Autonomous Trucks and the Future of the American Trucker

Maybe this will break the neck of autonomous trucks, maybe this isn't that big of a deal.

Who knows.

Ditto for licenses, drug tests, background checks, and most of the common kinds of moving violations. and scheduling has its own set of paperwork which is a colossal nightmare because you are dealing with the always conflicting priorities of drivers on one side and customers on the other.

The major logistical obstacle outside of paperwork will remain to be resolving last-mile issues, but that has already been resolved long ago for containerized railroad freight: a.k.a. autonomous trucking technology from the 1800s. There's been a century's worth of time to solve this, manifested in the form of short-haul service providers known as intermodal draymen who pick up the container from a designated landing area (a rail yard) and haul it the last mile. This can easily be adapted to autonomous trucking logistics.

Trucks autonomously deliver themselves between cities/ports -and there are a bunch of Drivers at the local hub who then pickup the truck and do "last mile" delivery operations.

People shouldnt need to drive from Oakland to Reno, as an example.

Then, truckers could go to work 9-5 and be home for dinner with their families every night.

Isn't that what we were told about taxi services when Uber started taking over? But it turns out that people prefer a driver who follows a GPS and you know he's 5 minutes away than a more expensive local driver that might come in 5 minutes or might come in 50 minutes (or not at all), all you know is that the dispatcher said "He's on the way"

optimize by splitting loads or arranging for return loads at their destination, etc.

Most of this seems like something logistics software can do - and it can optimize across a fleet instead of optimizing for a driver.

They also learn which customers pay promptly, which ones provide their loads in a way that’s easy to get on the truck, which ones generally have their paperwork in order, etc.

Also things that the business office would do -- if you want the cheap automated truck delivery, you'll pay on time and have your paperwork ready.

Loading docks are not all equal. Some are very ad-hoc

Again, this is something that shippers would change if they want the automated truck delivery. They can either pay to make their dock automated-truck-accessible, or they can pay a human driver to back it in. And those human drivers will become more scarce and expensive as time goes on.

I would expect that even if trucks became autonomous, a lot of truckers would survive the transition because people would still need to do a lot of that stuff.

Initially, sure, but long term, economics will win out.

Traditional freight forwarders are having trouble with this because they often don't have the technology to manage and understand this data. Instead they rely on lots of personnel and deep hierarchies including many subcontractors. At sennder.com we're trying to change this.

> require serious judgement to be able to maneuver large trucks around them

I think this is one aspect you get incorrect. With LIDAR and SONAR a computer can know an exact distance from corner to corner, can know and set the exact angles to hit a spot; while with a different set of eyes looking at a tree beside you. We already have consumer cars that have proximity warnings and trailer paths.

You think it's bad at face value, try considering it in the context of the DOT's rules on working hours.

Shipping containers and pallets have owners, but nobody minds leaving them behind at the point of delivery because they are interchangeable and they circulate around.

If truckers could pull up to a loading dock, unhook the trailer and leave it behind, and drive away with an empty trailer, that would be pretty cool.

For a while there I came up with roughly one invention per day that would radically reduce the amount of labor we performed or protect us from the sun and elements. For example, in big cities they use lifts to windows and chutes on stairs to get boxes up and down tall buildings. But they don't use anything in smaller cities except elbow grease usually.

Anyway, whenever I brought up a new idea, it was soundly rejected by pretty much everyone. The standard answer being "that would put us out of a job!"

There is massive resistance to any kind of innovation in the shipping industry. My gut feeling is that it won't change at all until it's too late, and then the whole thing will come crashing down when it's replaced by self-driving forklifts and drones. It's one of the few industries that still (under)employs millions of people, and I think that we should keep that in mind before we work so hard to automate it into oblivion.

But automation is inevitable and will come within 10 years or so, so if we really want to help society, we should be focussing on education and vo-tech training in order to find meaningful work for everyone who's going to be misplaced. I know in my heart that that won't be enough though, which is why I'm a huge proponent of universal basic income.

It's been a while since I drove trucks but I recall the absolute worst loads were deliveries to grocery warehouses. Because of DOT Hours of Service restrictions, it sometimes made economic sense to refuse these loads and instead sit idle a day with no work. You had to carefully budget your working hours over a rolling 8-day window and wasting hours at a grocery warehouse kills your earnings for days afterwards.

Grocery warehouses took forever, mostly because of their insistence that I wait while they counted everything and broke down pallets of stuff and re-stacked it. The actual unloading was quick, it was the hours afterwards before they would acknowledge receipt of goods and sign your paperwork to release you. They also used 'lumpers', third-party laborers (who they also did not trust) to count and re-stack correctly so their own employees would have to come double-check everything. Some would expect me to pay the lumpers, which I would always refuse to do, which further delayed things. I think some drivers just paid to get out of there faster.

Contrast this with more sophisticated operations such as a Wal-Mart distribution center where you could drop your loaded trailer and collect an empty one, then leave immediately for your next load. Wal-Mart wasn't worried about under-counted freight or breakage, they are big enough to just declare it unchallenged and the supplier accepts the loss and moves on. Trust doesn't factor into the process.

It wasn't all bad, you could offer to unload yourself for extra pay on some loads, but I only did this very rarely, once when delivering electric cars (GEM cars, like a super-deluxe street legal golf cart) to a warehouse. I drove them out of the trailer onto the loading dock and got paid an extra $100 for about two minutes of work! Easy to count too...

Additionally, the safety and compliance standards are different. For instance, ISO 26262 only applies to passenger vehicles.

One reason to think it'll happen much quicker in trucking is because the economic incentive is much higher for a trucking company to replace it's drivers than for a single person to use an autonomous car.

However, while the average consumer won't pay an extra $10-??k for a first generation self driving car that can't navigate their daily commute, a trucking company will glady pay an extra $50-???k for a first generation self driving truck that can only drive on highways to distribution centers if it means eliminating the human driver. The latter is as much as 50% of the operating cost of transportation, even when long haul trucking, so as long as capital and maintenance costs are comparable there is a lot more room to profit off of each sale. Even if it takes autonomous cars many more decades years to become an every day consumer item, autonomous trucks will likely be operational much sooner just because there is so much more money to be made in the short term from a few clients like Walmart, Amazon, Costco, etc. that don't need a perfect driving experience to benefit financially.

Not for a 100 years, don't believe the self-driving hype. That's what the rest of the article is about, the long distance highway truck driving jobs will (mostly) disappear but there's going to be a ton of city truck driving jobs that are likely to remain the domain of humans for decades to come.

That's the problem with most difficult to automate jobs that don't require college degree. They sound like anybody could do it. But there is huge difference between good renovation and bad renovation. The kind of guy who can do good job consistently is rare. The job requires passion and good attitude and personality that matches the job.

It's kinda sad how many men are passionate about driving a car. It's bit like how many women used to be passionate about weaving.