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Comment by josh2600 | Hacker News Reader

Why wouldn't Uber just do long haul to a distribution point near a city and hire drivers for the last mile?

Thing is this puts it in a narrow band of competitiveness between human-driven trucks (less capital-intensive, more expensive over time) and trains or sea ports (more capital-intensive but still cheaper than automated trucks). A lot of bigger cities where it makes economic sense to have this kind of hub-and-spoke model will already have trains and ports too, so it's a bit dicey.

What you can do, is to have the driver sleep in the cabin during the long leg of the journey and then drive just between highway and hub.

This means that instead of two drivers, you're not just paying two.

Doing that would require 100% autonomous and the legal allowances across the whole nation. There's also some very specific rule around what counts as rest for drivers and I'm not sure that would qualify as rest under the current rules.

Building all those distribution points would be fairly expensive and time intensive, a smaller market, and would still require contracting/employing a lot of medium distance drivers for the last X miles. 'Last mile' here is probably on the order of 20-50 miles at least with hundreds of distribution hubs.

Most of the big carriers already have the distribution points set up all over the place with a bunch of local drivers covering the last mile.

I (sort of) worked for Swift ~10 years ago and a lot of what I did was "drop and hook" at regional terminals or big warehouses. It was kind of uncommon to live (un)load -- mostly just drop the trailer I brought in where they told me, pick up an empty/loaded trailer and be on my way.

When I ran reefers it was totally the opposite, super rare to not have to live unload. A lot of the big places would have pre-loaded trailers waiting but delivery points were usually much smaller so didn't have a bunch of space for trailers to sit around. And then there were the times when I was live loading produce in the middle of a (literal) field...

> Most of the big carriers already have the distribution points set up all over the place with a bunch of local drivers covering the last mile.

> I (sort of) worked for Swift ~10 years ago ...

Then you know that many if not most of those distribution centers can only be reached by driving surface streets for one to many N miles.

Last week I picked up a trailer at the Loveland CO Walmart distribution center. I had to go through a roundabout to get to it. Those are fun.

Speaking of, that brings up a fun exception case. We drivers try very hard not to drive up on curbs, it's bad for the curb and whatever's behind it, and (eventually) bad for the truck and trailer and their tires and wheels; or even air lines, depending on what you rub up against.

I assume one of the many rules for autonomous trucks would be "don't run on the curbs." They'll probably be good at avoiding curbs where possible, but sometimes the geometry is impossible.

I further assume that an exception to the rule will have to be written.

And thousands to millions of other rules and exceptions.

It's not an easy problem, from the mundane to the catastrophic, and a scenario can easily go from one to the other in the flip of a bit.

I think the big question in this game becomes to you want to be a logistics company, or do you want to become a technology company?

Also, they don't let any Tom, Dick or Harry get a CDL, so that's a bit of a roadblock. Not like its too hard though.

Seems like a brilliant way to make use of a semi-idling workforce.

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