, accuracy aside, the same arguments were made all through the 70s, 80s, and 90s about manufacturing automation. And guess what, those jobs are gone now, but society didn't crumble.

It's not like his is all brand new people - it's happened over and over again for the past 200 years. Read your history, and realize that we will repeat it.

The 20% figure isn't actually that crazy.

A small town near where I grew up had a factory- Hershey chocolate- that supported maybe 20% of the jobs in the town. But it represented how 50% or more of the money entered the town. That money bounced around, creating jobs- stores, restaurants, even gas stations and hotels.

When the factory closed, everything was hit. A small town with few sources of external income can be devastated by the loss of a major one.

A huge percentage of America is small towns, and a large portion of them have truckers as their income.

Yes, they economy will recover, but if this automation happens very quickly there can and will be collateral damage.

I'm still for it happening, but the government would be wise to start preparing for the fallout now.

>And guess what, those jobs are gone now, but society didn't crumble.

I wouldn't say the loss of manufacturing jobs has been particularly well absorbed, in fact i would argue that we are still trying to deal with the effect this loss has had on our economy.

>... those jobs are gone now, but society didn't crumble.

Society where I live in California didn't, but the stories I read about Detroit and Baltimore make me wonder how society is doing in large parts of the country where manufacturing used to be a major employer.

> Trucking represents a considerable portion of the cost of all the goods we buy, so consumers everywhere will experience this change as lower prices and higher standards of living.

No, consumers won't. The savings will be funneled directly to shareholders.

Not really, competition will eventually drive down the prices.

People say things like this, then we end up with the cable (TV/Internet) industry.

Cable companies are universally granted local monopolies in the US; by definition they are an example of what happens when you artificially limit competition.

Fuel is half the price it was two years ago. So we should already be enjoying massive savings, right?

Nope [1].

[1] http://www.deseretnews.com/article/865646660/Why-food-prices...

This "Nirvana" of the driverless truck is focusing on long distance trucking.

There are a number of issues with this. The biggest one is that there is already a solution to the long distance safe movement of goods with minimal human involvement.

It is called a t-r-a-i-n.

Trucking companies already use long distance trains as alternatives to long distance truckers. It is far cheaper and less technologically risky to simply increase the amount of long distance freight that moves via railroad.

With driverless trucks, :

* each truck needs complex (expensive) electronics that need to be kept repaired and up to date * regulatory hurdles * liability issues

What happens when a computer has a memory corruption issue and shuts down halfway across Nevada?

For driverless trucks to be a real thing, the very real competition from the railroad industry needs to be addressed.

Based on past history, the railroad industry is going to be reminding all the regulators of how dangerous trucking (and now unmanned trucks) can be --- and how safe and proven the railroad alternative is.

Trains may already be a solution, yet a very large percentage (as high as 75%+ in Europe) of freight is carried using trucks. There's plenty of business for the driverless trucks to take over without having to tackle competition with rail.

Automation is driving humans out of jobs. Driverless trucks will layoff 1%+ of the US population, because driverless trucks are far more economical. The general trend is profits go up and employment goes down.

What to do with such an economy? Basic income. Tax the profits and give everyone sufficient income to pay for the basic necessities. That's one of the conclusions of the 2011 book Race Against The Machine, by two MIT professors.

I'm a big fan of Alan Watts' "Money, Guilt, and the Machine" [0] as are many people here. It's most poignant point IMHO is that we're screwed until we can separate money and morality. As we move towards more political extremes here in the US, that's going to be near impossible.

So we can either separate money from morality, or suffer greatly as jobs - especially blue collar jobs - are automated away.

Alas I fear there will be great suffering...

[0] https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=ssDY74nLuLg

I just listened to "Money, Guilt, and the Machine." I don't understand what you mean "separating money and morality." Can you explain?

I'm surprised that I never see mention of having one human at the front and a dozen slave trucks driving behind.

The trucks behind could be connected wirelessly. Or they could even use wires. Some sort of machine vision could keep an eye on the truck in front, adjusting distance as necessary.

Obviously that takes coordinating trucks going to the same direction but it seems reasonable to have a hub-and-spoke layout where "trains" are broken apart and re-assembled.

