The Poor ROI of Autonomy (2020)
medium.com
medium.com
1) The model most are working toward is "hub to hub" not point to point. As in, A human driver drives the truck from the warehouse or port to a hub on the highway outside the city surface streets. Then they get out of the truck and pick up another one that needs to go back into the city. The truck then drives itself on the highway to another hub near its destination where another human driver completes the trip. This works in multiple ways - it allows human drivers to deal with the hard part of automation while also avoiding the terrible away from home lifestyle, and it allows you to have dedicated autonomous trucks for on-highway separate from your human-driven fleet (you can swap the trailers instead of using the same cab). You'll see these hubs start cropping up in a couple years.
2) On-highway autonomy is not that far away anymore. It's definitely not a "next year" thing, but mid-late decade is a near certainty based on the current state of the tech. That's a long time for people used to software, but not a long time compared to the lifecycle of a truck.
3) There seems to be an implicit assumption in this write-up that autonomous systems will remain horribly expensive, which isn't true. They're expensive today because each generation of development is effectively custom built in small quantities. Just like Starsky said their camera system would drop in price with scale, a "ready for production" generation of autonomous driving kit in a few years will likely be close to 1/3 the current kit cost, which has very large impacts on the total ROI calculation.
I don't want to make it sound like there aren't big challenges left to solve - there are - but there's also a reason so much investment money has flowed into this space. The ROI does make sense, just not on the original hype-cycle timeline that a lot of people reported.
Autonomy also dove-tails very well with the inevitable electrification (reduced maintenance, higher up time, higher capex lower opex, etc)
DO you have any opinions on etrucks-battery-swapping?
> The charge time offers time for maintenance & switching trailers
> Charge times keep dropping & miles per charge keep increasing
> Batteries currently make up almost half the price of a car. Battery prices are dropping though. Not sure about cab prices. Also these cabs might be very cheap without human comforts in comparison to the battery, so if battery ends up being bulk of cost, you might gain little value there.
Anyways just 2 random cents from someone who finds interest in this but doesn't actually know anything.
Edit: I know from experience that getting a project to what we think is 95% there is relatively easy compared to the last 5% that make the product/project 100% viable. The real life testing will kill you if the edge cases don't. (I don't mean that literally, although...)
people are generally a lot less brazen towards other humans compared to how they interact with automations or things that are remotely surveilled rather than with a human attendant.
trains with unarmed guards generally don't get robbed.
Hijackers will be 3d printed and their facsimiles imprisoned
Which came first? Trucking or the CS degree?
Why trucking if you have the degree required to get a job sitting behind a computer vs sitting behind the wheel?
What're your general thoughts about the two industries/jobs?
As for comparing industries, I don't know, how can you compare when one has really small margins, has no technology besides tracking and logistics, is really change averse and has basically an un-educated cheap labor force and the other has hopefully good margins, a well paid skilled labor force and creates technology.
One thing for sure, a good or a bad boss is the same in both industries lol.
What's the competitive advantage of this setup over a train?
1. You benefit from the massive subsidy America provides for road transport
2. You can serve places that don't have good rail connections
3. If you're moving standard trailers, your 'hubs' don't need costly build-out like cranes. Your MVP hub is just a car park - or maybe even just a quiet side street. So you can serve a town that needs 2 trucks/week, instead of only being able to serve towns that need 40 trucks/week.
[1] https://medium.com/starsky-robotics-blog/the-end-of-starsky-...
"While this is a lower margin business than software’s traditional 90%, we expected to be able to get to a 50% margin in time.
It took me way too long to realize that VCs would rather a $1b business with a 90% margin than a $5b business with a 50% margin, even if capital requirements and growth were the same.
And growth would be the same. The biggest limiter of autonomous deployments isn’t sales, it’s safety."
In either case, returns are gated on fleet deployments, and the teleoperator approach seems more likely to deploy sooner at scale. Is it that VC's in this case were not investing in logistics, but in AI?
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opportunity_cost
You cannot say all things are equal, then x5 the total revenue of a company with significantly lower margins and say you’re comparing apples to apples.
Like to like comparison would be six companies each making one billion of which half have a 90% margin, other half having a 50% margin. If you only have the capital to invest in three, which would you pick, assuming all other factors were identical?
That said, even if the 50% margin reaches 5 billion in revenue, in theory cash flow might be more that the one billion in revenue company over a long period, but VC invest to flip investments, not for cash flow.
And from the numbers on the article, it would get a 50% margin, with something around 3 to 5 times ROI in an year.
