I've always felt that self driving trucks make the most economical sense to automate. A self driving truck would get to its destination faster (saving money) and without the need for a driver (saving money). And the majority of their time is spent on relatively predictable interstate roads, not the chaotic roads of a busy downtown, so they'd be simpler to automate.
Otto (the self-driving truck company that Uber bought and is now shuttering) was the first I'd heard of that. It's a bit sad that they're shutting down.
What do you mean by "most economical sense to automate"? It seems like everything about automating a truck would be more expensive (cost of 1 truck = 5-6 cars), the insurance and maintenance on the truck and hardware, the potential for catastrophic failure (1 runaway car doing 70 = bad, 1 runaway truck doing 70 = REALLY bad), the extra complexity of pulling a trailer and monitoring the trailer as well as the truck, monitoring the size and type of load of the truck and modifying the driving characteristics to match the load, the extra regulations that trucks are subject to (what roads they can be on, what loads they could cary on certain roads, what time of day they can drive on said roads, when they can or can't use engine braking).
Edit: even on 'simple' point A to point B route that involve 99% highway, what happens when a small part of the highway shuts down for whatever reason (flooding, multi-lan accident, fire, etc) and all traffic is routed on smaller adjacent streets, or forced to share a lane with oncoming traffic. Automating a truck is as hard or harder than automating a car, since you're dealing with the same external variables but have more internal/attached moving parts.
Trucks often drive mostly or only on major thoroughfares and often on extremely long and tedious routes. A self driving truck that could drive 50 hour stretches without getting tired or making mistakes would be a huge improvement in efficiency.
I could see there being a nice "hybrid" avenue, too: Have a human driver in the truck for managing all street level driving, overseeing loading/unloading, refueling, etc. And then let them take a break, or work on their side hustle or master's degree or whatever, while the truck is on the highway. And either pull off the highway or have the human take over if conditions aren't favorable.
Self-driving taxis, OTOH, feel like they've got a much longer way to go before they can generate any real profit.
This is generally seen as the path to full automation - you can couple autonomous "easy" highway driving with a remote driver taking over for the final mile. How long until we have aircraft doing the same thing ? ;)
Aircraft have six degrees of freedom. But for the ground, birds, weather, and other aircraft there is nothing a plane can run into. At 20,000 feet that mostly reduces to other aircraft. And still humans on the ground orchestrate among the flights and provide specific direct oversight of each and every flight in real time. Watching for weather. Watching for birds.
Don't get me wrong, I find aircraft automation impressive. But there is a massive human workforce that makes it possible for the cabin crew to run planes on autopilot. There's a mountain of rigid regulations, licensing and certifications that control every part of that workforce. Every part of each aircraft. Every piece of communication.
And for avoidance of aircraft: except for some last-second emergency reaction, this is the opposite of automated. We have specially trained, highly competent people on very short shifts under pretty much ideal working conditions ensuring that.
We place them _both_ inside the aircraft and on the ground. While ATC does provide separation, conflicts still can and do happen. Aircraft have onboard systems to warn of conflicts and even to suggest corrective action, but the pilots must be the ones to make the correction.
Indeed, I believe TCAS is one of the only places where planes and pilots override ATC, in that if ATC tells you to go down, and TCAS tells you to go up, you go up
> Well once airborne, aircraft already fly themselves and do everything except the last 100 feet of landing already.
That's only if nothing goes wrong. On the other hand, if the airplane I'm in loses both its engines and has to land on the Hudson River[1], I'd much prefer to have an experienced pilot and copilot in the cockpit.
Since the context here is "autoland", yes, that means "do not stop monitoring the bird, be always ready to take control." Landings are one of the trickier parts: you are moving at hundreds of mph, on an almost-collision course with the runway, by definition: the plane is supposed to stop flying very few feet above the concrete, AND not drop too hard.
AFAIK this is the accepted path forward (minus the side hustle aspect). Automate that which is easier to automate: the long distance highway driving. For the first/last mile, let a human do the work.