The Iowa Driving Simulator wrote a lot about that in the last decade. Trouble is, as I see it, that you use trucks precisely when you want to go to a destination uncorrelated with other trucks. Its hard enough to fill even one truck for a trip - that's the hard nut of the industry's problem. Solve that one, multiple trucks would be further down the list.

I have read this prediction several times this year. I expect to be reading the same prediction in 5 years.

I'm with you on that one, but much less skeptical about say 20 years.

It's a super interesting subject, but I don't really buy the argument that this will drive down costs for the consumer. Never mind that whole better standard of living line...that's just cheerleading. Companies have shown over and over again in the last two decades that they are capable of absorbing those new profits from efficiencies.

I agree there are examples that show what you suggest. There are far more examples to suggest the opposite though. If the technology becomes widely available and there are enough independent companies to promote competition rather than collusion, the prices have no choice but to go down.

How much did you pay for the super computer in your hand?

How much did UPS/Fedex shipping prices go down when fuel prices dropped? (hint, they went up).

what about their other costs?

UPS and Fedex raise their rates every year in January with a figure that far exceeds inflation or other indexed costs.

https://www.lojistic.com/pdf/UPS-Fedex-General-Price-Increas...

Ocean and air freight real prices are the cheapest they have ever been.

That doesn't necessarily trickle down to consumers though. As mentioned, it certainly doesn't in the case of UPS/Fedex. The high level question is what happens with the cost savings driverless trucking brings? Does it turn into profit or reduced pricing to consumers?

When I worked at the Federal Reserve, our vault was managed by autonomous, self-driving vehicles (more robots than trucks - basically smart forklifts). They drove standardized boxes of money around from counting rooms where humans touched the money, to storage where humans were not allowed to go. Warehouse management software knew exactly how much money was in each box. Laser scanning was used for guidance and security.

This was over a decade ago. I'm sure things are much better now.

At one point the author says something about convoys of trucks and taking advantage of the speed for maximum fuel efficiency, 45 mph. I'm not sure that people traveling on the interstate will appreciate being stuck behind convoys of automated trucks all running at 45 mph.

Hopefully our convoy of self driving cars will learn to stay separate from the convoy of self driving trucks.

I cannot wait.

If they stayed in the right lane it wouldn't be too much of a problem. The problem with trucks vs cars I run into most today is trucks passing other trucks in the left lane, or middle lanes on 3- or 4-lane highways. A convoy isn't the same thing as three trucks abreast, though.

Just going to say this before reading the article because it's been on my mind since college. The end state of automation is unemployment and massive income inequality, with wealth being concentrated amongst the owners of capital.

Now I'll go read the article.

Isn't that how its aways been, less the mass unemployment at least?

Maybe the inefficiencies make it less obvious?

My friend is some kind of logistics manager for a trucking company. He literally manages dozens of trucks and truck drivers daily.

He says, it's so ridiculous, how far away we are from automatting truck driving. There is a lot of manual work for loading and off-loading rigs. Plus there is driving in every single possible driving condition possible, around the world.

He said, he could see an auto-pilot system being installed in trucks in the next 10 years, but the rest is all manually done.

Did he see that driverless trucks made a delivery in Europe last week?

That was platooning with a lead driver.

Sure, so it makes 5/6 long-haul truckers redundant instead of ~6/6.

My friend was a truck driver for a while, and a friend-of-a-friend is some kind of logistics manager. They both had the same objections to self-driving trucks -- the regulatory necessity for a human driver to initially inspect and periodically check the load, and the last-mile driver thing (which they expressed in different terms).

The 'some kind of logistics manager' thinks there'll be autonomous trucks pretty shortly, but the implementation will look like that Simpsons episode for years to come -- the way things work right now, a human in the cab is required.

And I'm sure someone was friends with a confident stagecoach driver before automobiles took over. Computers have taken over tons of ridiculous and complicated tasks already, it's silly to think your specific niche is the special case.

  Computers have taken over tons of ridiculous and complicated tasks already, it's silly to think your specific niche is the special case.

Liability and government regulation are some of the biggest concerns of the trucking industry, and could prevent automated driving from taking hold for decades. Anecdotally, I've spent a lot of time talking to technology directors in trucking companies, and this sort of automation is hardly on the radar.