That's certainly not young Google, but why the hell would somebody refuse to finance this pivot? (There's something clearly missing, either from the company of from the VC's side, but VCs seem to get on that situation again and again.)
The numbers were for fully manual remote driving. This thread is all about asking why they closed down instead of going in the fully manual remote option.
The article makes it look like the manual remote driving was perfectly viable already. Although there are obvious connectivity problems for scaling it over huge distances.
> They also assumed margins would not be razor thin if two or more logistics companies succeed in creating autonomous trucks
Any midsized investor would expect to reap the high margins during the transition, and deal with (maybe sell) a fully established very large and lucrative logistics company afterwards. A smaller investor would expect to sell it as a service to all logistics companies, and reap a share of that 3x ROI with much smaller investment during the transition, and then probably sell the company for relatively cheap.
For example, this test was on a public road, but it was closed to the public during the test:
https://www.thedrive.com/tech/28520/starsky-robotics-becomes...
Please don’t depend on a single source, especially when that source is biased and likely has an agenda.
See Twiggy Forrest and Mike Cannon Brookes. They're investing in solar to power a long-line HVDC feed from NT Australia to Singapore, and Forrest is funding H2 plants in Gladstone, Qld Australia to supply a future Hydrogen market which doesn't yet exist. Why? because they WANT TO.
"oh, if you want to, then you aren't a VC" .. sorry, its not always just about the money.
I mean I don't think we'll have fully autonomous vehicles using AI for a very long time because it basically requires strong AI... But it also doesn't seem like research is especially stalled.
Its not cut and dry / black and white, there has been some loss in efficiency in some areas but that is a learning process and we're constantly reviewing and updating.
For us its about economy of scale, and given we control our mine sites 100% its a bit simpler than fwy's and hwy's etc.. we dont get inattentive drivers and drunk drivers and teenagers in blinged up ricerboxes.
The value its added has shown me that autonomy on the public roads is definitely going to be a thing and probably very soon. I would expect insurance companies to be the biggest drivers... offering discounts to vehicles that are not driven by humans. follow by municipal councils, who will notice that the more autonomous vehicles there are, the fewer accidents there will be and the better traffic flow is thereby reducing the need for road expansions and traffic management upgrades.
Won't this better traffic flow be offset by new congestion from AVs using the capacity of public roads as free car parks?
aka the Jevons Paradox
The unit economics is wonderful to go through. Appreciate the research!
> The hardest 1% of the technical problem, automating the surface streets and interchanges, would end up being worth only about $600/truck/yr. Level 4 truck autonomy has less value than a daily coffee.
Note that savings is $600, not $600,000. For a $100K truck, that’s 0.6% per year. Not nothing, but they’re happy to let someone else do the Herculean effort to get to L4.
For each programmer on a team that could do it in a year for, say, $240K in comp, you’d need 400 truck-years ($40M worth of trucks for 1 year) to make it a break even proposition. How many programmer-years do you think it would take to build L4 autonomous trucks? How many programmer-years have FAANG alone (leave out auto manufacturers or taxi apps) spent over the last decade on autonomous driving?
I think Tesla is the only company attempting this alone, all the other car manufactures are just in some form of partnership with others. These partnerships are known to include the big truck manufactures. I suppose there are a few car companies not investing in this (either tiny, or not selling cars in western countries).
Second, I think it is a bit naive to think that truck manufacturers/tech companies will just sell trucks for a similar fix price to traditional trucking companies. I think they will either
- lease them at an expensive rate (getting most of the additional margin, since they also deliver the value)
- offer them as a service, such that trucking companies only manage contracts (also expensive)
- found their own new companies or buy trucking companies to handle the contracts
Imagine a chain of autonomous trucks on a highway — isn't this basically a less energy efficient, less capacity version of a train that pushes a part of the costs onto public infrastructure?
Granted, trucks can also cover the last and the first mile(s) with much more flexibility, but a well designed system that allows you to quickly move containers from trains to trucks and vice versa could do just that as well.
Also: while this might not be as relevant within the US, on the rest of Earth truckers often also handle the customs at national borders and need to interact with certain laws. E.g. last week Bavaria, Germany banned trucks from taking non-highway routes to Austria. Not sure how an autonomous vehicle would honor this, or how police would be able to stop them. The mechanisms for doing all the things beyond just driving are just not there.
