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Poorly maintained autopilots would still be safer than poorly maintained drivers.

But at least if it's a poorly maintained driver the company can blame the driver and not change their practices.

They can still use the owner-operator model if they want to, and have the vehicles owned by a different entity than the freight company.

But in all seriousness, although I understand that people like to out-cynic each other, over the road trucks seem to be pretty well-maintained. Whether that's the result of safety regulations and enforcement or simple economics (a broken-down truck is not a moneymaking truck) is left as an exercise to the reader, but either way you do not see a lot of barely-making-it or broken-down commercial OTR trucks on the road. That level of poor maintenance is generally the province of private vehicles.

I'd hope a poorly maintained automated truck which crashes would result in extremely heavy fines and lawsuits, to the point where it could seriously threaten to put a trucking company out of business. Make it uneconomical not to maintain the trucks.

Drivers maintain themselves, so this is pretty much purely maintained drivers vs. little-to-not maintained autopilots.

That said, I agree there's plenty of incentives for the trucking companies to go the autopilot route.

>Drivers maintain themselves

Fatigue and sleep deprivation are chronic problems in the trucking industry. Clearly, many drivers are unable or unwilling to maintain themselves.

https://www.nytimes.com/2014/06/17/business/truckers-resist-...

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/congress-made-trucking-d...

I agree. My point being, trucking companies don't have to maintain drivers, they push this onto drivers themselves. So if they simply s/driver/autopilot/, they'll have to start maintaining.

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