Will automation put an end to the American trucker? | Hacker News Reader

Will automation put an end to the American trucker?

theguardian.com

137 pointsranit178 comments

The approach that Starsky (http://starsky.io/) is taking seems to be a promising one. They employ truck drivers as remote pilots for the "first and last mile", i.e. the local roads and loading dock work that autonomous vehicles struggle with most. Other advantages include lower fuel costs (driving slower because AVs aren't subject to operator-hour limits) and probably also lower labor costs (you don't need to pay truckers as much if the job is safe and nearby to home).

If the Starsky model ends up dominating, this could all add up to a case where the price of truck transportation drops so much that demand for truck drivers actually increases, possibly even counterbalancing the pressure of individual truckers being able to manage multiple vehicles at once. This would be an example of the "Jevons Effect" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox

> this could all add up to a case where the price of truck transportation drops so much that demand for truck drivers actually increases

The problem is that local drivers average about half the pay ($30-40k) vs long-haul drivers ($70-80k). Even if there is more demand for local drivers it likely won't offset the wages lost.

There are a lot of unknowns here. The factors putting downward pressure on trucker salaries are:

- Remote operation of trucks is an easier lifestyle, so more people would be willing to take the job, driving down salaries

- Fewer human truckers are needed per truck on the road, so for a given level of trucking activity, fewer jobs exist

Some potential countervailing factors:

- Price of trucking plummets, potentially jacking up demand (Jevons Paradox) depending on price elasticity of truck transportation

- Managing multiple vehicles may end up being more cognitively challenging than driving a single truck, reducing the pool of available workers and driving up salaries

The values of these parameters (and how they change over time) will be crucial to determining the net impact to trucker salaries and employment numbers. My intuition is that salaries will go down dramatically, employment numbers will go down modestly, and overall trucking activity will expand.

> Managing multiple vehicles may end up being more cognitively challenging than driving a single truck, reducing the pool of available workers and driving up salaries

Tangential to this point: If this mode of truck operation becomes prevalent, I could potentially see a path where warehouses/loading docks get employees certified (a la forklift truck certifications) to operate the truck on premises to handle the "last mile" (i.e. on-site) operations. Now you've completely decimated the number of trucker jobs.

I think you're drastically underestimating the difficulty involved in manuevering an eighteen wheeler around the premises of a typical business. There's no way it would be cost effective to train people for that so that they can spend most of their time doing something else.

The wages aren't "lost", the "saved" money will still be paid to somebody to do something.

Profits kept by shareholders.

and spent by them as well.

Maybe. Depends on tax law at the time. Going to need social safety net money, we might as well tax automation.

Our tax code needs reform, but taxing gains in productivity is a perverse incentive.

> but taxing gains in productivity is a perverse incentive.

Not at all. The end goal should not be productivity onto itself. If those gains are being scooped up by a sliver of the population, we change the rules to benefit all. One person, one vote.

As automation automates away more jobs, the cohort of people without jobs grows, forcing regulations (through democracy) to change to move towards a citizen's dividend funded by a tax on automation. The system will reach equilibrium, or there will be a revolution.

If you don't want your automation lifting the tide of all boats, someone else will come along and build it.

That mindset only works without the reality of globalization.

Events like Brexit and Donald Trump are only the start. If economic conditions gets worse for the disadvantaged, it gets worse for everyone.

Clearly, democracy can override your usual globalization proponents (see: "Okay, The Trans Pacific Partnership Is Dead. What was it?" | https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/monkey-cage/wp/2017/01/2...)

Spent by them in other countries, where they patriotically only spend it locally.

That’s the problem of the modern globalized world, all the profits end up spent in the US.

Rich people spend much less of their money on stuff than poor people do. Another thousand to a millionaire goes on the pile. Another thousand to a single mom goes on kids' shoes and car repairs.

Nobody throws their money into a pile.

Rich people predominantly invest their money which is still paying people to perform work, just like repairing shoes and cars.

Yes. They invest it. Not spend it as you claimed above.

And while both keep money moving, they have very different effects on the spender/investor.

Yes, "spent" was the wrong word.

All I'm saying is that the money will be moving, and still providing employment.

Shareholders aren’t all ‘rich people’ - pension funds, insurance funds, and regular old retiremt funds all hold a lot of stock.

People who have no hope of ever retiring from their low wage job that they live in fear of losing to automation might count anyone with a pension plan/retirement fund access (and even insurance) as rich.

They're lost to those who would have earned them.

Typically the gains would be shared through lower prices to customers and higher profits. Lower costs might also increase demand for services and goods, growing the industry and increasing employment elsewhere in companies, though that latter is likely to be a relatively small effect.

Its not about lower costs or growing the industry.

If we save $1 billion dollars in automating one industry, we are just going to spend that $1 billion dollars elsewhere, growing some other industry.

That's right, it frees up $1bn for other uses. This is why automation, ever since the industrial revolution, hasn't lead to persistent mass unemployment. The capital freed up by more efficient industry was used to create new industries and jobs that didn't even exist before. There have been some painful adjustments, but the more flexible an economy is the more rapidly it adjusts. Historically this has been a US strength.

Even so, it will devastate the economies of the places they drive through.

Truck stops, motels, independent semi repair shops, CB radio and accessories, probably more I'm missing. Oh, yeah, the final death knell for DVD porn.

I really don't see why autonomous vehicles couldn't handle the first/last miles soon after mastering the open road. I think only regulation would made this a requirement.

For trucks that don't follow the same routes every day (e.g. FedEx/UPS/etc.), even humans frequently have a hard time getting it right. "Oh, no, it's the other side of that bridge that's only for light vehicles. Yes, you'll have to drive around for two miles in heavy traffic to get here. No, it's the entrance on the back facing the tall green building." Etc...

