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Comment by btbuildem | Hacker News Reader

Self-driving trucks will have a significant impact on North-American workforce. Something like 6% ppl in NA are employed in the trucking industry.

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There are knock-on / 2nd order effects in other industries, as well. E.g. if robotic trucks lower the cost of over-the-road shipping by removing a big cost component (the driver), then it might affect the breakeven point at which rail shipping becomes more desirable than OTR (currently around 500 miles for most types of freight). And if taking the human drivers out lets you run trucks nonstop for longer, overall cargo velocity could increase, which makes various types of just-in-time logistics easier. It'll be interesting to see how it all shakes out.

Something I never hear when discussing automated trucks is the 10% of truckers that are owner-operators. Won't they just slap automation onto their trucks, and continue to own (but no longer operate)?

Won't displaced truck drivers become motivated to be owners themselves? It doesn't seem as bleak as everyone makes out. I don't really think most big companies want to own and maintain their own fleets of trucks.

Economies of scale seem like a large win, here. If you own a thousand trucks, your per-truck maintenance costs are less than if you own one truck. Companies that don't want to own and maintain a fleet of trucks will outsource to those who do, but it's simpler to deal with one external entity that can supply trucking than ten or a hundred such entities.

That’s where cooperatives could come in – what if the owner-operating truckers would just start a cooperative and own the fleet together?

Where are they going to get the money to become owners if they don't have a job anymore, but still have to support their family?

I'm not sure why you're being down-voted. People driving their own truck for a living are probably not swimming in capital, and outfitting a truck with self-driving capabilities (or buying a new truck) is likely to be expensive. Furthermore, they are more likely to lose out to bigger players who can aggregate inevitable software/sensor upgrade/repair costs across an entire fleet.

The idea that everything will work out because working people can just become capital owners ignores the obvious fact that working people work precisely because they don't have capital.

I'm being downvoted because people don't want to think of these things, or that access to capital is largely based on luck. They want to believe in a Just World, which means that their success was all due to their hard work, and if these people can't have that level of success, then it's clearly because they didn't work hard enough.

Most "owner" operators are running equipment that the bank still has the title on. Not exactly swimming with liquid cash to perform upgrades with.

That is the scary part. If you include other dependent jobs like service industries (hospitality/truck repair etc) related to trucking/transport it might be north of 10%.

IMO self-driving trucks won't displace humans behind the wheel. Trucks on public roads will be self-driving in the same way that planes are self-flying.

> IMO self-driving trucks won't displace humans behind the wheel. Trucks on public roads will be self-driving in the same way that planes are self-flying.

Not this year. Not next year. But they will.

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