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Comment by mainframed | Hacker News Reader

Great article, but I think the conclusion is a bit off. We also need more research into autonomous driving, to be able to drive trucks safely on highways. And automating that part you see as highly profitable. So, if anything, the article shows how important more research into this topic is, especially if we would factor in the two disproved assumptions, you mention in the last section.

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

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One thing that seems off to me about autonomous trucking is the following:

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 — isn't this basically a less energy efficient, less capacity version of a train that pushes a part of the costs onto public infrastructure?

Imagine a chain of autonomous trucks on a highway powered by overhead wires. https://www.openenlocc.net/editorial/

> Not sure how an autonomous vehicle would honor this

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.

> Imagine a chain of autonomous trucks on a highway — isn't this basically a less energy efficient, less capacity version of a train ...

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.

> Not sure how an autonomous vehicle would honor this.

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.

Intermodal logistics systems already use trains for quite a bit of the truly long distance travel in the US. (Probably less so in other areas.)

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.

If you can staff those few points close to where people live, that still has a massive potential impact on labour cost and employee retention.

I had the same thought.

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.

That isn't actually clear. While trains claim they are the most efficient, they use measures like ton-mile that make them look much better. Trucks are often used for light things which means the ton-mile would go down. Trucks are often used for small loads, trains to all those different destinations with small loads would be less efficient. Sure steel wheels have less rolling resistance than rubber, but it isn't that much less. Long trains are more aerodynamic, but trucks already have a fair amount of length to spread that would over.

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.

Go ahead. I am interested in the numbers that would support your theory. My k owledge is that trains are by at leasy a magnitude more efficie t than trucks.

It's a train with much more flexibility and track re-use.

- 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)

>- your infrastructuur is re-usable by the general public.

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.

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