I think what is going to happen is people are going to realize robot cars are death traps. Not because their rate of accidents will be any higher, but that when they do have accidents they will seem bizarre and inhuman mistakes that even the most incompetent human driver would never make.
Driving on the open road requires real intelligence. Not the pretend intelligence that modern AI gives, but real understanding of situations and terrain. Before that happens (which is basically skynet, and a very very long time away) all you have is a bag of tricks cobbled together. Those tricks will miss things and get confused and make mistakes. Maybe not very often but definitely in strange ways that are frightening.
The unknown is scary. Drunk drivers, tired drivers, old drivers, et al. are plenty dangerous, but they still behave in ways that can be understood. AI mistakes will be / are / have been strange unsettling things that can't be reasoned about if you're a person in the area of the misbehaving vehicle.
> Driving on the open road requires real intelligence. Not the pretend intelligence that modern AI gives, but real understanding of situations and terrain.
People used to say this about every single thing that computers can do better than people.
In my college town, some pedestrians got ran over by a driver who later pled insanity due to "caffeine-induced psychosis". I think you're seriously overrating the predictability of human failure modes.
> People used to say this about every single thing that computers can do better than people.
But computers can't do it better than people! That's what drives me nuts about this debate -- it's just accepted as a premise that either the self-driving cars are much safer than human drivers, or the path to getting them there is very close and no serious obstacles remain. Neither is true and it's not clear they will be. https://blog.piekniewski.info/2017/05/11/a-car-safety-myths-...
I think what is clear is that virtually no one is okay with large-scale public deployment of self-driving cars that aren’t clearly statistically safer than human drivers, so when we’re talking about public deployment of self-driving cars, it’s implied that we’re talking about when (if) they reach that level of safety.
Frankly, that's not clear to me. A lot of people seem quite eager to put the first vaguely plausible thing all over the road because of an exaggerated idea of the incompetence of human drivers (which is understandable, but harmful in this context)
Let's say we have a self-driving car that is as safe as the 20th percentile human driver. Do we allow that self-driving car on the roads? Do we selectively revoke licenses from 1 out of every 5 drivers and replace them with a car that's at least as safe as they are if not probably safer? Do we replace breathalyzer interlocks for drivers with DUI convictions with an AI driver and just revoke their licenses permanently?
There isn't a trivial solution to this problem. At some point, some AI driver is going to cause an accident that would not have been caused by a 95th percentile human driver. At the same time, human drivers do shit like this all the time: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oidHSzukSss
OK, nice anecdote, but if you follow my link you can see that if we just blindly take the average of all drivers and accidents per mile driven and then compare it to AI performance AI is nowhere near average, let alone the 95th percentile. Here is another example of what I'm complaining about: an argument that simply takes as its premise something not yet proven to be true.
To me, this seems like an a priori assumption that accepted as the truth. Then, when it's questioned, the person questioning is made out to be some kind of luddite.
Which is an odd phenomenon to me. I can't even get Google Assistant to understand me 3/4 of the time, yet I'm supposed to take it on faith that autonomous cars are inhumanly safe?
Google Assistant is a funny example, because my wife has a foreign name and I can do absolutely nothing to get it to understand when I ask to call her, even attempting to imitate its weird pronunciation of the name. The only thing that works is hand-typing "Xxxx is my wife" into the Assistant and then referring to her exclusively as "my wife," and that gets reset with updates periodically
Questioning the capacity of Friend Computer is treason here on HN, Citizen! Report yourself for immediate termination.
In other words, much of the autonomous robot debate here is based on handwaving, wishful thinking and No True Autonomous Scotsman (...would run over a human).
No, require data to be public, require a billion km simulated driving test for every software version that's released to a car without a safety driver.
> People used to say this about every single thing that computers can do better than people.
Did they though? Think about things that computers can do better than people: they're mainly things that we completely predicted computers would be better at (arithmetic, precision manufacturing, drafting, telecommunications routing). Beyond that, you're left with things computers are only better at dependent on priority, the canonical example being service jobs where economics trump's QoS; computers are much worse than a cashier, but comparatively cheaper by a margin that makes the quality compromise worth it.