Imagine a chain of autonomous trucks on a highway powered by overhead wires. https://www.openenlocc.net/editorial/
What? It's not like an autonomous vehicle is a 100% black box that you tell "go to point X" and everything after that it figures out itself. Of course it's based on traditional route planning and you can just tell that route planning to not consider banned roads.
In principle, yes. And a train is basically a less energy efficient version of a barge or a ship. The trade-off lies obviously elsewhere (and is complex). Typical problems are loading and unloading goods (which is often quite slow, even when containers are used) and re-assembling trains en route when wagons have different destinations. B2B in bulk is were trains excell, such as deliviering coal from a mine to a power plant.
> ... that pushes a part of the costs onto public infrastructure
Only if trucks are not adequately charged via taxes and tolls. To get foreign trucks involved in financing the road network, many European countries have moved from pure tax-based systems (on petrol and the vehicle itself) to toll systems in recent years.
The company operating them tells their engineers to implement the change in the routing algorithm.
> or how police would be able to stop them.
By flashing their lights and pulling the autonomous truck over, just like they do with any normal vehicle.
To your other point, yes, people are still needed for various purposes in the transport process. And that's sort of the issue. If at the end of the day, you need people available at various points, trying to automate past maybe some of the long haul highway sections (which probably has safety etc. benefits as well) doesn't really buy you a lot. Elaborate schemes of depots at highway exits and so forth have clearly diminishing returns.
You have similar but different considerations for automobiles. Unless you're truly going to have door to door in at least most conditions autonomy, automating long boring highway driving is really the big win even if it doesn't give urbanites in particular the personal chauffeur they want.
I think a big reason why trains aren’t used more (and why highway trucking is booming) is because the industry is sclerotic. In the US at least, it is one of the most conservative industries there is at all levels: regulators, companies, and workers. And because of the difficulty of switching, it’s hard to incrementally innovate on the system.
That said, there ARE companies innovating in this space. This seems like an obvious improvement on the status quo: https://moveparallel.com/
With battery-electric systems (enabled by lithium-ion), there is no massive benefit from centralizing motive power in the locomotives (thermal engines gain a lot of efficiency by scaling up, electric systems can operate efficiently at any scale), so you can just have individual packet-switching-like rail cars. Containerization systems (such as cranes, etc) open up the trade space for switching payloads without requiring complex and land-intensive switching yards for everything.
And there should be more room on the freight rail system as we decarbonize. Coal was 25% of rail volume in 2009 (much higher, if you go by total originated rail tonnage). There will be room on the railroads for more volume.
As such it isn't clear how much more efficient trains would be in the real world of freight.
Note that the above is about freight. Transporting humans as a number of different factors making the above inapplicable.
- You dan easily split of part of your convoy at any time.
- You can run convoys much closer together because the breaking distance is much better.
- your infrastructuur is re-usable by the general public.
- A single convoy breakdown doesn't completely block the tracks for other convoys. (Put differently, every location is an overtaking location)
It's the general public's infrastructure to begin with and for most countries this is also true for rails and their use. Trucks damage the surface a lot lot more than cars which currently in most countries isn't really accounted for. If it was (trough toll fees notably higher for trucks for example tho imo tolls are annoying and generally badly implemented) then it becomes a downside.
Do they keep trucks longer since they do less mileage?
Do they start billing by the hour?
Does their schedule become less pre-booked and simply on-demand?
Waymo seems to be working on it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z09jND0G6HQ but the fact that this 20 second maneuver is warranting a video in their eyes should tell you how complicated it is.
Imagine a new truck company created by one or more tech giants. A) Using state of the art tech. B) Assuming mostly full autonomy. C) Factor in the cost savings.
Conclusion is this company would very largely outperform traditional trucking companies in terms of profitability. And it would be extremely scalable.
If that holds then it follows that autonomy is simply the last component necessary to be able to disrupt the trucking industry as is.
The real question is to what degree autonomy is needed to be able to start doing this.
https://www.uber.com/us/en/freight/
(p.s. not an endorsement, I'm personally not a fan of Uber due to their tendency to play the role of Bad-Actor against both their gig-economy workers and customers, even seeking out and leveraging political corruption. Really low standards for ethical code of conduct.)
Autonomous trucks only have a chance if cash is dirt cheap, maintenance on the equipment is low, but labor is very expensive.
Which… isn’t what is happening now or likely for awhile.
- truck new: $150,000
- cost of electronics: $50,000
- maintenance: $10,000/yr (over non-automated)
- efficiency factor: 2x
- wages saved: $75,000/yr
So putting it together:
$200,000 setup but $65,000/yr saved, before counting efficiency. Adding in that drivers can only drive 11/24 hours (legally), you get $130,000/yr saved and drop your initial capital outlay in half.
