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Comment by dsnuh | Hacker News Reader

Yeah, I don't understand why they aren't doing something like this. Seems like a no-brainer to have a number of staging facilities along major transport corridors that the self driving trucks deliver to, leaving the last X miles to human drivers. The truck unhitches, fuels up, picks up a new trailer, and is back on the highway in 30 minutes. You could have these operating 24/7, with human drivers picking up loads for delivery during human working hours.

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I would guess it's due to investment...

Self driving experts can easily pull in salaries of $5M plus per year, and this stuff takes many years. To build a team of those people, you need to burn an insane amount of cash.

That much cash is only available from investors if the reward is huge. Replacing all interstate trucking is a much smaller potential reward than replacing all human transportation.

Hence everyone is working on the harder, but much higher reward projects.

> Self driving experts can easily pull in salaries of $5M plus per year

I think this is an exaggeration by almost an order of magnitude, unless you are referring to the handful of people that have had successful exits in this space.

Waymo is dropping billions on vehicles. Someone that they think can accelerate deploying those vehicles is worth an awful lot.

It would surprise me if another company didn't pick up the torch here. It sounds like Otto had a working demo of the technology. There's $800B+ on the table, someone is going to crack this market.

They are doing exactly this...with trains.

Trucking absolutely dwarfs the train industry in America.

That's just because SV hasn't disrupted the model yet...

Some day some billionaire will figure out there's a bunch of wasted potential in the train transportation network and get to work fixing it.

I can't tell if this is sarcasm or not...

Rio Tinto, the 2nd largest mining company in the world, has been working on autonomous trains and mining trucks for quite a while now.

Only recently approved, though: https://www.smartrailworld.com/mind-blowing-rio-tinto-autono...

In the US at least the highway system is littered with weigh stations, those would be perfect locations for "last mile" transfers.

And often surrounded by land I would wager the government owns, which could be used to build the transfer stations upon. Maybe even a susbsidised incentive to get companies on board, so they don't have to spend their own time and capital acquiring land.

They could do brake and other inspections there too.

Weight and dimension check stations would need to be considerably enlarged to allow for load handling facilities.

If it has space for a parking spot it has enough space to transfer a trailer to a different rig. No one is talking about unloading anything, it's just lowering the legs on the trailer and unlocking the fifth wheel to let the autonomous truck pull away and back the new truck up to it.

A company named Rivigo is doing something like this in India:

https://www.economist.com/business/2017/09/30/rivigo-is-help...

Yes, I am imagining something like this, with self driving electric tractor trailers being orchestrated at huge stations with solar collecting roofs along the transportation corridor. Inspection and maintenance could be performed by human workers if needed. If the trailer is destined within half the distance of the next station, the load is dropped, and a human driver does last mile(s) delivery.

> Yeah, I don't understand why they aren't doing something like this

But... Uber was planning to do exactly this ! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ge-4uWmuESQ

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