The only possible exception I could think of that's come up in recent discourse is diagnosing patients, but even that, while encroaching on a role that has traditionally been revered as a career, is still something that seems at least on the surface to be quite predictable given the nature of what's required to make diagnoses (simultaneous access to a trove of data and knowledge).
Beyond the above, I think it's pretty reasonable that there's a broad range of things computers will not be better than humans at for a very very long time, if ever.
But this is a cliche in the AI field: that AI is defined as the things that computers can’t do as well as humans right now. As soon as computers match human ability, well, clearly that doesn’t count as “intelligence.”
And I don’t think the problems computers have proven themselves useful in solving have been what most people expected. Chess, Go, facial recognition, Jeopardy, image classification (hot dog or not), captchas (clearly, since they’re designed specifically to resist computer solutions), etc. seem to me to be things that, before computers proved to be decent at, would have been widely considered to require intelligence on the level of humans.
People only thought that chess required intelligence because they had no idea how much raw computational power computers would obtain. To anyone who understands the rules of chess, it's obvious that a machine which can perform a near-exhaustive search of the state space for a few moves ahead is going to be able to play chess better than a typical human.
People only thought that driving cars required intelligence because they had no idea how much raw computational power computers would obtain. To anyone who understands the rules of driving cars, it's obvious that a machine which can perform a near-exhaustive search of the state space for a few seconds ahead is going to be able to drive better than a typical human.
>To anyone who understands the rules of driving cars, it's obvious that a machine which can perform a near-exhaustive search of the state space for a few seconds ahead is going to be able to drive better than a typical human.
But there aren't any formally-specified rules for driving cars, and this isn't obvious.
Driving has a universal, formal, self-contained, non-contradictory, simple set of rules that all the road users unconditionally follow? Can I see it?
Nope, despite a myriad of road codes, the actual traffic doesn't follow a set of formalized rules: a chess rook can't just decide that it will start disintegrating all of a sudden, as opposed to a vehicle. You could probably approximate the ruleset if you made it self-modifying...which will then demolish your second point about near-exhaustively searching the state space - good luck doing that before the heat death of the universe, as you're essentially simulating the whole environment. Oh look, there's also weather. How's that exhaustively searchable? Asking for the Nobel Prize committee.
For the sake of discussion, let's say that a miracle happens and you managed to do all that - but sorry, it's useless again, the few seconds have already elapsed and you need to do it again. And again. And again, ad infinitum.
Now, I could envision "by our current technology, we can't yet, but we're hoping for a miracle in this specific spot" - but "assuming a massive miracle happens every few seconds, for each vehicle" is completely removed from reality: why not have teleports, if we're in magical wish-granting land already?
it's ok, you only need a near exhaustive search, and to be better than humans.
For highway driving Waymo had 6 disengagements in 2017, street: 57.
Total driven: 352000 miles
1 disengagement for "a recklessly behaving road user"
5 for "incorrect behavior prediction of other traffic participants"
Seems like predicting other people is almost perfect, the others were more internal problems.
Driving a car when a weird thing happens isn't that complicated: You stop, braking at the minimum amount required to do so safely, to avoid cars behind you hitting you
Near-exhaustive search of what? You're handwaving away that there isn't a stateless formal graph to search - rather a stochastic, everchanging environment. Again: how do you near-exhaustively search that?
(In other words, yes, it might be eventually possible to have self-driving vehicles, but pretending that the search space is bounded, or even near-exhaustively searchable a la chess - that's just pure technobabble)
Well yes, my original comment was mostly a joke after all.
Anyway, self driving cars will only get better, and the more of them there are the better they will be, because no humans around doing weird things who don't talk over the SDC network to explain where they're going
Now that is a future that I can at least imagine, starting with SDV-only enclaves: "no humans driving on the West Coast" etc. Still doesn't solve other road users (cyclists, pedestrians), but it would definitely do away with entire classes of problems.
