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Comment by a3n | Hacker News Reader

> And the majority of their time is spent on relatively predictable interstate roads, not the chaotic roads of a busy downtown, so they'd be simpler to automate.

No, they'd be at least as complicated as automating cars, because there are no delivery destinations on the freeway. You have to go through the same surface streets as cars, and it's much harder to drive a truck and trailer through busy and small surface streets than to drive a car.

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Nah, just have "pilots" that wait at hubs. Trucks auto-drive the highways and pull into a staging area where they are prioritized for a human driver to bring them the last mile.

Even so trucks are more difficult to drive than cars. They need longer following distance and they need to react sooner to traffic jams or obstacles ahead. They have so much more momentum than a passenger vehicle. And they are much less nimble in handling. Anyone who thinks driving a truck is easy because they travel on highways has never driven one.

Essentially the same as today’s airline pilots.

Cargo container ships too. There are pilots that wait near each major port that specialize in that port.

Definitely. That’s another good example. I hear those guys stationed at Long Beach make bucketloads too guiding those ships in port.

I think it's assumed they'd drop off to hubs that would be near highways.

This is how it's done, and has been done, with rail-shipped containers for 70-80 years. The intermodal industry already has all the complex contractual plumbing and logistical framework to handle this with ease, but it's an extremely automation-averse industry. They still use faxes extensively ffs.

Not just intermodal. To get paid for delivering a trailer, I have to fax in the receiver-signed bill of lading to my company. You can do that at virtually every truck stop, or at a company terminal. I use an employer-provided phone app and my phone's camera to do that, but the fax is still heavily used by many or most drivers.

You could work with them the same way intermodal rail container operations function, where trains carrying hundreds of containers are last-miled by specialized drayage companies that pick the containers up at rail yards and bring them to consignees (destination customers).

Doing the same but with pools can of driverless trucks all dropping off trailers at a designated transfer yard would require very little modification to this very mature but little known niche of freight logistics. The economics would be similar.

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