> 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?