I'm skeptical. European roads are not American roads. According to google there are over 4 million miles of road in the US and there is very little standardization. I would venture to say that road quality is much worse in the US. I'm skeptical that the sensors in self-driving vehicles are capable of making long hauls on US roads.

> We may also need dedicated lanes as slow-moving driverless trucks could be a hazard for drivers.

I wonder if the author realizes the amount of money this would take in the US. Even if the federal government put up the money to make this happen on interstates, each state would have to come up with the money for state roads. For most states, the transportation budget is a ongoing battle and I can't see tax payer money going to automated truck lanes any time soon.

My guess is that driverless trucks will only be 'a thing' in very urban areas over a short distance due to safety, maintenance, and financial concerns. Therefore, the long haul trucker will still have a job at the end of the day.

Well even Germany isn't going to start with self-driving trucks driving everywhere. Every country has standardization problems... in Germany there are ancient towns with arches that trucks can't go under (and not all of them are marked). In the US we have inconsistent/missing signs, dense urban areas built for small cars, and all kinds of crazy human driving.

My guess is actually opposite of yours though. I think short distance trucking will come last, with long-haul interstate trucking coming first. Short distances don't really need an automated truck... the trucker just gets in, drives, and arrives. Automating/standardizing loading/unloading would be great but automating the driver is less of a win.

On the hand, take interstates. Trucker gets in and drives for upward a few days with multiple mandated stops for naps/food... afaik, it takes 3 days to safely drive from SF to NY because of those stops. Now imagine a self-driving truck where the driver is only responsible for first/last-mile driving and refueling... done in 48 hours flat. 30% shorter transit time, plus whatever fuel/insurance savings the AI driver generates. Not bad.

The trucks will likely drive at 45 mph so it would take 65 hours to cross the country. Still a huge improvement.

> The trucks will likely drive at 45 mph so it would take 65 hours to cross the country. Still a huge improvement.

By "likely" you mean one guy in a Tech Crunch editorial mentioned that would be efficient. Driverless trucks could look totally different because they don't need to house a driver (and their sleeping quarters) and be much more aerodynamic.

> ancient towns with arches that trucks can't go under (and not all of them are marked).

And that are routinely blocked by trucks with human drivers who keep forgetting their required height clearance. If there was a way to make shipping companies fully responsible for all the delays caused but stuck trucks, laser-scanner assistance systems that stop the truck before it is stopped by the arch would already be a popular retrofit.

To be honest, the haulage company or their insurance company is losing money whilst their truck is stuck under a bridge, and even more when someone sends them the bill for the bridge repair. If laser scanners or databases attached to geolocation services aren't sufficiently accurate or affordable to make even that minimal level of driver aid widespread, it's probably an indication that adequate driver replacement services are going to be even further behind for those routes.

Trucking as an industry is still firmly entrenched in the 20th century. Those shipping companies do have to pay for delays, but the industry's mindset is that delays are an immutable cost of doing business... get insurance against delays, travel around areas that might pose risks (even if it takes longer), train humans to predict/handle exceptional cases, pad out shipping schedules, etc. There's plenty of room for disruption.

Truck manufacturers are onboard because they get to sell replacements for every truck on the road... it's the shipping companies that are going to be the hard sell. The market is ripe for disruption but both shipping customers and shippers will be hesitant when faced with new fangled laser-thingamajiggers.

The author proposes building special "slow lanes" for a tightly bound string of trucks in a "peloton" where the trucks do not need to be individually manually driven.

Isn't that a train?

Many of the comments here are overestimating what's required for this to have an impact. Driverless trucks only need to cover some large percentage of the driving currently performed by humans to be major economic changers.

For example, let's say they can only run during daylight hours, in conditions other than rain and snow, only on long-haul routes, and humans will do the "last-mile" piloting on local roads.

Now let's suppose that for routes that fit those parameters driverless trucks end up taking over 40% of those kinds of routes. That's huge. It would absolutely transform the economies of all the states that are looking for truck drivers here. http://media2.policymic.com/bf05a1c9e6b8a55095f8b4726e30b52f...

Indeed. I find the binary view of self-driving/driverless/robot lorries somewhat narrow.

Furthermore, a lot of these sort of technologies have already made it into lorries and cars, just commonly called 'driver aids'. Such as radar controlled cruise control, lane control, etc.