Until AI for vehicles massively increases, humans are going to be better at navigating the truck through smaller roads, abiding by weight restrictions that may not already be known about, having local knowledge of the area that AI might not have. Every delivery location is going to be a little different so you would need a really general AI to understand how to just get the truck up to the loading dock (if you are that lucky).

The long haul portion of the journey is much more suited to the AI of today, cars already have enough tech to get this done with pretty good results.

> Every delivery location is going to be a little different so you would need a really general AI to understand how to just get the truck up to the loading dock (if you are that lucky).

or, as someone with a loading dock, i'd be willing to pay to have someone come out with a bunch of lidar gear and whatever to model up my dock and surrounding area, so i could just provide a big data blob about my dock to the shipping companies, and have their AI trucks pull in correctly every time.

as opposed to worrying about the days when some new guy (with his local knowledge and general intelligence) shows up to deliver and comes in the wrong way and gets stuck for 2 hours.

(there's a new job for you right there, folks, since the model will probably need to be updated every year or two as the shipping companies change their AIs, and changes are made to the surrounding buildings.)

I expect many regular delivery end points will get set up with autonomous vehicle standardised parking bays, with programmed routes in and out added to the AI mapping databases. If you don’t have one of those, you’ll need to pay a premium for driver operated delivery or remote driver guidance.

One word - teamsters.

The long haul stuff should go on rails anyway. It's very wasteful to run it on the interstates. The majority of the fatigue damage to the highways comes from trucks, then there's all the rubber dust, fuel inefficiency, etc.

The trailers should just be picked up and dropped on flatcars, and trucks used for intracity last mile stuff.

This comment invariably pops up in these threads; If it was going to, it already would have.. It's too late now.

Would it have been a better solution? Probably, but the investment required (laying down the rails, land buyouts, copious use of emanate domain, political greasing of the wheels, etc...) has always been prohibitive. The gains would be shared between many disparate groups that would need to fund this together, taking years to decades for any ROI - certainly a longer time-frame than most publicly traded, quarterly measured, corporations can afford. At the least this would have required some government subsidization.

With driver-less tech around the corner, returns on this investment for any one company become even more dubious, and thus make it less likely to happen. I think the parent comment here will always get some up-votes, but that is as far as I see this going anymore. Maybe it'd go farther if we threw in words like 'Hyperloop' ;)

The rails are already there. When I drive down I5, you can see them.

The reason this sorry state of affairs exists is because truck traffic is heavily subsidized (highways paid for with taxes) whereas rail traffic is heavily taxed (and the rail companies have to pay for the tracks).

It could be improved by increasing weight taxes on trucks, and using the proceeds to subsidize intercity tracks.

Yeah the impact on roads increases with the fourth power of vehicle weight. Why doesn't the tax?

Truck industry lobbying.

There's a lot to this. But it's not just about lobbying, it's also about unions and votes. The American auto dealerships likewise have a lot of what's described as "lobbying power" when really it's more that they have a lot of people that want to see politicians protect them.

Many trucks in the US have a bumper sticker that says, "Without trucks, America stops." Teamster strikes, like the León Vilarín teamster strike in October 1972 in Chile, are a disaster for any country and create national emergencies.

I read years ago that truck loaded to the legal weight limit causes 9,000 times as much fatigue damage as a car. And lots of trucks are overloaded.

At least trucks are carrying something we all need, unlike cars.

Even in France, with paying interstate (called autoroute here) and subsidized rail (it was a state monopole until recently), most of transport of goods is by truck.

I think it's mostly a last mile problem (you'll need big trucks to carry from the station), compounded by the fact that most of the train station of cities and I don't think they is a lot of dedicated cargo train station. Also you do not control part of the schedule: you are dependent on the departure/arrival time of trains. And don't forget the strikes...

I believe SNCF was also know for loosing freight a few years ago. Might have improved these days since I assume most cars must have some sort of GPS. Timing was another problem since freight had to yield priority to passenger traffic, which is pretty dominant in France.

Europe generally prioritises passenger transport over freight transport, but there are rail freight terminals -- probably not anywhere you're likely to visit (example [1])

Rail traffic is allocated on a timetable, for both passenger and goods trains. The time and route is called a "path" in British English, and reserving one costs money.

A power station might have a daily path from a port to their power plant, as they can reliably use all the coal.

Rail freight companies book many paths between freight terminals, container ports and so on and mix together goods from many customers to run on trains on these paths. Therefore, the timings are reliable, potentially more reliable than by road, but the flexibility is less.

If there aren't any goods to move, the company doesn't need to use the path. (I used to live close to a railway line used to transfer trains containing nuclear waste. The reprocessing plant had a path to run a train every day, but only used it every couple of weeks -- presumably, they don't like leaving the waste at the power station any longer than necessary.)

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rail_freight_in_Great_Britain#...

At least in the United States, this is incorrect. Long haul trucking is expensive compared to shipping things via the rails. The reason things end up being shipped via truck is that its faster, plain and simple. Shipping via rail car is slow and has no guaranteed arrival date. Or should I say, dependable arrival date. And from a logistics stand point you have to engage a last mile trucker at the rail head nearest your true destination to haul your item to the destination. Since you're unlikely to be shipping an entire container/rail car, you'll need to pay extra since the delivery driver will have to drive to your destination then 'dead head' (i.e. return without a load) to the rail yard.

These are just organizational problems that could be worked out if the financial incentives were there, instead of tilted heavily in favor of trucking.

Why aren't warehouses located at or near rail stations?

Because trucking is, or at least was, cheap.

Prior to the rise of the Interstate Highway system, most warehouses were on rail lines, or spurs. You'll still find the trackage, or at least the traces of them, in many urban areas throughout the U.S.

In San Francisco, the region near Potrero Hill by the old Fashion Design Centre. The odd street patterns and building perimeters show the former track rights of way.

https://www.google.com/maps/place/San+Francisco+Design+Cente...

