You get paid to train your replacements. If you don't train them, someone else will. It's a no win for them. They don't have pull or unions that commuter train operators have so it's not like they'll get to ride along and supervise the autonomous vehicle, in the long term. Instead, there may be an ops center somewhere in TX where operators intervene remotely when an irregular operating pattern pops up. Those will be fewer operators.
Wages are a trucking firm's biggest expense. Why would a firm go out and buy a bunch of expensive self-driving trucks, so that they could pay the same number of people the same wages.
Halving the cost of transporting goods will not double the demand for transporting goods. Consumer budgets are fixed, and transportation is a very small fraction of the price of goods that consumers buy.
Dropping the cost of transport by 30%, because you only need to employ half the truckers, will not double demand. Unlike the before-after world of trucking, air travel, container shipping, etc, there isn't a mountain of businesses that suddenly become viable when long-haul costs get slashed by a third.
What fraction of the economy do they make up?
What if efficiency gains are not 2x, but 10x? What if you'll only need to employ one trucker to do the job of 10? Do you think demand for trucking will go up 10x? This isn't a web framework.
Trucking costs are built into most products. My grocery store sells apples from California. If the cost of trucking them to me goes down, those apples will decrease in cost and they will potentially sell more apples.
Automation of driving is all about making people with lots of capital richer. Efficiency is just the dream -- this stuff will dramatically increase costs of shipping as capacity is constrained.
For example, I just requested quotes for waterjetting some stuff today. If LTL shipping were cheap enough to I'd look outside the high CoL sphincter of the country where I happen to reside but instead I'm stuck paying a premium because the local cost of everything is high. There's also a cylinder head in my garage for a 60s Ford I'd like to give to someone who needs it but nobody needs it bad enough to pay for me to ship it across the country.
At the higher volume levels similar stuff happens. A construction company may source steel from farther away to undercut it's competition. You can bet the logistics people at Walmart (and anyone else with a big fleet) are drooling over all the optimizations they could implement if trucks could run like call centers.
This is the only point I seek to make.
If salaries are 60% of the cost of shipping, and self-driving trucks make drivers twice as productive, costs will drop 30%.
This will bring a demand increase of less then 30%. Let's say 15%.
... Doing the math, it looks like 42% of truckers just lost their jobs. But at least they can buy more apples with the money they no longer have.
The bigger the productivity gain, the worse it will look for them.
Lots of products have price elasticity of greater than 1.
Shipping seems like a very elastic industry. If anything, demand would increase by more than 1% for every 1% decrease in cost.
This is because shipping costs if shipping costs are low enough, then you can build something for cheap somewhere else and then ship stuff across the country to high cost of living locations.
YOU wouldn't ship stuff more, but industry would.
IE imagine if something costs 1/3 if it is made in China.
If shipping costs are more then you save, then nobody would ship it. But if shipping costs go down, now you can easy get those cost benefits of across world or across country manufacturing.
Possibly since not all my cars are electric yet.
You can also see this happening for other resources
On the other hand, if the price of that ticket dropped from $400 to $360, we wouldn't see a 10% increase in passenger volume. The set of people who will fly somewhere for $360, but won't for $400 is tiny.
I posit that trucking is in the latter, rather then the former category. It's already cheap.
I disagree. Given companies like Amazon, it is currently not cheap enough. I would argue that it will take longer before it's 'cheap'. The appetite for 'free shipping' is still growing and it's very different from the demand for airplane tickets. Kind of like with your electricity example, you're missing parts of the big picture.
But what percentage do trucking expenses make, of their overall sales receipts?
Will their sales double if the cost of trucking drops by a third?
Yes I could be wrong but I feel further lowering the costs of long distance trucking would help increase eccomerce sales for retailers which in turn would further increase demand for it
Cost stay the same, but trucking capacity triples.
Yes wages are the biggest expense but I think the big pushed for self-driving trucks is 1) Reduced liability 2) Trucks can be operating nearly 24hrs a day. 3) Greater fuel efficiency.
So sure some will lose their jobs but I think half is overly pessimistic.
In comparison to a computer programmer, yes. In comparison to the nationwide average, no. https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&c...
I can immediately think of one (retired) truck driver I know who comfortably raised a family of 6 on a single salary.
https://www.usatoday.com/pages/interactives/news/rigged-forc...
Most of those roles managing bullshit at the head end will go away as the robot fleets consolidate and the current carriers die off. Customers will have to take or leave on whatever terms the carrier demands -- just like the old railroad days.
There is little basis to declare human drivers 'fundamentally unsafe' given the proportion of accidents pales in comparison to the gigantic volume of vehicles on roads worldwide over varied road and traffic conditions.
It can be speculated automated vehicles may require constraints on roads in which case it becomes apples to oranges. And human drivers equipped with the kind of technology and sensors on self driven cars would be much safer.
While computers lack human weaknesses, they bring a slew of new ones. Computers have no situational awareness, no context, are vulnerable to hacking, respond in predetermined ways which can be manipulated or abused, etc.
There just is not enough evidence to make the claim that ubiquitous autonomous cars will be any safer than human drivers on shared roads. There are many known unknowns and who knows how many unknown unknowns left to discover and mitigate with this tech.
https://techcrunch.com/2017/03/17/laying-a-trap-for-self-dri...
Today that is true. I am speculating when I say that autonomous vehicles will be safer than humans drivers. There is enough effort going into developing them that we will soon have that data though.
Google's data is already showing promise that the autonomous car is likely to be safer, but they don't have enough miles to be significant.
> There is little basis to declare human drivers 'fundamentally unsafe' given the proportion of accidents pales in comparison to the gigantic volume of vehicles on roads worldwide over varied road and traffic conditions.
10.6 deaths per 100,000 people is enough for me to call humans fundamentally unsafe. (though cancer and other medical conditions are bigger)
Since humans cannot be equipped with the sensors a computer can (ie eyes on the back of your head) it isn't fair to compare the as if situation.
You don't think so? Seems like an unmanned truck would be a great target for theft.
That's true, but the problem is which one? Most of them are dry vans that you don't know what's inside, and/or not worth the risk. My loaded trailer was once opened and they didn't touch the merchandise. The only loss was the lock.
Just go on an open stretch of road in the country side with a firearm and open fire through the truck windows. A truck driver isn't going to be able to defend themselves.
You might argue that this doesn't happen because criminals are afraid of getting caught by the police and sent to jail.
But, if anything, the risks would be even greater for a self driving truck that has dozens of always on cameras recording, GPS tracking, and an emergency police call system.
So by the time a truck is stopped, realizes a robbery is in progress, contacts command, who assesses if it's a real event, who contact local police, who send a cruiser to check investigate. They thiefs could have gotten away with quite a lot.
Btw, a grand theft rarely rises to immediate action. City PD have bigger concerns, most of the Midwest is sparsely populated. That leaves the bored suburb PD who'll be in the most responsive.
2 aspects
1) If drivers are at such danger that they do more than contact police then the liability would require they have trained security with them.
2) Drivers themselves are a major security vulnerability, how susceptible is a driver to being paid off by a "pirate". [and there was a recent article in Outside about how healthy nuts go through a lot of truck theft]
I would compare it to banks. ATMs are still a target of theft but it's much harder to crack them compared to robbing a bank where tellers have access to cash. The same will be true for trucks. There will be some thefts that are more sophisticated (and successful) but the overall rate will go down.
Semi-autonomous driving of trucks could change the job for the better. It would cost a lot of jobs but then again, few people become truck drivers because they love being on the road for days. For most it's a job and they'd be happy to take another one. And there is currently little evidence that no new jobs would come up as they always have for past disruptions.