Most of lorry hauling takes place on motorways, where the process can be easily automated. Only when trips from the origin to the motorway and the motorway to the destination could remain in control of the driver.

And moreover, this sort of technology could be fitted to lorries very soon. Fully automated self-driving lorries are still decades off. Partly of all the minor quirks and issues, but mostly because once more than 50% of the actual lorry driving is automated, there will be less urgency for it.

It doesn't even have to be all or nothing. Imagine a kind of road-train, where the leading truck is driven in a heavily assisted manner but still has human control in the mix. Another 5 - 10 fully automated "follow the leader" style trucks could simply imitate the leader truck. All the while gathering data..

I hope they remember to write an algorithm so that when approaching a hill and there are two lanes each direction, two trucks will pull up beside each and race up the hill each at 55MPH despite the speed limit being 70MPH.

no, one of them has to go at 55.25MPH to make it look like they have a chance of overtaking before the top.

Last week, my brother (27) was ran over and killed in a truck stop parking lot by a distracted truck driver. I wholeheartedly embrace the prospect of automating trucks, as a sensor would have prevented this.

First of all I am sorry for your loss. I formed a group within my own city to prevent traffic deaths from happening here.

I agree with you; drivers need more sensors to alert them and stop them from killing people. However, computers can still fail - we need those sensors and maybe automatic brake application to prevent this sort of tragedy - I doubt if we want to trust a computer entirely for this sort of thing.

I think it's better to put more of the trucking freight back on rail. But that requires a lot of investment in various secondary rail lines.

That means public money. Something I don't see happening for a long time.

Why do you think that? What if the trucks were electric?

Trucks are very hard on the roadbed, especially given that road damage scales proportionally to the fourth power of the axle weight. For the same reason we don't ship all of our goods in tons of little cars, but use trucks with GVWR potentially many times greater, similar efficiency is pretty simple with trains in that they require less operators and prime movers to move more goods in the same amount of time.

Why not operate trucks like drones?

Why does the driver need to sit in the vehicle all the time? Have rotating drivers, no need for rest times of the machine enforced by the limitations of the human body operating it.

You can then gradually phase in auto-pilot modes on highways, so that one operator is responsible for multiple vehicles. Already happening in combat drone space.

As they're not transporting passengers it is an easier sell.

Semi-autonomous drones with remote pilots/drivers/captains should change the game in trucking, shipping and freight trains.

I think land-pirates will start taking on driverless vehicles when they're common and easy to find. A lot changes when harming a fellow human is no longer on the table.

Or, even better, Robot land-pirates.

There are many many things out there that you can steal without harming a fellow human now.

When robots are doing all the tedious jobs for humans, you either live for free or work for fun. Not much need for breaking the law (unless that's just fun).

"A convoy of self-driving trucks recently drove across Europe and arrived at the Port of Rotterdam"

Except it didn't. They were driven by drivers, only difference was software controlled the speed so they could drive closer together.

https://www.eutruckplatooning.com/News/495554.aspx

Driverless trucks have been operating in the mining industry in Australia for over four years. There are lots of long haul routes around the world that are almost entirely truck traffic where automation makes a lot of sense.

Video showing how the mining trucks operate: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s0RCSX95QmE (2012)

Maybe we will get hubs initially where humans make the small journey to their local hub A with a some standardized container load, then the robots take over loading it onto a robot road train as designated by the software for the long haul and another human picks up the consignment from hub B and takes it to the recipient? All the hubs are next to a highway.

Further fuel efficiencies will be had as the self-driving fleets adopt platooning technologies, like those from Peloton Technology, allowing trucks to draft behind one another in highway trains.

Great. Now imagine trying to merge onto a highway, only to be cutoff by a long train of trucks blindly following each other, inches apart.

I wrote about this recently: "Get ready for our first civil war against robots - here's what it will look like."

http://fourlightyears.blogspot.com.au/2016/03/get-ready-for-...

I agree. I think another difference with the trucker community (vs angry taxi drivers) is that they are "tight". They have their own social circles, unions, radio talk shows, cb radio, websites, newsletters, etc.

They already know how to organize, communicate, influence, etc. And then there's the union history, tactics, etc.

I'm thinking about India where politicians are clashing over train and road as we speak. For a country building new infrastructure, I wonder which one is more viable?