You're arguing past parent. He stated not that trucking is cheaper, but that it is heavily subsidized. In almost all cases, rail would cheaper, and some things will take advantage of that. Likewise, in all situations trucking will be more expensive,yet there are use cases where the reliability and speed are justified (just like couriers are sometimes justified.) The difference made by the subsidies is all in shifting the margin.

Things that would be toss-ups or wins for rail are instead pushed to trucking. This would just be wasteful, and not so pernicious, were it not for the serious negative impacts on the layout of our towns that result from favoring trucks so heavily.

You also have cases like Portland where they shut down the shipping terminals which mean that all the things that would move by rail instead moves by truck now.

The amount of semi traffic from Portland to Seattle on I-5 has exploded, it certainly made driving that stretch a lot less enjoyable.

The current rail network already grows and shrinks with demand so long term you it can continue to expand without massive investments.

IMO, Automated trucking makes trains more not less useful. The core problem with using trains is speed plus how much time and effort loading and unloading takes. With automated trucks you can significantly reduce this friction.

There's very real advantages to long-haul trucking over rail. Shipping time costs logistics operations real money in terms of inventory costs, flexibility, and responsiveness to market conditions. Cargo ships are even cheaper than rail, but shipping costs aren't always the dominant concern. Similarly, some goods get air shipped even with the higher cost of doing so.

It already does - if its longer than 600 route miles, is timed to move slower than 50 mph, its already on the rails, thats what TOFC service is.

What makes you think this isn’t already happening?

Norfolk southern runs behind my house and I see semi trailers on top of rail cars all the time. I see UPS trailers on trains almost every time I watch one.

Refrigerated semi trailers are common on trains too. I’m guessing they have food in them.

> What makes you think this isn’t already happening?

Driving on I5 that seems to be a continuous stream of semi trucks, while I rarely see a freight train next to the freeway.

This is Stefan, from Starsky Robotics.

I hear this all the time, and honestly in many cases a truck is the transportation of last resort. If you need 5 shipping containers of goods going from A->B all arriving at Time X; it's probably going by train.

An issue with rail (as pointed out by others) is how to haul the freight from the rail head (rail yard) to the end warehouses, and the extra time it takes to have goods go on two trucks and one train instead of just one truck. The other issue is that in the US it's really hard to hire and retain long haul truck drivers (it turns out most people want to go home each night after a hard day’s work).

Competition to hire drivers is fierce, and driver turnover can be 100%/yr...which means sometimes your drivers don't show up to pull your freight. Rail is also generally cheaper so if you can put your goods on the train you do.

As far as wear and tear on the highway: that's what weigh stations are for. They not only assign usage taxes, they also make sure weight is evenly distributed across the axles to limit damage to the road.

/SSA

>As far as wear and tear on the highway: that's what weigh stations are for.

That doesn't create a system where trucks pay taxes roughly proportional to the damage they do.

I remember reading the damage a vehicle does is roughly proportional to the fourth power of its weight.

There's a pretty good chart here, near the bottom: http://pedalfortcollins.com/greatest-demand-on-tax-dollars/

Kinda. Has more to do with axle load than total weight.

You could also say that the research is pretty incomplete. All the known studies have been performed at highway speeds...it's entirely plausible that speed exaggerates the damage disparity.

Hey are you all trying to sell your hardware and software or are you trying to create a whole shipping company? Who are your competitors? I've been trying to do some research on companies in this space but it's been a bit hard to find info on anyone except Otto. If you've got the time I'd like to ask you a few questions, my email is in my profile.

This is their competition, and they're much better funded (although funding doesn't necessarily equal success).

http://embarktrucks.com/

Thanks! I really appreciate it!

>As far as wear and tear on the highway: that's what weigh stations are for.

I believe WalterBright meant that even at the legal weight limit, trucks cause 10,000x as much damage as cars. In 2005 this amounting to a $60b taxpayer subsidy.[1]

This isn't to criticize Starsky Robotics (this inefficiency predates it), which is just operating in the environment it finds itself. And in general, inefficiency begets opportunity.

[1] https://truecostblog.com/2009/06/02/the-hidden-trucking-indu...

>As far as wear and tear on the highway...

Right or wrong, I don't think you have to defend that point. The government sets these parameters under which you (or truckers) do business. It's not your responsibility to maintain the highway as long as each truck complies with regulations. And it's not your fault.

American taxpayers subsidise many other things that don't quite make sense (to me), like corn production. You don't see people blame farmers for doing what's best for their farm and family.

Don't forget to take into account there's normally only one or two lanes of train traffic that runs right along side of an 8 lane high way.

Much more chance for congestion. I lived right next to a set of tracks once. Trains would regularly sit for over an hour without moving.

That's almost certainly a temporary effect though - if the trucks are being outfitted with the hardware necesary for full automation, full automation is only a software update away and the pilots will only have a job for the relatively short period where automation isn't good enough to handle that portion of the journey.

It's going to be a one hell of a software update...

that's how autopilot landed on current Tesla cars.

There are a few things I think you've overlooked:

- For one, you're talking about human drivers covering first and last mile, which is a tiny, tiny fraction of the route that a truck covers which is why the Starsky model works well, in theory anyway. That means one given driver can do the work of probably a few hundred trucks in their last mile phase, even if they end up with some downtime in the middle, it's not even close to balancing. You're still talking about a possibly slightly larger market being overseen by a much smaller workforce.

- Secondly, this completely ignores what could be the silver medal effect of truck driving becoming automated; the death of millions of small and large businesses that operate basing heavily on the incomes of truckers, everything from truck stops and diners, all the way to motels, specialty truck accessory companies, on and on and on. These are the ripple effects that many people aren't looking at when they're thinking about this, it isn't just trucking, it's one of the last jobs available to you with naught but high school under your belt that earns around $40k. And that's not even going into how many businesses do a ton of business with truckers that earn that wage, which is usually much higher than their neighbors are earning.

