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Comment by hourislate | Hacker News Reader

The driver is such a small cost in all of this. Contrary to what the media says, drivers are really not making that much for the amount of time they spend in the truck and on the road.

It would be good if an autonomous system could be more of a supporting technology that works with the driver allowing him/her to rest while it takes over on those long interstate segments of a trip. It would definitely save time and money for everyone. Best of all you still have the driver to complete the difficult segments or deal with bad weather and break downs.

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It's true that drivers don't earn much in the end when it comes to $ / year—but the "truck" does cost quite a bit: fuel, maintenance, insurance, equipment loans, etc.

The driver is still making ~50% of the overall cost of a truck (whether that amounts to a livable wage is a whole 'nother discussion).

https://www.freightwaves.com/news/understanding-total-operat... has a good breakdown of the cost structure for carriers.

It's not just the drivers salary, it's finding drivers (up till covid, trucking companies were getting desperate and jacking up rates here) and the rules about hours behind the wheel. Self driving trucks don't have drug testing, physicals, better job offers, and mandatory rest periods

If a truck has two drivers on board, can one sleep while the other drives?

If so, it should be pretty straightforward - even with current rules - to have the human sleep (or watch movies) while the computer does the long-distance runs, then have the human do the last mile and exception-handling locally (not talking about split-second emergency takeover, just "the truck has stopped because it can't figure out what to do").

The problem with highway driving is that there often isn't time to safely stop and pull over if it doesn't know what to do going at highway speeds.

> If a truck has two drivers on board, can one sleep while the other drives?

There is a difference between "can" and "does it help re: times" - and the answer at least for Europe is no (https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lenk-_und_Ruhezeiten). The "down time" has to be in a stationary vehicle or outside of the vehicle (e.g. hotel) in order to count.

The trucking companies were desperate, but apparently not desperate enough to significantly raise wages or improve working conditions.

uh..not this tangent again.

this isn't a helpful comment

What is "this" tangent again? I might be going off on a tangent here but, I bet it's this novel idea that companies should raise their compensation when they have trouble finding people to fill their open positions.

> companies should raise their compensation when they have trouble finding people to fill their open positions.

So you are anti H1B ? another tangent :D

Another inflammatory strawman comment, not this again...

exactly!

They can't. Trucking is an undifferentiated / commoditized service in a fragmented market. If one company increases pay to drivers, they can't increase rates to customers because they'll just shift their demand to someone cheaper.

As a results rates can't rise very quickly, which means that trucking companies can't really afford to pay drivers any better (obviously with some and slight exceptions, and only talking about US long haul trucking).

And yet shipping prices rose quickly when there was a spike in diesel fuel costs several years ago.

Trucking companies could solve some of their work environment related employee retention problems for free. For example by firing toxic managers, and treating drivers with a little more respect.

It's not that they can't find new drivers, it's that the business model specifically relies on new drivers to make money so they want as many as they can get. The trucking companies finance the purchase of trucks by these freshly trained "independent" drivers, who may own their truck but also agree to a contract to only take jobs from the trucking company that trained them and provided financing. Many of these drivers make almost no money despite delivering loads, and eventually return the truck and get out of their contract, having made nothing or even lost money.

Somewhere around 1.7 million people do that job full time. They average $45k/year. That's $76.5 billion per year before any of the other costs of employing them besides salary.

Planet Money had an interesting episode recently of some of the sketchier ways that drivers are exploited. Worth a listen if you're interested - https://www.npr.org/2020/08/10/901110994/big-rigged

They're like 43% of costs in trucking though.

I strongly believe that focus on drivers is a red herring born from inaccurate sci-fi.

Drivers are necessary anyway, because humans can adapt to more situations. Roadblock? The driver (of the autonomous vehicle) can call dispatch to warn the next vehicles, reroute, and get the blockage handled. Bandits? They can detect and assess the danger, call police, and de-escalate the situation.

But truly autonomous vehicles can drive while the driver sleeps. That alone means reduced latency for the transport of goods over large distances. Even better, drivers can handle multiple vehicles following each other, which means increased bandwidth.

If driving pays badly we should still automate it for the sake of reducing "busywork".

The driver severely limits the amount of work the truck can do. A driverless truck could be working pretty much 24x7, which is 168 hours a week. A human driver can only do a maximum of about 60 hours/wk. Therefore each robot truck can do more than twice as much work, saving significantly on capital costs.

Could a truck actually legally drive 168h per week in the US?

I heard that trucks in Germany need exceptional reasons (like transporting medicine) to drive on Sundays, and in Switzerland, vehicles above 3.5t aren't allowed to drive between 2200 and 0500 hours at all.

I've never heard of any regulations in America on when a truck can be on the road, and have seen them on the interstate every time I've driven on one, regardless of time or date.

Agree with what you said. However, I believe drivers have a high indirect cost. In fact, in Europe truck drivers can drive only 8h/day maximum with mandated breaks every so often. This means that your truck has, at best, 1/3 efficiency unless you cram 2 or 3 drivers in the truck that can rotate.

Automation allows for scaling, isn’t that the point? So that trucks can be simply purchased, dispatched, or retired to alter capacities rather than manually handling individual drivers.

Drivers still need to sleep. Can't an autonomous solution run all day and night and increase capacity by ~30%?

> Contrary to what the media says, drivers are really not making that much for the amount of time they spend in the truck and on the road.

Uhh, what media are you watching that are saying that truck drivers are raking in the dough?

VHS tapes of the Saturday afternoon movie matinee on the local UHF channel, showing ads from the Truck Driving Institue.

Here is just one example. If you're familiar with Google, you should be able to pull up some more articles on the subject.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2018/05/28/ameri...

On the other hand [1] says "Walmart has upped the ante by raising driver salaries to $87,500 [...] The median annual wage for most tractor-trailer truck drivers across the U.S. is $44,500, [...] only 10 percent of truckers earn above $64,000."

Needless to say, whether those count as "raking in the dough" depends on whether you consider a night sleeping in a truck stop as work time or leisure time.

[1] https://www.cnbc.com/2019/01/28/walmart-is-hiring-hundreds-o...

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