This has been a subject of long debate in India - autonomous cars are fairly useless in Indian cities. At the scale of transportation needed, nothing other than mass transportation (subways,etc) makes sense with last mile connectivity.

The same question exists for freight - should we construct trains or trucks? Taking into account offloading cost - which one is more efficient? I think people overestimate the complexity of shipping items with time guarantees. A hub and spoke model works great here - but what is doing the actual long haul?

And people don't understand the scale at which countries like India or China need to operate. The transportation needs of all of Europe are dwarfed by how much needs to be moved (quickly and economically ) in India.

This will work, until they realize that the drivers were responsible for doing a pre-trip inspection of the truck and trailer (looking for bad tires, burnt-out lights, worn air-hoses). The warehouse workers aren't going to do this, as their boss is going to be telling them "Just get the thing loaded and don't worry about that."

The result will be increasing accident rates, not only involving the trucks, but also cars near them (when a truck tire blows, the explosion is significant). Russian dash cam footage:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=prTiFClMM0A

I think it's a misunderstanding that self-driving trucks will not have drivers on board. Or am I being naive? See this article on Daimler's recent trial in Germany:

"While self-driving is the name of the game, Highway Pilot isn't about letting those behind the wheel plonk their feet on the dashboard and snooze their way to their destination. Daimler likens the system to the autopilot used in aviation, in that the driver must be prepared to take control at any time." http://www.gizmag.com/daimlers-production-autonomous-truck-d...

I thought driverless trucks were already a thing.

From [1]:

>Driverless trucks aren’t new to the resource industry. Mining giants Rio Tinto Group and BHP Billiton Ltd. use them at many of their operations and oilsands producers see driverless trucks as an obvious way to boost productivity.

I can definitely see it expanding, as automation has a tendency to do, and the idea that no technology will automate away more jobs is certainly interesting.

[1] http://business.financialpost.com/news/energy/how-canadas-oi...

Society will trust these automakers with autonomous vehicles? They can't even get their gas milage right.

- Mitsubishi Motors: We did false mileage tests since 1991

- Toyota Unintended Acceleration and the Big Bowl of “Spaghetti” Code

- Volkswagon emissions scandal

On and on and on...

Here's an article about the self-driving trucks that were referenced in the OP: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/apr/07/convoy-se...

They still had drivers in them, but the trucks were automated (it doesn't mention if the drivers had to override it at times or not).

I've always thought trucks should have their own lanes due to very different acceleration and lane changing patterns from other automobiles. I wonder if the emergence of driverless vehicles ends up leading to a separation of driverless and driver roads/lanes. At least early on. It could assuage safety concerns of mixing both modes, and one can imagine efficiency gains from chaining driverless vehicles in 'trains' on their own lane.

I really don't think this will happen in my lifetime. Could the whole robot drives car really evolve to replace the current state? I'm not sure that can happen over night.

The technology already exists. We're there.

Because of a single experiment in highly controlled environment :) Please come back to earth.

Because of self-driving vehicles currently safely operating in the US, some of the more impressive results various DARPA challenges have resulted in in recent years, and of course a single experiment in a highly controlled environment.

I never left. ;)

"Where drivers are restricted by law from driving more than 11 hours per day without taking an 8-hour break, a driverless truck can drive nearly 24 hours per day. That means the technology would effectively double the output of the U.S. transportation network at 25 percent of the cost."

This suggests each truck has one driver - the truck stops when the driver stops. Aren't there systems that let drivers pool/share trucks so the trucks can be on the road 24 hours a day?

I'm pretty sure the limiting factor for trucking throughput is drivers not trucks. That's why labor accounts for 75% of the cost of shipping.

I think thorstadt was talking about latency: just like express messengers switched horses in the pre-telegraph age, trucks could be handed from driver to driver to keep them running without mandated breaks.

With half-workday legs, a system like that could even allow many relay drivers to get home every day despite driving long-haul loads.

My gut feeling is that this could work in theory, but would never evolve in the framework of a free market economy (whereas a planned economy would tend do everything by train).

Yes, it's called "team driving".

This is one of those jobs that I can totally see being automated, and I really worry about being automated. If we automate the long haul truckers out of a job that is going to be a huge dislocation of workers. Further, what is their alternative job prospects? Even with free retraining do we have enough things for them to do?

