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Comment by ilamont | Hacker News Reader

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...

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"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?

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.

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.

> 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.

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.

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.

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."

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