- Thirdly, if all trucking is done from various Starsky-like operations, then truckers in general will be moving into more consolidated living conditions. Again trucking is one of the VERY rare jobs that requires minimal training, pays a comfortable wage, and is available pretty much anywhere in the States where there are roads and people who buy products. If you want to work as a software developer, chances are you'll have to move to Silicon Valley, San Francisco, Austin, etc. but if you're looking to be a trucker, you can go pretty much anywhere and have fairly solid employment opportunities. For now.

> Thirdly, if all trucking is done from various Starsky-like operations, then truckers in general will be moving into more consolidated living conditions.

why? if the controls are network traffic, and one driver being right next to another driver doesn't add value, why not spread them across the country? it'll reduce control latency, increase reliability (can't have all deliveries stopping if the fiber to one building is cut), and make it easier to have drivers awake when the deliveries are tending to take place (certainly some locations might take deliveries in the middle of the night, but mostly they're going to happen when businesses and such have employees available to receive the materials.)

If you want to work as a software developer, chances are you'll have to move to Silicon Valley, San Francisco, Austin, etc

If you're willing to work for truck driver wages ($40K - $70K), you can be a developer in any sizable town in the USA.

If you want to work as a software developer, chances are you'll have to move to Silicon Valley, San Francisco, Austin, etc.

Not that I disagree with your basic point, but that's a pretty narrow view of the software world. There are jobs for developers all over the place, even in podunk towns with a few thousand residents. Granted, that town might have like 3 total jobs for programmers, but a. that's an extreme example and b. "long tail". Consider all the mid-sized cities out there, as well as "non tech hub" big cities and there's plenty of places for programmers to live and work.

Just to illustrate:

https://www.indeed.com/jobs?q=java&l=Buffalo%2C+NY

https://www.indeed.com/jobs?q=java&l=cleveland%2C+oh

https://www.indeed.com/jobs?q=java&l=fargo%2C+nd

https://www.indeed.com/jobs?q=%22visual+basic%22&l=Oklahoma+...

https://www.indeed.com/jobs?q=c%23+&l=Boise%2C+ID

https://www.indeed.com/jobs?q=java&l=chicago%2C+il

https://www.indeed.com/jobs?q=java&l=Cincinnati%2C+OH

https://www.indeed.com/jobs?q=java&l=Phoenix%2C+AZ

https://www.indeed.com/jobs?q=java&l=Tampa%2C+FL

etc., etc. etc.

Corollary - Why no driverless trains yet?

The savings likely aren't worth it. Trains can pull a lot of cargo compared to a truck, so the marginal cost for a driver is a substantially smaller percentage.

Yup, this is often the answer.

Same with "why do we still have humans taking orders at McD?" Then it materializes when the cashier's minimum wage pops up -- in comes the kiosks.

I don't think it has anything to do with cashier wages, and more to do with customer perception.

Kiosks are already cheaper than people.

With minimum wage at $7.25/hour, and a Kiosk being able to replace 2+ shifts (16 hour days 7 days a week), that's $30K/year in savings, which would more than pay for a kiosk and maintenance.

Developing the software to run them isn't free, but spreading $15M in development costs among 14,000 restaurants is only $1K each.

But many customers would balk at having to order at a kiosk, so McDonalds will still hire humans.

> But many customers would balk at having to order at a kiosk, so McDonalds will still hire humans.

A lot of locations around me have both kiosks and staffed registers.

I used the kiosk once and thought it was annoying to work through. If you have a simple order like "A medium #3", then its an order of magnitude faster to order through a person. On the other hand, if you like to customize your burger, or order a several things a la carte, the kiosk might be better depending on the competence of the human at the cash register.

(Of course, whether or not your customized burger or list of a la carte items gets made correctly by the kitchen staff is an entirely different conversation...)

> If you have a simple order like "A medium #3", then its an order of magnitude faster to order through a person.

This is a user interface [fixable] problem, not some inherent defect in kiosks. You should be able to walk up to the kiosk, tap #3, wave your NFC payment at it, and walk away with a hamburger. Today's "Tap. Tap. Scroll, Scroll. Tap. Back. Tap. Tap checkout. Tap Ok. Insert credit card in this other machine. Tap confirm. Sign. Remove card. Tap done." mess is merely incompetent product design.

I think the decision has 3 main factors:

1. Total operational cost,

2. Customer satisfaction,

3. Risk related to change.

You make a good point though -- perhaps it's not primarily driven by the combo of current and projected minimum wage hikes.

Can anyone quantify?

Also usability. Ever watched an older person try to get a drink out of one of those touch-screen drink dispensers with 100 choices of soda+flavors?

Same would happen with a kiosk order taker. Two humans talking can still communicate much more reliably than one human navigating a somewhat unfamiliar UI.

They exist, you can find them on e.g. the London underground.

I'm curious how the minimum wage compares in the various train driver jurisdictions. (I don't know -- possibly not relevant.)

There's an initiative to move to autopilot for trains, or Positive Train Control. The US Gov't started the initiative in 2008 after a particularly gnarly train accident which killed 25 people. It was due to be rolled out in 2015 and we're still waiting...

For long-haul rail freight the economics don't matter as much as they do for trucks. 1-2 people can control a 7 mile train as opposed to trucks which have 1 driver per 50' trailer.

/SSA

There was an ELI5 post the other day with a pretty detailed response[0]

The TL;DR amounts to the braking system and current regulation about when trains are eligible to be automated.

[0]https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/712012/e...

They exist for local rail and subways, and with the unification of the European signaling and braking systems, soon they’ll also dominate long-range rail

http://www.afr.com/business/mining/iron-ore/rio-tinto-makes-...