Automated trucks pay for themselves in just a few years — if not immediately, due to cutting your fleet in half.
We’re talking a rack of GPUs for $50k. Nothing about the problem suggests that automated driving can’t be done with a rack of GPUs per vehicle.
We have tractors self-driving and doing real-time analysis on a field of view to decide how to treat plants with a lot less compute than that.
Slapping an extra $50k on the sticker price of an average truck (which is what I think we both googled to discover it's $150k) and doing some rudimentary maths doesn't result in an answer to the question of whether self-driving trucks are possible, affordable or practical. It just tells you whether some finger-in-the-air numbers you selected sum to >0.
The autonomous truck also have to be able to handle all kinds of tight and busy city streets, badly thought out warehouse terminals and a million other things that is an annoyance for a trucker but a huge problem to automate.
I think you reduce a lot of the challenge with freeway-only driving between large staging lots adjacent to industrial areas and allowing humans to do the “hard” part of the first + final mile.
This seems like a problem already solved in the airline industry.
* Pilots don't load and unload the planes. Baggage handlers and gate agents do that. Flight attendants ensure that self-loading cargo is adequately strapped.
* Airline dispatchers (a job which requires an FAA certification) handle much of the flight planning, weather monitoring and other paperwork.
In other words, many of the "other things" a truck driver does are outsourced in the airline context to other employees who are not controlling the airplane.
I don't really see why the DoT couldn't create an analogous "truck dispatcher" position for OTR trucking, who handles all or most of the things you described.
One long-term consequence is that it would further entrench the scale effects of volume shippers (like ports and Amazon warehouses): A dispatcher at the origin would be the responsible person to verify that loads are correctly stacked and strapped, and shippers below a certain scale would not be able to fully use a full-time person in that role.
Amortized, the answer seems to be that trucks would remain affordable — even at the $100B to $1T cost to develop.
> It just tells you whether some finger-in-the-air numbers you selected sum to >0.
Estimating the unit economics and R+D amortized cost (as I did) is more reliable than going based purely on your feelings — as you have done.
I’d appreciate if you would make specific criticisms about my model, rather than tell me how you feel about the topic.
You feel that self-driving trucks will be solved with a $100b-$1tn investment
I feel like that simply won’t happen.
That’s really what this boils down to. It’s ok to fall back on gut-feel on these issues, don’t let guys like Ben Shapiro tell you otherwise :-)
The difference is that we can look at other R+D of technologies (which cost less than that), the rate of autonomous piloting in drones and cars, and have reasonable idea that $100B-$1T over a decade will allow us to reach the level of freeway driving for trucks.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DARPA_Grand_Challenge
https://www.tesla.com/support/autopilot
https://www.sciencefocus.com/news/self-driving-car-trial-lau...
There are already most of the key components — and we’re ball-parking (on the high side) what that will cost to productize.
You haven’t presented any basis for why you think that won’t happen, other than you just don’t like it.
I understand you want estimates based on existing technologies and unit prices to be the same as your gut feeling — but they’re not.
that's not even close to a fair comparison.
In practice, the fixed costs of R&D in the AV space are pretty large. If for example it takes 500 engineers that cost 250k per year to make the trucks self driving, then you're spending 125M per year just in engineer salaries. That's of course excluding any of the costs spent on things like data storage (cameras and lidars generate a ton of data), compute (ML eats a ton of processing), data labeling, mapping, vehicle testing, fleet management, regulatory compliance, etc.
There are 2M semi-trucks in the US, so if half are automated (1M), you can spend $1B per year for $1k per truck per year. Which doesn’t substantially change my calculations. That’s my point: the unit costs are so ridiculously good that pulling $10k/yr in tech overhead, or $10B/yr total, you’d still come out ahead in 5 years.
Phrased another way: we can spend $100B across a decade to develop automated trucking, and the consequence would be our automated trucks break even in three to five years instead of two to three years, after amortizing the R+D.
I didn’t assess the operations because I couldn’t find a good metric on how much that costs now - and hand waved fleet maintenance, testing, regulation, etc as approximately the cost of the current burdens for those things.
It's just that the AV players absolutely need to operate at scale, as their fixed costs are really high compared to a traditional trucking company.
You can retain (relatively) small fleets if the manufacturer is amortizing the cost of technology across vehicles sold.
