The challenge of autonomous trucks isn't that they're "more dangerous," it's a matter of physics and current LIDAR technology. The weight of the truck means there is a minimal safe stopping distance at a given speed. Frankly, the quality and distance of current LIDAR tech falls short of the distance required for safe stopping at the average highway speed for a truck.
Put another way, the autonomous driving stack has difficulty seeing far enough ahead of a truck to successfully stop in time to not cause an accident in highway environments. You'll need better fusion of perception stack (LIDAR + imaging + neural nets) or better LIDAR ranges to be able to deploy autonomous trucking sooner.
This year we've seen Luminar start to go public via SPAC, and their high-range Lidar has been mounted on most (all?) non-Waymo self-driving truck prototypes. There's even a public dataset with Luminar data now: https://github.com/TRI-ML/DDAD
So early on, when the number of people that know the system is small, it seems better to work on the bigger, more general problem, and branch out to the sub problem later on when there's more people to work on it.
From another perspective, of you stop work on cities to finish a trucks launch, you're losing ground to competitors working on cities, which may be decisive in the research phase.
- Insurance, since you're transporting others stuff at highway speeds
- You still need a CDL driver right now (not cheap)
- Economics - the failure of Starsky Robotics might offer some clues here
- Interstate Regulations on Driverless testing (?)
The interestion questions are "is the 'greater economic incentive for trucking' assumption correct in the first place" and if so, why were we still bothering with consumer automotive in the first place?
Teamsters would say otherwise.
That's obviously not a set of statistics that is possible to directly observe; such a conclusion is only possible through a model dependent on extrapolation which assumes that a relationship holds outside the observable range. (And it's also somewhat incoherent, as both corporate decision-makers and legislators are subsets of the public.)
It sounds like you're airing a general grievance against sampling, but I'm sure that's not what you mean, so please elaborate?
> And it's also somewhat incoherent, as both corporate decision-makers and legislators are subsets of the public.
I don't see how that renders anything 'incoherent'. Are you interpreting "unanimous public support" to mean "literally every single citizen supports this policy, including corporate decision-makers and legislators"? Such pedantry aside, it's entirely possible for an overwhelming majority of the public to want a particular policy decision irrespective of whether "corporate decision-makers" or legislators find themselves in the majority or minority.
In whatever case, the statistic I'm thinking of is from former labor secretary Robert Reich's "Inequality for All" documentary. I don't care to skim it for exact phrasing or numbers. Similar information can be found here: https://represent.us/action/no-the-problem/.
You obviously aren't going to have any measure that actually has 100% popular support. So the only way you could get to “if it has unanimity among the public, it has only a 30% chance of passing” based on anything even approximating empirical science is to take some observations about success at various less than unanimous levels, and develop a model of the relationship between public support and chance of passage, and use that model to extrapolate beyond the high endpoint of support from the data. Without a strong theoretical rationale which you have good reason other than the observed relationship within the tested range to believe is the explanation for the tested phenomenon, it is always suspect to extrapolate an empirical relationship outside of the range in which it has been observed.
> Similar information can be found here: > https://represent.us/action/no-the-problem/.
The study linked to support that is interesting, but since it models the effect of interest groups, including mass interest groups, separately from both public and elite individual preferences, and finds that both elite preferences and interest group alignment have significant independent impacts, but average citizen preferences don't have a strong separate effect, what it really indicates is that average citizens are effective in politics only to the extent that their preferences energize action through organized groups.
[1] https://www.truckinginfo.com/10126660/fmcsa-denies-request-f...
Trucks are big, heavy, and human-driven ones already scare enough people on the road. If you launch with trucks first, you risk a backlash from people who are afraid of them. If you start with an autonomous taxi service people can sit in the cars themselves, feel safe, see that there's a "safety driver" present, and even if they aren't in the vehicle they still get to interact with them on the roads. you can make people comfortable with the idea before you launch the trucks. and everything that goes into the self-driving taxis is still valuable development work for the trucks. I wouldn't be surprised if self-driving trucks actually are the first real commercial launch target for waymo, and the taxi thing is just PR.
as long as the regulatory situation allows it, yes. but until they're seeking approval to have them actually allowed on the roads, making people feel warm and fuzzy is pretty important.
Still have a driver do the last mile, for deliveries to stores, homes, etc, but the between cities, long haul routes seem ripe for automation. (especially with all the laws on driver mandatory rest periods).
You save a lot of money on accidents too by automating.
The problem is just that you still need a driver anyway, so it really doesn't help that much for now.
Its the same problem Waymo has in general.
Or I guess you mean they still need a driver because of compliance/legal issues?
What you suggest is an interesting idea, a total change on how we think about truck logistics. Its certainty possible but I don't know if we will ever get there. By the time the legal things are sorted out, the trucks might just drive themselves all the way to the destination.
And who will win general driving is yet open, and just assuming it Waymo is foolish. I think is funny how on HN people dismiss Tesla when there are actually tons of people who already do their commute on the highway almost without intervention literally all over the world.
They have trucks that will have this same feature and they have already talked about the idea of platooning.
Just downvoting me because you don't think Tesla approach is as good as Waymo/Daimler approach doesn't make what I said wrong.
That's just advanced driver assistance, nowhere near "full self driving". Granted, it's better than other cars, but it's still not self driving.
Also, "almost without intervention" has no meaning if you have to keep your hand at the wheel at all times ready to takeover.