> They employ truck drivers as remote pilots for the "first and last mile"

It would make even more sense to employ a "local" pilot with local knowledge for the first and last miles, kind of how tug-boats help large container ships in and out of ports.

Harbour pilots actually drive those large ships in and out of port from the bridge.

Parallels also to the rise in the demand for horses after the introduction of the railroad.

The availability of long-haul transport increased transportation volume, but the "last mile" connection from origin/destination to the railroad depot couldn't be accomodated as readily. So: horses and carts.

Variously: Robert J. Gordon, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, Vaclav Smil, Energy and World History -- of which there's a heavily revised edition out this year, Energy and Civilization.

If Uber is right about it's autonomous taxis, and Tesla's cars really will be able to come when you whistle, then last mile driving and docking are surely solvable problems.

I'm generally an optimistic person, but I think autonomous driving is going to seriously disrupt our societies. I simply cannot see where the huge workforce of unskilled males driving trucks and taxis is going to be soaked up. The industrial revolution did it last time, but anything you can suggest as a potential equivalent (colonising Mars?) will be demanding smart flexible people - and an awful lot of automated systems.

I'm picking the mass unemployment will lead to civil war in the US (where all those unskilled males have semi automatic guns) and universal basic incomes in more civilised countries.

The most likely thing (imo) that will happen will be highway trains...there will be a real human driver in the front of the caravan, maybe just in a van or car, and then 1-10 self driving heavy duty trucks behind them. They'll draft off of each other and do 99% of the long haul route in an automated way.

Once each truck is near it's destination, it will peel off of the pack and park itself near the highway, at which point a real driver will hop in and finish the route.

I work in the telematics space, and work with extremely large fleets that you'd all recognize on the highway every day. None of them are afraid of self driving trucks disrupting them any time soon. However, these automated caravans could be their first opportunity to restructure the flow of their capacity across the country.

it seems they would need to build additional infrastructure. its my understanding that truckers would already like to caravan behind one another in very long chains (save lots of fuel), but its illegal due to traffic and safety concerns for other drivers.

Too bad that all the "speculative VC dollars" seem to be in trying to jump directly to full-automation of multiple small passenger vehicles.

Now, I've never heard any public figure say this out loud -- so maybe I'm just barking up the wrong tree -- but I think the bandwagon is being pulled by a very particular idea about a market they can try to corner.

Specifically, they're thinking of a future demographic bump in people who are too age-impaired to safely and legally drive themselves. Folks who can't (or won't) pay another human to drive, or move to a location with better public-transit, but who still have enough affluence for a self-driving car.

IMO it explains the bubbly frenzied focus from multiple companies, despite the significant degree of basic research still required.

Part of the allure of self-driving cars is drastic reduction of traffic deaths. Long-haul drivers are not the one who kill themselves on the road the most; regular people are.

I'm not saying this is the driving force behind focus of companies, but it's an important consideration for many individuals in this space.

In these times, you need very little to start a bubble.

It just seems bizarre that "highway trains" have to be reinvented alongside railroad tracks.

I don't think a rail train could detach a car from the middle without stopping and park it on the side of the track.

From the middle no, but it's been done from the end - you just have to plan the makeup of your train.

Sure but then a driver can hop into the truck and drive it to the local Walmart.

Trains go to many less places than highways do at this point.

Tracks go to all large cities.

What are the names of some of these companies in the trucking telematics space? Curious to know more about what they track.

(Not being a jerk) if you just Google "truck telematics" the front page (and ads) are basically the big players. There are many more who you'll never hear about too.

They generally track the Tractor (truck) and Trailer, and also provide regulatory (hours of service) and Dispatch (sending jobs to drivers).

They also do a million other things, but that's the gist.

> The most likely thing (imo) that will happen will be highway trains

It already happens according to legislation. Though, these vehicle are generally limited to 2 trailers, restricted to some loads), if road condition allows it.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long_combination_vehicle

"Then what you have is a truckers’ lounge with 20 or 30 guys standing around getting paid."

THAT's the error: those guys aren't getting paid anything to stand there. They get paid by the mile. Making them wait is benefiting the warehouse, and costing THEM.

Yeah. My wife has a friend who's a long-haul trucker. He gets profoundly disrespected by the current system, including showing up at 8AM to an appointment and being made wait all day, and sometimes into the next day, for his truck to be unloaded/loaded and ready for him to take.

And he's paid nothing for that. There's no penalty at all for wasting the trucker's time. I cite this as evidence that the truckers have no effective lobbying body, and therefore will in fact lose most of long-haul jobs over the next 15 years.

http://www.getloaded.com/load-board-blog/post/Whats-the-Best...

It looks like your wife's friend needs a better broker because all the companies we deal with charge us.

Our shipper won't schedule a truck unless we know that the load is ready due to how steep the fees can be.

When we shipped some equipment to a major trade show, they try to schedule it so that the truckers have a minimum wait but the show will also pay the detention fees back if they were the source of the delay.

Just because you're getting charged, doesn't mean the trucker is getting paid.

Honestly, I would guess you've nailed it: The delivery company is collecting a fee because they are only paid for per delivery, so making a driver (and truck) wait doesn't otherwise make them money.

But there's no guarantee that the fees are passed on to the driver. Just in case, I'll pass a question back through my wife to see if some truckers are actually paid for waiting. They talk to each other; I bet they all know if anyone is paid to wait.

Depends, do truckers have a strong political lobby? If no, they'll be in trouble. If yes, then they'll be guaranteed to exist for as long as they are funding lobbyists and politicians.

In the United States at least, it's going to be devastating. I don't see a bunch of individual owner-operators banding together to protect their livelihoods. As soon as it's cheaper to run automated trucks, they'll get picked off one by one. Probably the best than can be hoped for is laws mandating a person as co-operator in case of emergency. There's also some version of the last mile problem, where people need to be present.