But I always consider at least 3 or maybe even more players. Each invest huge amount of money. Now there is oversupply. They must get at least some of this back. Thus they start to compete with prices. Eventually they end up with pretty slim profit margins.
It would seem with modern automation that you could place relay stations at roughly 250 mile spacings so a driver can pick up a trailer near home, drive 4 hours out, drop off trailer, pick up new one, drive 4 hours back home, drop off trailer, and go home.
This seems like a much easier nut to crack than autonomous driving. Real estate in a lot of flyover country in America is really cheap. And it has other advantages like gasoline and service are at specified points. Basically, treat trailers like IP packets.
What am I missing? (I suspect some sort of CapEx/OpEx accounting tomfoolery that means everybody wants everybody else to take the risk of actually owning things.)
You also lose throughput by introducing potential handover delays. You end up with a bloated admin that is continuously having to fix a shifting constraint as certain legs become bottlenecks, etc.
Heck, no. America's philosophy is if you don't work, you don't eat.
The people investing the capital to replace the workers are doing this so they can capture the money that used to go to the workers. And that's what will continue to happen.
I would argue the rich would much prefer to let everyone live at some <low but "okay"> standard of living than have a few more zeros on their bank totals and live in constant fear.
I think the world shown in the movie Elysium portrays this reality and its possible outcomes better than I can do. Not the be the best movie ever, but it got this part pretty well in my mind...
I suspect many of the rich don't feel they are yet rich enough for this reasoning to be applicable to them.... and each year as they get richer, their subconscious goalposts move a little further.
The basic thesis is while tech makes some jobs obsolete, but they will be replaced by newer jobs, and everyone benefits from the better, cheaper world created by the tech advancement(s). The main critique for this notion is asking how many of these new jobs are really created, and whether they offer the same stability and benefits.
If this thesis is valid however, the other big issue that remains is the widening wealth gap. The solution for that is probably not banning automation - but rather progressive taxation based on one's wealth. I know some people find this idea evil, but it's a fantastic solution to the issue of extreme inequality.
The bottom line is that automating a job is obviously a net positive because it frees up a human to do something else elsewhere, while still providing the same added value as before. There will always be something for that human to do, even if not a traditional style job.
The gap, as you point out, is making sure that newly created value gets taxed and provided to that freed up person as UBI, so that they can continue to live and consume those products that the machine makes in the first place, otherwise there is no demand for them and capitalism doesn't work. There is no point in having an army of robots making hats if there's nobody to wear them.
I doubt it is really possible to design a system for 'just' highway driving of such high quality that no intervention is required within the reaction time of a remote operator without actually trying to fully solve it. This could be limited to highways of course, but a loss of connection in city regions would then automatically mean the truck would have to stop where it is (in the middle of the road with hazards on)
I do like the remote operator scenario for start and end quite a lot though as it would ease the incremental inclusion of autonomy into the truck economy and offer higher safety with machines this big.
Other than that isn't there in London a autonomous train? I remember riding that in 2005 or so
I think that automation is possible because it was built de novo and doesn't interface with the rest of the rail network.
Automated trains do have difficulties, but they are very different from the ones you see with human drivers.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_automated_train_system...
The problem is automatizing the existing infrastructure, 'cause it requires great effort (so, money and inconveniences).
I don't think however that the lessons there are applicable to cars as well, and while I think we could and should invest a lot on train systems, the final goal for cars should be reducing them, not replacing them with autonomous systems.
I don't follow. As Animats indicated, there are already plenty of autonomous trains that work fine.
As the other poster said, the main need for humans is to fix mechanical problems. If the door jams, unjam it (why can't passengers use a different door or figure out how to unjam it>) If someone is having a heart attack do CPR until medical crew arrives, then stop the train until the medical crew is off (central dispatch can teach anyone CPR over the phone and stop the train). If someone is attacked - stop the the attack (unless you are a trained police office you will probably make the situation worse trying to stop an attack)
In short there actually isn't that much that a human can do that a computer cannot do better.
Passengers fixing their own doors and responding to their own emergency alarms doesn't fit most people's definitions of "better". Hence why even though train automation has been possible for decades, most trains and especially most trains travelling long distances aren't.
Has it been done on anything more complex than 100% underground subway line with the train just going back and forth?
Imagine a door gets jammed or there are some problematic passengers. If there is someone on board they can fix the problem in a couple minutes. But on a completely automated train there is no one on board to fix the problem. One solution would be that you send out crews to arrive at smaller stations and fix the issue, and larger stations could have dedicated people, but that is already more investment and less efficient than just having someone on board.
