Waymo puts the brakes on self-driving trucks program
techcrunch.com
techcrunch.com
In a dense city, there’s often nowhere you can legally stop. Real taxi drivers will often just stop in the middle of the street, or double park temporarily.
The entire junction was filled with immobile vehicles because one taxi had stopped.
In the UK, this is legal. Black cabs can stop wherever they like to pick up and set down. It's an extraordinary privilege.
In the mean time, I expect a lot of lawsuits and weird insurance decisions.
So, unless it's 100% computer controlled, there's really not much point in it from the fleet owner's perspective
FTFY
Agree on lane keeping, but my experience with emergency braking has been less than stellar. it seems to mostly react accidentally and occasionally not do what it is supposed to.
I don’t know if anyone is arguing for completely eliminating trucks from the supply chain, but there are definitely counterexamples to the idea freight trains cannot penetrate cities at all. I believe there are even some specialized small trains which can deliver goods directly to loading bays of large stores, but I can’t find an example right now.
It would make more sense to me to legislate new commercial buildings must include a loading dock. Require developers to make the commercial buildings have shared loading dock so several small bodegas and stores can all share a dock on their building. This would reduce the amount of the trucks parking in the street with a liftgate or forklift to lower the pallets.
The reality is that 18 wheeler s are there for a reason, and probably you should know it before think urban center only needs small trucks.
Transportation is a huge industry compared to just ridehailing (which is perhaps just 1% by value).
And investors care about potential market size.
Both markets could probably be made profitable, but their consumer transportation efforts are further along. If you have to cut one, trucking is the better choice.
Those are two vastly different things. Unless you're saying that self-driving cars/personal vehicles will replace the other things?
I have a toy model for e-trucking + autonomy + middle mile. But its a long hard slog to roll out (ha! pun!)
But, wouldn't interstate trucking be one of the easiest self driving applications?
Use a driver to get the truck onto the interstate, pull over to the shoulder, set truck in autonomous mode, get out, truck drives close to destination on interstates only, pulls over to shoulder, human driver gets back in...
Seems like a good stop gap solution...
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Edit: So, maybe not the shoulder, but even a truck stop or an easy to navigate to area. Basically, removing the complexity of surface streets...
The shoulder has many uses, depending on where the road is located.
In Chicagoland, Pace transit buses use the shoulder, and have giant "Authorized to use the shoulder" signs on them.
In the southeast, driving in the shoulder lanes is encouraged during evacuations, and they're painted with hurricane symbols.
Shoulders can be easily repurposed for other uses.
Never assume that where you are is how things are everywhere.
Doing an 8 hour shift of that, 5 days per week, would also be a much better quality of life for the drive instead of being a long haul trucker, I assume. This may make it easier to recruit drivers - isn't there a truck driver shortage in America?
Aside from not paying a driver, it doubles the utilization of the trucks when they don't have to be parked while the driver sleeps. Huge efficiency boost.
A human driver who handled an outgoing truck could just wait (an hour or so) on the same spot for the next incoming truck.
Rail is a good solution to going halfway across the country. Trucking is a good solution for getting from your warehouse to the store ten miles away.
Long haul truckers exist, of course, and I presume make sense in the niches they exist in, but I wouldn't be surprised to find that they're a relatively small percentage of the total trucking market.
Or just build parking lot in suitable location where trucks are driven to and from.
I think that is the point, we should be doing better by the citizens.
There’s a light rail project going on near where I live that’s going to have taken near a decade and several billion dollars to complete. “just” scaling up such systems to run throughout suburbs is economically and politically infeasible.
The scale of buses make them much worse in terms of cost-effectiveness and therefore environment safety. Instead of spending overhead on specialized equipment, it's much better to mass produce similar typed vehicles that are easier to maintain and service and put that money towards environment measures.
Also, when you factor in things like the carbon cost of the driver that is needed for the bus, the fact that buses still operate on a schedule and not on demand (therefore leading to an entire bus with a capacity for 40 people being occupied by one or two), and that on average they're much more expensive to transition to more eco-friendly advancements, I would say busses are way worse than a fully functional sdc environment.
People envision sdcs as taxis with robots, but it would mean so much more. You could have better and safer bike lanes, slower lanes with with lower speed vehicles that cost ~1k for < 1 mile travel increasing the chances people go and visit nearby businesses. And all of it with the efficiency of a factory instead of the bureaucracy of most transit systems where it takes millions to add the bare minimum of services.
> Also, when you factor in things like the carbon cost of the driver that is needed for the bus, the fact that buses still operate on a schedule and not on demand (therefore leading to an entire bus with a capacity for 40 people being occupied by one or two), and that on average they're much more expensive to transition to more eco-friendly advancements, I would say busses are way worse than a fully functional sdc environment.
This paragraph is completely false.
There is no reason you cannot have a self driving bus and thus no driver at all.
While a bus on a fixed route will be empty at the end of the route, even in the not very dense suburbs they have a lot more people on it.
A fixed route is an advantage: you can depend on it! You know where it will be at any time and you can plan. Shared flexible routes cannot work - People need to know they will get to where they are going on time and a shared flexible ride must randomly detour to pickup/drop off someone else and then you miss your schedule.
> You could have better and safer bike lanes, slower lanes with with lower speed vehicles that cost ~1k for < 1 mile travel increasing the chances people go and visit nearby businesses
I have no idea what you are saying. People have places to go. They want to get there fast, not slow. People already can bike or walk to close places - that they often drive anyway is proof that speed is important. Your argument is completely in bad faith.
Don't just take my word for it. https://humantransit.org/2019/08/what-is-microtransit-for.ht... https://humantransit.org/2011/03/how-universal-is-transits-g... is from a real expert in the field that explains why you are wrong starting from fundamentals that do not change.
And, with the weight of EVs, even heavier.
I present the California high speed rail project as Exhibit A, and rest my case.
From https://www.cnbc.com/2023/05/17/why-californias-high-speed-r...
Plus there's no status to be had from investing in rail, but plenty of it from some hip young people promising trucks of the future today! After all, if Elon is [saying he is] doing it, how can you not believe?
The depot will already have copious amounts of cctv in which to enhance the AI driving systems, whilst also being able to keep track of all trailers coming into the yard and leaving via a gatehouse.
So just like warehouses have become automated, to me, it seems like the next step in automation is to handle the trailer movements in the depot. They will still need a human, to wind up or down the wheels, and plug the air in, when moving a trailer on or off the bay, but the warehouse can get busy at peak time, and the demand for a shunter to move trailers off the bay so the warehouse doesnt slow down is a real need.
Also, the potential damage and liability differential between a 90,000lb freight truck and a 4000lb passenger vehicle has to factor in, too. All collisions and fatalities are unfortunate, but better to limit the liability early on in the scaling phase and come back to commercial trucking later once the company and tech are further along.
In a single week I witnessed, multiple near fatal collision's that had my uncle not been 100% locked in to the road he would have caused. Everything from people texting on the highway at 70+ miles, a person almost crossed 4 lanes of traffic to not miss an exit, and they were applying make up at the same time, people cutting in front him with literal inches away, people don't understand the sheer weight of these vehicles and can't comprehend why they can't break like they do. Funny enough, he preferred the highways vs normal roads. Highway traffic was somewhat predictable even with all of the insane issues, but normal roads ? Try moving an 18 wheeler through a residential neighborhood (yes hn this was the only way) or pull out of a Wallmart, those were those most dangerous maneuvers.