For fully automated trucking, I imagine no one has explored the security implications yet. These vehicles seem far too easy to hijack, redirect, or delay and steal the cargo. Take out the human factor and long-haul trucks are autonomous warehouses roaming the countryside.

Autonomous trucks may actually be a little more secure. The vast majority of truck thefts occur within 200 miles of the origin and truckers are strongly encouraged to not stop in this zone. Many still do though, either for legitimate reasons, or they're working with the thieves. Automated trucking will probably fix this problem. You can have automated trucks moving from secured site to secured site without worrying about exceeding a truckers 11 hour drive limit.

They can also lock down the cargo in such a way that it sort of becomes a sort of totally-sealed (automated) roving container. Much like any security, there would be limits into how cheap they can make the container still relatively secure of course (those hijackers are pretty wily and clever!)...but that doesn't seem to be such a logistical challenge in my mind.

> The vast majority of truck thefts occur within 200 miles of the origin ...

Now. The GP point is, if in future thieves find ways to explore truck software and redirect the trucks then current statistics will change.

Aside from thieves, there's likely to be some mischief from the truckers whose jobs were taken away, or soon will be. They are already a group that's very tight, with lots of communication methods (CB, forums, newsletters, etc). And pretty good knowledge on how to disable/vandalize a semi truck.

I'd also expect more "insider" help than usual. Probably many truckers will be transitioned to lower paying roles and will be bitter.

I don't think exploiting software, in the usual sense of the term, is even necessary. Just box the truck in somehow when it's off the grid and can't phone home. There's no way the designers will build in the capability to ram through a barricade, will they?

My point, which I stated poorly, is that automated trucking is a whole new class of problems from a security standpoint. I'm leaving some scenarios out deliberately. I haven't even given much thought to the problem, but I hope someone does.

What do you think a human driver would do if they were faced with a barricade? They'll hand over the keys. Act quickly and they probably won't even have the chance to call the cops before you take their phone.

An automated truck will lock itself down, and start taking high def video. Plus, if it has a satellite hook-up, it can contact the police even from outside of cellphone range.

Laws would have to change with a person in the cab you are talking about Grand Theft, Kidnapping, and Robbery. With an AI it's just Grand Theft meaning you'd spend much less time in prison.

Exactly, the law hasn't caught up yet. Likely they'll take a cue from laws covering rail shipping, but I'm not a lawyer.

Why would laws have to change, after all there is no kidnapping and robbery occuring. Stealing the contents of an ai-truck is less terrible than robbing a truck driver at gunpoint. There is a reason one is punished more than the other.

It seems like it'd be far easier to rob a human-driven truck. Point a gun in the driver's face and they'll do whatever you want. For a machine, you'll actually have to hack into it.

I could see the last mile problem for trucking being solved by depots on the outskirts of cities where the automated trucks arrive, and human drivers commute and drive the trucks from the depot to their final destinations in the city. I don't know about the economics of it, but it could potentially be beneficial to the health of the human drivers as they wouldn't need to be making long-haul trips, but instead navigating more, but shorter, trips into cities. If this scenario increased the volume of long-haul trips (through automation), it could create demand for more drivers for the last mile trips.

> I imagine no one has explored the security implications yet.

I bet they have. Especially insurers.

Insurers, in stark contrast to VC funded startups, are very conservative. I'm confident they'll rather not spend time and money now exploring something that's not going to be reality for at least half a decade, maybe ever.

I agree, they are among the most conservative. But I think that's why they are studying it. Insurance companies hate being surprised.

Self-driving vehicles will going to prevent a lot of collisions which will in turn drive premiums way, way down. The need to insure unattended shipments is one mitigating factor that I bet they are thinking about.

I would hope so. And maybe the cost of insurance is what keeps human-driven trucking going for awhile longer.

> I bet they have. Especially insurers.

Externalize the cost: call the cops when the truck surveillance detects something and have them clean up the mess.

I think I like that better than the transport companies having private police forces.

Truckers are mainly small businesses so they probably have no lobby. The bigger trucking companies that employ these self-employed truckers will happily switch to automatic trucks. They also have the political clout.

Same for farmers. The real small family farmers have no political power. It's the big farms that get laws made for them.

What about the teamsters union?

Are all truckers in that union? I thought a lot of truckers are small businesses that contract with large ones.

Owner/operators can join the teamsters.

As a small farmer, the government requires that we pay into an industry lobby group each year. All farmers, that is, not just small ones.

But, as a small farmer, I already see how unaffordable automation is. Tractors that are basically self-driving have been commercially available for decades, but it is difficult to pencil out unless you have a lot of acres to spread the costs across. I feel that the same will be true for self-driving trucks. The huge fleets will adopt it immediately, but small guys like me who only have to haul grain a few weeks of the year, it seems more cost effective to just spend some time in the seat.

Time will tell, but history tends to be a good indicator. I don't see truckers going away any time soon.

Given that truck driver is the most popular job in the majority of US States, I get the feeling its going to go beyond having a political lobby. You put that many people out of work in one event and that's going to wreck havoc. Political lobbies are not the only way to exert power.

Truck driving is not the largest employment by major NAICS job classification. Instead you'll find that the ranking puts office & administrative, sales, and food services ahead of all transport. The final column is per-mille, not per-cent, contribution.

