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Comment by briffle | Hacker News Reader

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

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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.

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.

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