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Comment by smoe | Hacker News Reader

I don’t know much about the space, but always found it interesting that most of the conversation is about autonomous driving for individuals, which to me seems to be the last step after e.g cargo outside cities and public transportation has been automated. I reckon because the latter are less sexy, lead to job losses and maybe require more public acceptance?

I know there is a lot of work being done in this areas as well but what is the current state of it and what are the barriers?

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A city bus carrying 20 people has 5% the drivers-per-person that an individual vehicle has. The driverless system only would save 5% the human effort that it would for a solo vehicle, so it needs to be 20x as good before it's worthwhile. Put another way, the bus with 20 riders is already equivalent to automating 19 cars.

Roughly the same idea with freight - a single truck driver serves the needs of many people.

Human drivers still do meaningfully cost money to employ, and they do annoying things like needing to sleep or take rest room breaks. Autonomous trucking would completely revolutionize the industry.

Autonomous trucks for urban trucking are a pipe dream, but maybe for long-haul routes.

That said, it's not at all clear to me that developing autonomous trucks for long interstate routes would be meaningfully cheaper than laying rail on literally every high-traffic route on the planet, which uses perfectly-understood technology and has entirely predictable returns.

Presumably you would be able to leverage a lot of that effort and expand into autonomous driving for other scenarios, right?

That's what's being attempted, essentially.

Autonomous driving in good conditions on highways is already working quite well, but once it's wet/foggy and there are animals wandering onto the roads and other cars are behaving unpredictably... those are not straightforward problems to solve.

We already have a lot of rail in the world, but still have lots and lots of trucks. Is it just not enough rail? Roads are also useful for people in a really dynamic way that rail isn’t (especially for big countries like the US).

There is some path dependency here, trains came earlier than cars and early industrialised nations build rail networks that were far more extensive than they are now. There were also freight trams in cities like Berlin, which delivered cargo to smaller industrial sites in the city.

You can have a driver in the truck for the city portions (at the beginning and the end of the trip), but sleeping on the highway rather than having to stop the truck for a full night.

Sure, but when you load 20 people onto a vehicle, if you don't have a driver you still need a security guard.

Subways the world over do without just fine.

The train system in Sydney, Australia has a guard cabin which it's recommended to ride near at night when there aren't many people about.

I don't know if it's because I've only been here four years, or because I'm from a city/country with a lot more crime, or it's my train line, but I've never felt unsafe on the late trains or the night buses.

Also, for the unfamiliar, 'guard' here does not mean an armed guard.

Subways in my country at least definitely do have guards (but they also have human drivers, so I don't think the two are really related).

Every train in London, even the fully automated ones, have at least one person onboard. Maybe at some point that will change, but there's a lot of pressure against it.

Profit margin. The driver just isn't an expensive or limiting part of cargo transport.

To be clear, the conversation also isn't about autonomous driving for individually-owned cars. Tesla's disasters aside, its about autonomous taxi services.

Are you in the freight industry? Because drivers are exactly what is expensive and limits growth right now. there is a humongous supply of trucking jobs, and they are paying really high rates right now (up to 70-80 cents per mile)

Fuel is still wayyyy bigger than the driver.

Both would be valuable - but a truck that is 30% more fuel efficient is probably going to save more money than one that doesn't need a driver (but still needs people more loading).

There are different estimates everywhere - but I usually see 20-30% of trucking costs are drivers. In other freight industries (cargo ships, trains, etc.) it would obviously be less.

https://www.thetruckersreport.com/infographics/cost-of-truck...

Thanks for that chart, but I read it differently. Just because something isn't the No 1. cost doesn't mean people aren't interested in lowering the cost. So let's say there are 3 million truck drivers in the US that earn an average of say 50K {1}. That's $150 Billion in costs per annum. Sure, there are other costs that are higher, but if you could lower that only by 50% -- say automate some (but not all routes), that technology would save $75 Billion per year, and that number would grow with inflation. Even at a real discount rate of 8% (10% with 2% inflation), that is worth 937 Billion dollars -- nearly a trillion. Now let's say the software vendor who solves this splits the savings with the trucking industry, so they get 37.5 B per year and the industry gets the other half. That's some nice recurring revenue, worth significant investment if it's technologically feasible.

So this is all about scale. Everyone is obsessing over Uber for cultural and political reasons, but there are 1/10 as many taxi drivers as truck drivers, and they earn half as much. The big money is in trucking, and even if the problem is only half solved (say just for some long-haul routes), it would be worth hundreds of billions of dollars, even if truck driver wages are not the single most expensive cost. Hell they could be the 10th or 20th most expensive, what matters is the billions that could be saved, not the rank ordering.

{1}https://www.bls.gov/opub/mlr/2019/article/is-the-us-labor-ma...

Another thing is that autonomous truck can drive 24h. In most countries there are regulation how often drivers have to take a break, e.g. in Poland after 4.5h of driving truck driver need 45min break, after 9h there is mandatory minimum 11h break.

In Australia on the major trucking routes, many trucks are company owned and are handed over to fresh drivers at rest stops. The trucks can proceed to destinations while the drivers sleep

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