I'm really interested in disruptive ideas that can soak up lots and lots of human labor at a living wage.

How about we automate rail traffic first. They are close...but the electronic system is still so far behind. They keep having to push back the requiremen.

I think there's less incentive for automating trains because of the cargo:driver ratio. The cost of the human at the helm is a much smaller portion of the cost of operating the railroad.

Totally agree, they only need a handful of people to operate a multi-mile long train.

Actually not true; the total number of people it requires to move a train, with all the other trains on the track, and then taking in every safety precaution, track monitoring, etc. The operation involves many people on a highly coordinated level...they don't have a lot of room for error with the number of trains on the small amount of track.

I was just saying it from a standpoint of that is has been mandated by the government (U.S.) and the date has had to be pushed back multiple times because the railroads are having a tough time implementing it. It's actually a much harder problem then you might initially think. The cost of the human is negligible; it's about the cost of the cargo, and not needing to stop unnecessarily to change the humans out.

Either way, if we can't accomplish automated long distance rail...automated trucking freight doesn't look to be that close.

"Last mile" delivery may perhaps be done with much smaller, mostly-autonomous vehicles (with remote operators getting involved only when needed).

See related article and thread in [1] - article also discusses some startup ideas for mostly-autonomous systems.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11565601

See also [2] for a description of the verification challenges of a fictitious (but informative) Amazon last-mile autonomous delivery vehicle.

[2] https://www.cs.york.ac.uk/ftpdir/reports/2015/YCS/496/YCS-20...

The introduction of tractors and machinery into farming would have caused a similar amount of job loss (if not more?). I really feel for all of the people and communities that will be affected by the loss of trucking jobs, but in 100 years, we're unlikely to look back and say "I wish we kept human truckers", just like no-one says "I wish we never introduced tractors".

It is the cotton mill workers who are famous for their dislike of technology taking their jobs:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luddite

no-one says "I wish we never introduced tractors"

The Amish?

Only some of them: http://www.nytimes.com/1995/04/16/us/some-amish-to-use-tract...

My father is a truck driver; He says he's not worried. There's too much other stuff to consider before robots replace him. Like the maintenance that needs to be done during the trip. That can't be automated.

This might be good for short one day jaunts, but multiple day trips cross country are another story entirely.

24 hour trucking is already possible. You just need two drivers. My sister was a 24 hour long haul trucker for a while, running routes from Virginia to Seattle nonstop with a partner driver. They'd work nonstop for three weeks, then take a week or two break, which is actually a pretty good schedule in some ways.

One would think that ships would be the first to be automated but alas they are not.. why? theft. Would you trust your driverless truck not to get hacked and stolen? would you trust sensitive and expensive equipment to be moved by driverless trucks? There's still a long way to go.

That ignores the economic factors. Much like trains, cargo ships haul a huge amount of cargo while being manned by a small crew. Thus the labor cost as a percentage of total cargo haul cost is quite low. A truck, though, requires a human driver to move a single cargo container any distance, so there's a much bigger economic incentive to replace the driver with a computer.

You still need security for these trains of trucks.

People can just "security guard" the trucks. Sleep, play video games, whatever.

Get all the benefits of safety, constant movement, better efficiency, maintain SOME of the jobs. Require mechanic training to make it a skilled job, etc.

Where will an autonomous truck (AT) refuel? On US highways, fuel stations are not "full service", the driver is expected to operate the fuel filling and pay. So will some stations provide attendants to fuel ATs?

If there is resentment against the ATs -- and that is just about a certainty -- there will be cases of resentful attendants shorting the fuel delivery, or even sabotaging trucks (water/sugar in the tank).

So, maybe the trucking companies hire min-wage attendants to work the pumps at designated stations along the routes. The stations that permit AT refueling would be obvious targets for Luddite retaliation.

Actually, the ATs themselves would be pretty obvious targets for vandalism. They would be easy to identify -- driving at 45mph in platoons, as described in the article -- and unprotected along the vast open stretches of US interstate highways. I would expect many, many ATs would arrive at their destinations with rifle bullet holes in them.

Luddite terrorists is already a problem we are facing.

http://techcrunch.com/2015/06/25/french-anti-uber-protest-tu...

http://techcrunch.com/2015/10/01/the-fight-against-uber-is-g...