    43-0000 Office and Administrative Support Occupations                22026080  156.881
    41-0000 Sales and Related Occupations                                14536530  103.537
    35-0000 Food Preparation and Serving Related Occupations             12981720   92.462
    53-0000 Transportation and Material Moving Occupations                9731790   69.315
    51-0000 Production Occupations                                        9105650   64.855
    25-0000 Education, Training, and Library Occupations                  8636430   61.513
    29-0000 Healthcare Practitioners and Technical Occupations            8318500   59.249
    47-0000 Construction and Extraction Occupations                       5585420   39.782
    49-0000 Installation, Maintenance, and Repair Occupations             5456640   38.865
    39-0000 Personal Care and Service Occupations                         4514960   32.158
    37-0000 Building and Grounds Cleaning and Maintenance Occupations     4426090   31.525
    15-0000 Computer and Mathematical Occupations                         4165140   29.666
    31-0000 Healthcare Support Occupations                                4043480   28.800
    33-0000 Protective Service Occupations                                3386360   24.119
    17-0000 Architecture and Engineering Occupations                      2499050   17.799
    21-0000 Community and Social Service Occupations                      2019250   14.382
    27-0000 Arts, Design, Entertainment, Sports, and Media Occupations    1902970   13.554
    19-0000 Life, Physical, and Social Science Occupations                1152840    8.211
    23-0000 Legal Occupations                                             1075520    7.660
    45-0000 Farming, Fishing, and Forestry Occupations                     463640    3.302

Source: https://www.bls.gov/oes/current/oes_nat.htm

Edit: I'm perplexed by the downvotes. Care to explain yourself?

I didn't downvote you. I'm guessing it's about two things.

The parent said the majority of the US states. [1] The premise there is - based on the data I've seen at least - in many states trucking is the most common specialized job. Sales and office jobs are non-specific as a super category. It doesn't make a lot of sense to compare something as extremely vague and varied as "sales" to trucking. Food prep & serving, does have some claim on the most common job, although that's generally a much lower tier of work in terms of pay and upside potential (fry cook, cashier or runner at McDonald's vs making $80k a year long-haul, not very comparable skill-sets).

And you didn't go any deeper on the numbers in response to large differences between states in employment (given the parent proclaimed "in the majority of US states"). For example, in some states is transportation and material moving a more common job than food prep, and which states are those? (etc etc)

[1] According to NPR's Planet Money, truck driver is in fact the most common job in most states. They reach that conclusion by dumping the overly vague super categories such as sales.

http://www.npr.org/sections/money/2015/02/05/382664837/map-t...

The detail level I provided is the "major" classification division. At "minor", trucking is only the 12th largest employment classification. There's a breakdown to fine detail (and I'm not sure what classification system is used) in which "truck driver" is the most numerous single entry, but that's almost entirely an ontological artefact: truck driving doesn't have a bunch of fine subdivisions. Contrast the employment classifications for "teacher", which has something like 50 distinct sub-categories.

         1	41-2000 Retail Sales Workers                                          8791750   62.619
         2	35-3000 Food and Beverage Serving Workers                             7355090   52.387
         3	43-4000 Information and Record Clerks                                 5630810   40.105
         4	29-1000 Health Diagnosing and Treating Practitioners                  5143640   36.636
         5	13-1000 Business Operations Specialists                               4629810   32.976
         6	53-7000 Material Moving Workers                                       4580950   32.628
         7	47-2000 Construction Trades Workers                                   4216890   30.035
         8	25-2000 Preschool, Primary, Secondary, and Special Education School   4133490   29.441
         9	43-5000 Material Recording, Scheduling, Dispatching, and Distributi   4101520   29.213
        10	15-1100 Computer Occupations                                          3997370   28.471
        11	43-9000 Other Office and Administrative Support Workers               3940510   28.066
        12	53-3000 Motor Vehicle Operators                                       3934070   28.020
        13	35-2000 Cooks and Food Preparation Workers                            3190940   22.728
        14	37-2000 Building Cleaning and Pest Control Workers                    3174220   22.608
        15	43-3000 Financial Clerks                                              3133030   22.315
        16	29-2000 Health Technologists and Technicians                          3018820   21.502
        17	49-9000 Other Installation, Maintenance, and Repair Occupations       2836540   20.203
        18	39-9000 Other Personal Care and Service Workers                       2820750   20.091
        19	13-2000 Financial Specialists                                         2651370   18.884
        20	51-9000 Other Production Occupations                                  2582350   18.393

I've looked at this before ... in June of 2015 ... and the result was very nearly the same. From then:

https://www.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/3832wx/occupat...

And yes, I have not broken this down by state, let me see if I can find that data. It's also worth noting that the NPR article uses Census classifications, which may differ from those I've listed (though Census is one of the participants in the NAICS classification, itself shared between Mexico, the US, and Canada).

NPR are ... unclear in the extreme ... as what specific data fields and employment classifications they are using. Given the NAICS categories above, multiple states would have to show peak employment in one of the listed categories above "Motor Vehicle Operators". And yet, none do.

Everyone talks about truck drivers becoming obsolete once self driving cars take over the road.

What I would worry about are endless number of doctors and surgeons that spent a life time mastering a skill and will just as easily be rendered obsolete by the same technology.

Lawyers too.

> What I would worry about are endless number of doctors and surgeons that spent a life time mastering a skill and will just as easily be rendered obsolete by the same technology.

You mean, because they operate on car crash victims?

You jest but the vast majority of lawyers in the US practice automotive law.

The day we don't need trauma surgeons is a good day.

Don't worry about doctors. Political power wins out in the end, and they have tons of it.

For example: for decades they've managed to resist entry of decision-support systems(which were not perfect, but still, an improvement), even though their own error rate is ~1/8.

Pretty much the reason I don't go to the doctor unless I need stitches or am experiencing intolerable pain.

A couple of years back, after being tossed around by a dozen doctors for simple infection. A few hours of internet research helped me solve my problem, better than any doctor did.

Health care industry is a cartel that optimizes for profit.

>>Political power wins out in the end

Well actually its economic power. These people just have to pray technology doesn't get cheaper with time.

I remember in the 90s an entire generation of Indian workforce lost jobs overnight, for decades they fought computers and software. They bought in regulations, laws and what not. Unions fought 'computers' tooth and nail. Yes, you read it right- they were against the very use of computers.