Retrofitting automation for a train network in a wealthy country like Switzerland wouldn’t be a big problem, but it just makes more sense to leave the driver in there. Accordingly, SBB is investing much more into driver augmentation to help the drivers drive as efficiently, safely, and consistently as possible.
Political: union strikes (meaning if you want to automate a line you may have to accept it being closed for the duration) and public outcry over a reduction in jobs.
Cost: You often only get the benefit of the simpler domain if you can implement the whole system from scratch, if you have to deal with the existing signalling, engines, (and human-driven trains) that's a complex problem, with massive capital outlay.
For local public transit subway (ny mta, path ny nj), I think the cost is worth it if it means fewer delays.
https://www.republicworld.com/world-news/australia/australia...
Traditional lineside signals and signs do give enough information to drive a train by a computer, but the rail industry has already chosen decades ago to integrate signalling and automation with the infrastructure, which is a completely different approach than today's self-driving cars. As a result, heavy rail and metro trains will not be "self-driving" in the same way as self-driving cars.
Now, if you say trams that run on streets, then possibly. Trams are often driven by sight and has stronger braking so it is possible to apply the same principles from self-driving cars. In fact, Siemens has been developing and testing one such tram. [1] Though I think the problem space is very similar to self-driving cars. There is no steering, but it still has to handle pedestrians and other road traffic.
[1]: https://www.mobility.siemens.com/global/en/portfolio/rail/ro...
I wonder how latency is handled. I wonder how close nearby you'd still want the remote driver since someone across the world would have at least hundreds of milliseconds in delay communicating back and forth
Also, what happens in periods of disconnectivity? It seems like you'd still need some autonomous capability then, although it might be lessened to only needing to pull over?
For the future, the good news is that the world is already headed towards a state where roads come with high-speed connectivity infrastructure for vehicle-to-vehicle, vehicle-to-infrastructure and vehicle-to-x communication. Building reliable, high-speed connectivity to the road makes a lot of sense if you want autonomy to really take off.
That makes sense, but just sounds like a worse version of freight trains to me.
(Edit: This didn't reply to the correct comment)
Autonomy was acquired by Hewlett-Packard (HP) in October 2011. The deal valued Autonomy at $11.7 billion (£7.4 billion). Within a year, HP had written off $8.8 billion of Autonomy's value. HP claimed this resulted from "serious accounting improprieties" and "outright misrepresentations" by the previous management.
> Mining giant Rio Tinto is running pits at its Yandicoogina and Nammuldi mine sites, with workers controlling the driverless trucks largely from an operations centre in Perth, 1,200 kilometres away.
> Josh Bennett manages the mining operations at Yandicoogina mine north west of Newman and is closely involved with running 22 driverless trucks on the site.
That was then and much has happened since.
> In 2018, each truck was estimated to have operated on average 700 hours more than conventional haul trucks, with 15% lower costs – delivering clear productivity benefits. They also take truck operators out of harm’s way, reducing the risks associated with working around heavy machinery.
[1] https://www.abc.net.au/news/2015-10-18/rio-tinto-opens-world...
So far the biggest winners are companies outsourcing the time of being ready to retailers: Tesla and Comma.AI
- Back of the day cab? You may as well look out of the window. Even then the following point applies (somewhat).
- Back of the sleeper? What are you looking at, front of the dry van / reefer I guess? Hardly useful that way...
- Back of the trailer? The trailer might not even be yours. I guess you could make a kit that clips onto the door handle or bumper? But then you'd be looking at... the dock gate, most of the time. Again, not very useful.
This can go on and on, but I think what you really want is a drone directly overhead.
This is easy. Just put an Ethernet connector between the truck and the cab and put a "security camera" on the trailer. The only part of this that we don't have already is the Ethernet connector which is currently going through ISO to get a standard connector: it needs to not vibrate loose, but still break away if the trailer comes unhooked (in particular when the driver forgets to disconnect it while disconnecting the trailer)
I put security camera in quotes because you need something a little more robust that the camera you buy at best buy. This is the case, and maybe the lens, mostly it is the same thing. in any case you can buy these off the shelf today, but the truck/trailer connector won't be compatible with one from a different manufacture.
This is not as complicated as you make it out to be, there are already hookups for air brakes and trailer lights.
Regulations have already required this for passenger cars for years.
For all other cases (backup), an overhead view, real or synthesized, would be much more helpful in establishing actual situational awareness. Anything less than this would still require the driver to G.O.A.L. (Get Out And Look).