I don't think protecting trucks from terrorists is a major issue - providing security is just a minor added cost, as is armoring the trucks.

The real issue is that for the most part governments seem to be siding with the terrorists rather than shutting them down.

It doesn't require any kind of criminal activity to disrupt the trucking industry. Just lay off the truckers, and the drop in consumer demand will take care of the industry.

The best way for this to play out is for drivers to buy their own automated rigs and work as contractors. Regulations would need to be updated to allow "drivers" to log the hours spent sleeping while the truck was moving.

I'm starting to think we should tax the value made out of automation.

I feel like it's the only way to redistribute the wealth accumulated by the few actors that will control these giant automated industries.

Let's not kill an industry before it even begins.

Wouldn't it be much easier to assure security on roads if every car had to have 50 USD short-range (500 m is enough) radio transmitter that sends its velocity and position (from GPS).

It's obviously possible techincaly (see cheap tablets), and from law POV (see seat belts requirement).

It would be useful (the device can have cheap black and white lcd screen and show "radar"-like view with cars ahead and behind).

It would also increase security even if there are no automated cars (overtaking tall cars will be much easier for one thing). Of course - if some cars don't use it - it's actaully decreasing security, so there needs to be adjustment period.

And when these things are in place - automated cars are much easier problem.

Would it require to have a backup device? Would cyclists and pedestrians have to have it as well?

Backups - yes I guess. It's cheap so why not.

Pedestrians and cyclists would surely protest.

Can someone explain why we're supposedly getting driverless cars and trucks yet the simplistic task of ordering food isn't automated? Why does McDonald's have order takers?

Upselling? Why did several fuel stations pull out their pay-at-pump systems and force you to go into the store to pay -- so they can sell you more stuff you didn't originally intend to by (that they also make better margin on).

McDonalds already has automated order takers around here. There are still humans, but so will there still be manned trucks, just fewer.

I wonder what the net effect will be on truck brokerage? Since "75% of cost is labor" I'm sure revenue will be impacted but not margin.

navigating high-grade descents are the wrinkle - truck air brakes seem very finicky. But I think there's no reason why long, sparse, flat freeway sections could not be run by automated cabs relatively soon, for example CA-I5 from Tejon Ranch to Stockton, or the I80 between Chicago outskirts and somewhere in Wyoming.

Presumably we don't spend $10k/trunk on better brakes because humans can deal without them. But if that was what's needed to make self-driving work, the economics could support it. Electric regenerative breaking would do nicely.

Truck air brakes are finicky because they are mechanically designed to distribute brake pressure evenly across the wheels in response to one input -- pressure from the driver's foot on the brake pedal. An automated cab could communicate more information: desired speed, tolerance, required stopping distance, and general vehicle stability info, and a microcontroller at each wheel could combine that with sensor info about road conditions and temperature at that wheel to determine how much brake to apply and where -- all with faster reaction times than a human driver would be capable of.

The old technique was, at a wheel, hit the brakes really hard to stop the wheel rotating as fast as possible, hopefully less than one second, and then fully release the brake. Then the stopped wheel starts sliding and, then, starts rotating again, while still sliding some, until it is full rotating again, and then hit the brakes again. So, the technique is automatically sensitive to load, tread on the tires, traction on the road, etc. So, don't want all the wheels stopped at the same time. Then on an 18 wheel truck, should still be able to maintain directional control.

Of course, there is a lot that could be done, but most of that has one thing in common -- money, for the engineering, manufacturing, original purchase, in-service monitoring, problem detection, problem diagnosis, and repair. Money.

Sure a single air brake is finicky, but 8 hubs with individually controlled regenerative brakes? Sounds like a perfect job for a computer.

I think one thing people don't understand is that if truck drivers are out of the equation, a huge amount of cargo will go back to rail. Roadways will clean up nicely. And if rail becomes more efficient, we might start building more rail. And put more passenger trains on said rail. That would empty out the roads even more.

The trucks will still be there, just without their drivers.

This is bad for the 99.998% .

According to my co workers it won't happen or be a problem.

Because!

The level of deny is really... Annoying..

Because lawyers.

