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Comment by dmitriid | Hacker News Reader

The gist:

> The T-Pod has permission to make short trips - between a warehouse and a terminal - on a public road in an industrial area in Jonkoping, central Sweden, at up to 5 km/hr, documents from the transport authority show. > > Einride would apply next year for more public route permits and was planning to expand in the United States.

So, not as sensational as the title would lead you believe.

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Whoever claimed that Jönköping is in central Sweden needs some kind of measuring device, it's quite clearly in the south. Even if the northern half is comparatively sparsely populated it still counts as part of Sweden.

https://www.openstreetmap.org/?mlat=57.783333&mlon=14.166667...

It's like when people say anything more than an hour north of NYC is "upstate".

You kind of need to have a "there is no land beyond the beltway" world view to wind up working for most media outlets anyway (not sure which is the chicken and which is the egg) so this is "central Sweden" by that yard stick.

> It's like when people say anything more than an hour north of NYC is "upstate".

That is a correct statement that essentially nobody would argue with.

The more aggressive and somewhat arguable view is that upstate is anything north of about 125th street.

I was born in Brooklyn and (seriously) everything north of The Bronx was upstate.

I mean realistically the only actual argument is if the upstate line is there, or immediately north of Westchester County.

I believe this is what is referred to as central Sweden because it lies in the middle of Sweden's two major cities, Stockholm and Gothenburg. Similarly, Austin is considered Central Texas, Dallas is considered North Texas, etc. even though that isn't extremely accurate looking at a map.

ThatI would argue that an population based map projection would put Jönköping nicely in the middle.

https://www.visualcapitalist.com/massive-world-map-redrawn-b...

Is it not the first fully autonomous truck, if not vehicle, used in a "real life" scenario that is not just a closed-off portion of a street ? That is the real interesting point, regardless of the speed or the actual location.

It's definitely not the first /vehicle/. Waymo has fully autonomous cars driving people around in Phoenix.

Those are manned with a qualified driver who supposedly is paying attention and can take control at any time.

These trucks are unmanned, with a remote driver who may or may not be paying attention but can take control at any time.

The rule is clearly stated in the swedish article that during these drives a person must be present with one hand on the controls just I'm case. Same saftey net, really, remote or not imo makes no difference

Slight difference that makes it all the more interesting: the remote controller watches 10 vehicles at once. I feel this is the same difference as a manned vs unmanned subway, because it means reliability is good enough that you don't need one human per vehicle. Each vehicle is a little bit more autonomous.

Also, the safety net inside the vehicle is clearly just for testing purposes, while the remote safety net is something that can be done in production.

The remote controller can not only watch 10 vehicles at the same time, but also go home at the end of a 6 hours shift and handle the vehicles to another driver without even stopping.

Waymo operated some trips without safety drivers Nov 2018.

not even the first in Sweden, I took a ride on a self driving bus (that had a safety person sitting bored inside) in a suburb of Stockholm

https://mitti.se/nyheter/forsvinner-sjalvkorande-bussar/

Offtopic, but my favorite line of the article:

"We where very surprised to see how many people intentionally jumped in front of the moving buses to see if they would stop"

Probably drivers from the local transit union. I've seen/read about (union) activists doing some crazy things and it wouldn't surprise me that someone or some people would try to show with their life that this is a bad idea and therefore shouldn't replace a human driven system.

Do you have any data to back the assertion that this was about unions?

My gut says that it’s more probable that it was the hacker news crowd trying to test the technology, but I have to admit to have absolutely no data to support this assertion, either.

I'm almost certain you are right, especially considering this bus operated in an area where there a lot of tech companies.

Was it on the streets, with no traffic blocking ? I took the same kind of shuttles as part of an experiment, but it was on a very specific path that was shared with pedestrians, not on the road.

They ran a test in Gothenburg as well at one of the university campuses. And while some of the roads they ran on where technically public car roads, they where small back roads across campus that see very little car traffic.

>So, not as sensational as the title would lead you believe.

But enough to make me believe in not wanting to get a future job in driving trucks (there's a market here that pays)

It’s not like many kids are planning to be truck drivers. It is a job that people wander into. The bigger problem will be those that are doing it when the job goes away, as well as continued pressure on the job market as a whole (what will pop up to replace the portion of the labor pool that would have driven trucks before).

I think truck drivers (especially long haulers) are safe for at least 10-20 years. But yeah, truck are probably the first road vehicles to be reliably automated.

Actually, I think that long haulers are going to be the ones that first suffer. When you need a human there anyway to sign/unload/etc, then having that human also be a driver isn't such a huge problem. With long-haul the only thing that the human really needs to do is drive, and then, if needed, you could have a staging area to get the truck into the city… in much the same way that road-trains are dealt with.

My thinking is that long haul happens over public roads, and the problem of navigating public roads hasn't been solved yet.

However, shorter distances especially inside large industrial zones (like in the linked article) can be reliably automated.

But yeah, however you look at it, being a truck driver in industrial countries might not be a wise long-term career choice: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/apr/07/convoy-se...

So kinda like the automated trailers used for containers at major ports, just electric.

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