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Comment by onlyrealcuzzo | Hacker News Reader

I'll take a 90% efficiency gain any day. If they can drive I-70 from SF to NYC with no human, or the 10 from Florida to California, that seems like a win, even if the person has to drive in the city. Warehousing will just get shifted around to work with where the trucks can safely drive.

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I'll take a 90% efficiency gain any day.

If you need a safety driver 100% of the time, the net gain in efficiency is 0%.

Edit: There's no comment in the article about there being period with no safety driver.

If it's one safety driver monitoring 4 vehicles it's still a win.

But that isn't what the article talked about either (A European company did do a run like that a while though).

It did talk about "level 4 autonomy" based on a single drive with no disengagements (they mentioned they'd made a lot of drives but didn't mention their disengagement rate overall), doesn't sound like "achieving level 4" autonomy either-either.

How is one driver going to take over for 4 vehicles? Each truck needs a safety driver.

90% less human mistakes.

I'm sure someone's working on telepresence which kicks in when the AI's getting confused.

Earn credits for Stadia - solve these realtime truck simulator captcha!

I would imagine that the current google captcha system has so much traffic, you could use it to power real time driving with static pictures. Set 20 people to tell you if there is a stop sign. 50 more to decide if that object in the road is dangerous or not. All you need is a decent number of responses coming back that agree.

This is halarious and terrifying. I can envisage groups of trolls who get together to captcha-troll lorries into buldings or worse for lulz and the terribly written legislation shoved in place to mitigate it before nation-states get in on the fun.

>> If you need a safety driver 100% of the time, the net gain in efficiency is 0%.

If this trial period helps us improve the technology and eventually remove the safety driver after 1, 2, or 10yrs, that is a huge gain. What is the rush? -- every technology takes time to perfect. Lets judge the technology once it has had time to mature.

If the truck still requires a human for some tasks (intra-city, fuelling, etc.) but can be rated to legally drive itself for most of the trip, then the human could sleep / eat / etc. during those times they're not required. This would presumably let them avoid minimum stationary rest times etc. since they could get a full rest of sleep while the truck drives itself (on sufficiently long journeys).

For owner-operators who live out of their vehicle anyway and are more concerned about getting work than sleeping in a hotel somewhere this could dramatically increase the volume of work they can take on (at least until fully autonomous trucks become widely available and humans are completely deprecated as truck drivers).

From that perspective it would be more efficient, not 90% but there would be significant gains.

Well, if you had trucks that were safe enough to sleep in while they auto-drove, the companies would certainly want to go one better and have them drive empty. They could create dedicated fueling and loading areas if need-be.

But the trucks being that safe is the big question. The article describes a single trip without disengagement. Much more that is clearly needed.

"most of the trip"

So if I get woken up every 10 miles, am I really meeting the rest requirements?

I was thinking more like "the truck can legally drive itself until the next fuel stop in about 14 hours time, so I'm going to get some sleep".

No.

we still won't allow trains to operate without onboard supervision and they should much easier to automate

It doesnt help that the FRA is pretty awful and stuck in the 1880s.

Handling that 10% is going to be tricky, though. Can an unpiloted truck be trusted to know its limitations perfectly, shutdown and park when it hits borderline road conditions?

Edit: Okay, remote driver access might solve this.

Judging by how frequently I occasionally lose internet connection for a mile or two in my major metro area for even basic tasks, like Siri dictation or streaming audio, I can't imagine how remote takeover could possibly be the answer to the "10%" situation unless we're prepared for some percentage of the time we are faced with a truck that simply gives up, puts on four-way flashers and comes to a stop wherever it may be (which could include network dead zones)... and then it's a matter for the police and/or recovery workers to either get the AI back in the saddle or move the truck.

> Judging by how frequently I occasionally lose internet connection for a mile or two in my major metro area for even basic tasks, like Siri dictation or streaming audio, I can't imagine how remote takeover could possibly be the answer to the "10%" situation

I mean, it's possible that demand for self-driving trucks means reliable wireless connections get implemented everywhere they can drive.

There is already fantastic LTE along all the long-haul truck routes, because human truck drivers like to be connected to the rest of society while they are alone on the road for dozens of hours.

Also, Starlink is coming.

Interesting points.

The problem is that you can't plan the remaining 10%. Perhaps it's every 10 miles you have to have the safety driver take over. That makes it effectively useless.

That would be quite the feat given that I70 goes to neither of those states.

I80 goes SF to NJ, but no single interstate will take you from SF to NYC proper.

I'm pretty sure the control city on 80 east is NYC and not Newark.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interstate_80#New_Jersey

"I-80 does not enter New York City. [...] I-80's designated end (as per signage and New Jersey Department of Transportation documents) is four miles (6.4 km) short of New York City in Teaneck, before the Degraw Avenue overpass."

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