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Comment by notlukesky | Hacker News Reader

I always thought that autonomous driving was more than 10 years off (if not 20) for cars in city traffic. But I thought trucking in the US had a chance for intersate traffic till the proverbial last mile, because there are less edge cases that you need to train the model. Were you off by just 3 years for interstate “driving” till the last mile?

Will investors lose their loss memory and a whole new set will invest in the space in say 3 years.

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System worked. Problem was investors have mostly bet on full autonomy, and when that failed to materialized they got scared out of the space.

Full autonomy isn't necessary. And I don't know if it's even profitable for trucks.

> investors have mostly bet on full autonomy

lol.

I used to live on one of the side streets in MV that Google's AV cars trained on. Saw three in a row once. They were usually the only traffic, so that annual report of millions of miles travelled was meaningless - they might as well have driven arounf the Safeway parking lot at 5 am.

I guess passenger-carrying quadcopters is next. Oh wait ...

I live next to the weird intersection at Duboce Park. I see a Cruise car go by it every 30m.

A better solution for robotaxis - just avoid the weird intersections.

Does the current coronavirus pandemic assist you in promoting a teleop model? I'm not sure how much human to human contact there is in the business.

Hard to say. Truck drivers will be hit hard by this - they can't really stop interacting with people, almost never get paid time off, are older and in poor health, and are paycheck to paycheck.

My bet is that nearly all of them get COVID, with a higher hospitalization / mortality rate. Could knock 30% of capacity off the road in the next 2 quarters, which would mean food shortages.

There are some. Initial pickup, all the pit stops for fuel,food,sleep. The end of the journey,where the recipient may check the delivery and etc.

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