Comment by rezashirazian | Hacker News Reader

Comment by rezashirazian | Hacker News Reader

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Your assertion that moving freight must come first, to me, has no apparent logic behind it.

Sure it does. It is the easier problem, and it makes sense to assume the easier problem will be solved before the hard one.

Self driving cars that move about long stretches of interstate highways with little to no interactions with intersections, pedestrians or complicated traffic patterns is a far easier problem than driving in densely populated urban areas.

If you think about it, taxi cab drivers barely need any qualifications to drive a cab. Truckers need more, almost as if trucking is a more demanding type of driving. By that alone, I feel like it's fairly apparent which would be easier to replicate on silicon.

Trucking is a far more demanding job than driving a cab, but that is only true for humans. What makes trucking demanding is long, rigorous driving schedules that require high degree of driving stamina. As it turns out computers have very high stamina and are very good at doing long rigorous activities without suffering any fatigue. This is as opposed to driving a cab where the difficulty of the job is not so much in the rigor of the job but more in what humans do better than computers. Which is mainly dealing with other people, understanding patterns and learning from past experiences.

Freight generally needs to be handle all of the problems that a cab does (turning, stoplights, other cars, getting from point A to point B, etc.), mostly because pretty much all freight trucks need to go through a town/city at some point.

Additionally, they need to be able to drive at night in areas without much lighting, they need to drive for hours and hours on end, instead of just 5-45minutes, etc. Finally, they are 40+ feet long (instead of being around 15 feet long) and have much less maneuverability and a much longer stopping distance/time.

Sounds like a harder problem to me.

The economic win (and comparatively easy problem) is to have trucks self drive on the interstate, stopping on the outskirts of whatever city or town is the destination to pick up a human driver who will take care of the "last mile".

Set up a distribution center on I90 30 miles outside Chicago (e.g. Gary Indiana) set up a distribution center on I80 30 miles outside New York (e.g. Paterson NJ). Use human drivers for the last 30 miles, and automation to drive the rest. The route doesn't go through any heavily trafficked areas except Gary and Cleveland, which you could avoid by starting the route at 9pm for a 9am arrival with travel through Cleveland occurring at 2am. I'd say that with current technology we could probably do this in less than a year. Since trucks cost about 150k new and truck drivers can't drive 12 hours straight, the economics of full automation are much easier to justify.

Having driven back and forth from Chicago to New York a couple of times, I would welcome autonomous trucks driving throughout the night, especially if they strictly adhere to the right lane at a moderate, passable speed. Once night falls, truckers take over the road, and they typically like to go at or slightly above speed limit, making it less of a cozy environment for regular sedan drivers.

> they need to drive for hours and hours on end, instead of just 5-45minutes If you assume that whatever vehicle considered is being driven near full-duty-cycle, the total amount of time is roughly conserved (perhaps autonomous vehicles will get 2x-3x utilization per day, for better or worse)

You could create a system, potentially using truck stops or in some way your own infrastructure, which is a docking point for autonomous vehicles. At these locations, human drivers pick up and drop off the otherwise autonomous vehicles, allowing humans to take the burden of the difficult portion of driving, while computers handle the boring part of driving. Of course, you would have to place similar stops every (80% of a tank of gas, measured in distance), as well for refueling. Naturally, this idea has a dozen holes at the moment and would need to be improved to be viable.

> Freight generally needs to be handle all of the problems that a cab does (turning, stoplights, other cars, getting from point A to point B, etc.), mostly because pretty much all freight trucks need to go through a town/city at some point.

Freight consists of both long and short haul, with different needs and approaches. Your point applies to the "last mile" delivery phase, which may or may not be a significant part of the operation.

In fact, many big stores like Walmart, Costco, Aldi, and the like are placed pretty close to an interstate exit. I would guess that this allows significant reduction in costs, as the operators don't need to switch from their optimized long haul vehicles (big trailers, etc) to more maneuvarable, less efficient (per unit weight of goods) trucks for the last mile stage.

There is plenty of freight that is carried on highways over long distances with low traffic volumes, in a similar role to rail freight.

> Additionally, they need to be able to drive at night in areas without much lighting,

During winter at higher latitudes a lot of driving is at night. As for lighting, plenty of city streets are dark and have poor lighting at night.

> they need to drive for hours and hours on end, instead of just 5-45minutes, etc.

So? Fatigue is something that affects human drivers. There should be no serious differences for an autonomous vehicle driving 10 30 minute trips and one 5 hour one, modulo start and stop. In fact, if anything, longer duration trips tend to involve a greater fraction of highway usage that does not require significant brake usage, turning, etc.

> Finally, they are 40+ feet long (instead of being around 15 feet long) and have much less maneuverability and a much longer stopping distance/time.

I agree with this.

As long as they share the road with other vehicles it does not sound very practical.Heavy vehicles have their unique handling and failure patterns that I doubt are well suited to automation at the moment.

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