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Comment by rakoo | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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