When the prime minister called for use of computers in India in the 1980s there was a national strike.

Eventually it became impossible to not use computers without slipping into an economic stone age. People had to give way.

Be careful what you hope for by way of law.

The Jevons Paradox implications of reducing the costs of litigation by one or more orders of magnitude ... terrify me. The more so as reducing costs tends to increase the level of concentration of power.

"Will automation put end to the European hand writer?" Unfortuantly since Gutenberg's book pressing automation Europe lives in misery.

The modern airplane is fairly heavily automated, and probably could be piloted from afar. But we choose to mandate a pilot on board.

I suspect a similar situation will play out for trucks.

I suspect that truckers, like pilots, may see wages stagnate and longer hours, but the profession won't disappear anytime soon.

Mu impression is most commercial flights are largely run on autopilot. AFAIK, pilots typically only get involved for takeoff, landing, flight path changes and abnormal events. If last-mile piloting was a thing, I'm sure the airlines would try to cut costs by getting rid of the crew for the auto-pilot segments. It seems trivial for an automated truck to pull off the highway and wait for a trucker to deliver a vehicle, yet impossible for an aircraft to hold at 30k feet and wait for a pilot.

A huge difference is that when something goes wrong with a truck then the autopilot can just apply the brakes and let the truck come to a halt and wait for help.

That doesn't work with airplanes.

>It seems trivial for an automated truck to pull off the highway and wait for a trucker to deliver a vehicle, yet impossible for an aircraft to hold at 30k feet and wait for a pilot.

I think many people will not like the idea of sharing a highway with an unmanned truck.

I've done my fair share of driving (including a couple cross country drives to SF for internships), and the scariest parts usually involved passing or being in close proximity to semis.

“Trucking is a $700bn industry, in which a third of costs go to compensating drivers”

That’s enough information to answer the question.

It would be sort of cool if highways could then promote a "goods carrier trucks can only run nightly" rule with this. Of course allowing essential goods trucks to run in daylight

> while truckers are prohibited from driving more than 11 hours per day without taking an eight-hour break, a driverless truck can drive for the entire day. This effectively doubles the output of the trucking network at a quarter of the cost.

Interestingly, doubling the throughput of the trucking network would also halve the average lifetime of road surfaces. "The federal government has estimated that a 40-ton, 18-wheel truck causes the same damage as 9,600 midsize cars." http://www.latimes.com/opinion/readersreact/la-le-0215-sunda...

sounds like a great opportunity for the automated road repair industry

The automation of vehicles is taken to strongly imply robotic devices elsewhere in society.

Apart from more sophisticated robot hoovers, lawn mowers I don't think that is necessarily so.

Hoovers and mowers are safe because they are small, light, low to the ground and constrained to floors and lawns.

Vehicles, fast, heavy, high, are in a controlled environment.

Other controlled enviroments like factories have already ventured into robotics.

It seems to me that main advantages of automated movement would exist in unstructured environments like streets, shops. The robots I've seen so far have low center of gravity, are heavy so as to inhibit any danger.

What exactly does automated driving do for other unstructured environments?

It is far from clear to me that this is going to be a trifle soon after the roads swarm with autos.

We don't even have autonomous street sweepers (well defined environment, not allowed to run over stuff) mining dump trucks (not as well defined environment, few things it's not allowed to run over and most of them have reflectors on them) or forklifts to unload trucks (well defined environment, nothing to run into).

I'm not holding my breath for automated trucking.

Automated mining trucks are already being used: https://www.technologyreview.com/s/603170/mining-24-hours-a-...

I haven't thought of this until now, but it's going to be interesting to see the impact of self driving trucks on human migration. Today many people feel trapped where they live because it's prohibitively expensive to move. Once self-driving trucks are common, the cost of moving across the country should plummet. Imagine being able to move everything in your apartment or home across the country for a few hundred dollars.

I've moved across the country a few times now - I'm not sure the expense of physically moving stuff was ever the largest.

They were for me, by far. What other expenses are there?

The fact that you'd first have to secure employment at your destination city?

The only move I've coordinated cost quite a lot. It involved moving a 4 bedroom house from the South to New England and cost about $4-5k with labor and boxing and only unloading at the destination. The majority of the cost was the labor after everything was boxed and loaded.

If you're loading and moving yourself, a U-Haul or similar is not that expensive. I've done interstate moves and the truck rental was never more than a few hundred dollars.

True, but there is another cost there, opportunity cost. The week you take to drive cross country is a week that you aren't working and earning money. You're no longer paying the truck driver for his time, but you are now using your time. Overall, this self-move approach works for short moves of maybe 1-2 days time, but the moment a move will take more than a weekend, you're disrupting your earning opportunities.

With self-driving trucks, you will be able to move for a few hundred dollars and be able to focus on employment.

The freeway is where AI will be first. It is the most controlled driving environment we have. It can be made even more controlled in a fairly efficiently and cheaply. The local city and country roads have a plethora of other issues. Pedestrians, driveways, trees, multitudes of entrances and exits...its a nightmare really.

Give me AI on the freeway, and I'd probably be happy enough.

Automation is one thing in fully mapped Mountain View with perfect weather. It's a whole other job when supply lines go through rough terrain, like Canadian western highways in winter... those chains won't get around those tires by themselves, not to mention the risk of mechanical failures.

Yes, but those surely make up a small proportion of all truck freight traffic.

Just the threat of automated long haul trucking should cause rail freight rates to decrease, ultimately rates will drop dramatically. Last mile is the final holdout for truckers.

Some will be employed driving the wreckers to go get the trucks that flake out and drive off the road.

Obviously. Question is how soon.

Suggest change title from tracker to trucker.

Thanks for noticing. Unfortunately, I cannot change the title anymore … or don’t know how.

Fixed - thanks.

Having almost been seriously injured or killed by truckers more times than I'd like, I fucking hope so.

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