We need to create a new highway system for driverless cars/vans/trucks/etc. The current road infrastructure with its potholes, tolls, traffic congestion is not ideal. They need to conceive something similar to HOV lanes in order for this to move forward.

lol - like politicians give a damn about infrastructure for living human beings that suffer every day on broken roads and dangerous bridges

they'll get right on that

How did we ever get to HOV lanes?

Taken to the extreme, a separate network for platooned long haul transport could even be electrified, combining 90% of the relative advantage of railroad over conventional road with more than 100% of the benefits of conventional road over railroad.

Musk allegedly talked about automated Buses in Norway not long ago.

Are any startups working on the last mile of autonomous logistics?

There are a few:

- Dispatch [1]

- Starships [2]

- And at least one stealth mode company

[1] http://techcrunch.com/2016/04/06/self-driving-delivery-vehic...

[2] https://www.starship.xyz/concept/

Interesting, not exactly the last mile I was imagining; meaning the last mile from long haul to local distribution hubs.

Code generation and Computer Aided Software Engineering is also "coming" and will make the lowly developer and programmer obsolete.

Too bad that the 80 / 20 split does not quite work for things people pay for and rely on.

That's because we're trying to do more. If we were just trying to solve the same old problems as in 1970, then we wouldn't need as many programmers as we have now.

Once trucks can drive autonomously, once it's a solved problem, what more is there to do within that vertical?

Here come the bevy of calls for basic income..

Driverless container carriers, traveling at medium speeds across the country, in groups, with only last mile labor required...sounds like, Trains?

Sure, except that the Interstate + National Highway System alone have more total millage than the US railroad system.

Why are we not seeing driver-less trains?

there are driverless trains at lots of airports, but i think the reason they dont appear elsewhere is that the cost savings wouldnt be as great. a single train conductor is managing a massive vehicle - sometimes two orders of magnitude more than a truck. the labor component with trains is significantly lower than in trucking. i think the same is true for ships. taxis are at the other end of the spectrum, where labor is a very large part of the cost structure.

We are. We have our very own driver-less light rail in Vancouver: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SkyTrain_(Vancouver)

As in freight trains?

Because freight trains have problems that need to be solved in the middle of nowhere.

For example, a car shell's a wheel and it needs to be cut out to a siding in the middle of Utah in the middle of winter. Communication is limited to say the least.

The siding is rarely used and is covered with snow and ice. The switch is a manual switch and is jammed with ice.

A human can deal with getting these issues, cut out the defective car, put the train back together and proceed.

How does a driverless freight train deal with this?

The point here is that exceptions to normal behavior happen all the time. Most of the time, the human pulls to a siding, walks the train and a half-hour/45mins later the train is rolling again.

Great just what everybody wants. A mile-long platooning heard of driverless trucks doing 45 in the middle lane =P

+ AI is coming and it's going to automate millions of jobs (lawyers, call center, ...)

Good riddance. Just because a job exists doesn't mean it's a fair contract or even beneficial to the employee. If you drive cross-country and break down your hourly rate according to how many hours you spend tied to your load, it only comes out to be slightly more than minimum wage, if even that. I know a guy who has spent an entire week, 24/7, stranded across the country and he only received $200 for it from his company. That's less than $2 / hr. A pizza delivery guy can make more than that just in tips. I'm not crying for the trucking industry.

So many comments here are in the form of "People won't trust autonomous vehicles." Well I'm people, and I trust them. And it's for one simple reason: Whatever bugs they have can be fixed for every autonomous car on the road at the same time. That just can't be said for human beings. Every one of us has to learn how to idle icy roads, fog and other hazards individually, with wildly varying results. A computer program does it once, and is constantly getting feedback from the millions of cars on the road all the time.

Sure, people want someone to blame for accidents. And people might not like the idea of cars without drivers, or worry about contrived "Does the car kill the driver or the pedestrian" situations. But at the end of the day, statistics is overwhelmingly on the side of driverless cars. Saying "Yes, but people aren't reasonable enough to see that" isn't helpful. The question is, how quickly can we get people to do what's best after the technology has been perfected?

You overstate what data is available. What self-driving cars are currently operating in icy/snowy/rainy conditions on poorly maintained roads that aren't radar-mapped to the inch?

In any case, avoiding hitting people and other cars is the easy part of building self-driving vehicles. Navigating in ever-changing uncertain road conditions reliably is a different problem altogether.

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