That just isn't true. It was widely believed through the seventies and eighties that chess inherently required creativity, and a machine could never beat a grandmaster.
Rather, I suspect, tasks which computers start outperforming humans in we reanalyse as "completely procedural". Nobody called chess procedural in the middle of last century.
Well, a computer playing chess is simply enumerating all possible boards. Which is the same way that a GAN produced “art”. Humans do it creatively because that’s how you do it if you lack exhaustive computing power and memory. In neither case is a computer mimicking that process of a human, they simply arrive at the same outcome by a brute force means.
No. Computers don't play chess by "simply enumerating all possible boards". That would require ludicrously more compute power than we have, and, of course, it would also _solve_ chess, rather than just allowing the computers to play once it would (if it could ever be done) show that the game itself has a solution, a best way to play, like Tic-Tac-Toe.
Historically AI chess (e.g. "Deep Blue" or Stockfish) is played by machines using one heuristic to estimate how "good" positions are without truly knowing, not so dissimilar from how humans evaluate a chess position. and then another heuristic to try out moves to get to further positions. The machine considers possible plays and how they affect the heuristic "value" of the board, preferring those with more value. Human Chess AI authors design the two heuristics used, though they often aren't very good at actually playing chess because it's a different skill.
Google's AlphaZero AI plays chess differently again, it had no preconceptions of how to play Chess, instead it learned through self-play - it knows the rules of the game but began with no idea what's a good or bad move, it adapted its own heuristics based on how well they'd won or lost. It actually recapitulated most of human chess theory history over its incubation period of thousands of games, discovering ideas like the Sicilian Defence for itself, new attacks would at first see overwhelming success, and then, playing versions of itself that had seen these attacks, they'd be defended more effectively.
Alpha Zero plays a radically "more human" style of chess than most modern human Chess grandmasters, huge multi-move strategies in which pieces are sacrificed to take positional advantage. It looks like something humans were doing last century - except Alpha Zero does it much better than they ever did.
A typical chess position has fewer than 100 possible moves, so a modern computer can do quite a deep exhaustive search of the state space. You won't beat Kasparov just by doing that, but I'd bet it's enough to beat me.
The problem is that you lack an evaluation function. Let's consider two of those 100 possible moves. Your rook could take this opposing pawn, or, your own pawn could move forward one space. Which is better? Why? Neither of them immediately wins the game, but we must pick something. In a smaller, tighter game, like Tic-Tac-Toe we could crank our exhaustive search until we discover that this opening move leads to a possible win... but the search space in Chess is categorically too enormous for that.
Both Google's Alpha Zero and simple human play encourages the belief that a good evaluation heuristic is essential. The evaluation heuristic looks at a board position and it doesn't recommend a move it says something like "I rate this position 0.418" where 1.0 is "I'll definitely win on my turn" and -1.0 is "My opponent wins on their turn". Google's engine contemplates relatively few possible moves (for a computer) but the results are striking because it's looking at _good_ moves more of the time rather than wasting a lot of time thinking about moves that are a bad idea.
This seems obvious, but, well, learn chess and see for yourself.
Yes I'm aware that you need an evaluation heuristic. My point is that you don't need a particularly good one to be able to beat an average intelligent human at chess. (After all, most humans don't have very sophisticated chess position evaluation heuristics, and they are able to examine vastly less of the search space than a computer.) Beating Kasparov is another matter, of course.
Here's an example of a simple chess engine that is good enough to beat amateur human players at least some of the time:
> I bet if you time traveled and showed Siri/Cortana to an AI researcher from 1960 they’d be incredibly disappointed.
It's a common misconception that the 1960s and 1970s were a time of unbridled enthusiasm in AI. In fact, there was a ton of pessimism back then too: for example, ALPAC [1] was so pessimistic about the future of natural language processing that it got the US government to pull most of its funding.
I think if you were to show Siri, Alexa, etc. to some of those folks they'd be pleased that we've gotten as far as we have, while acknowledging the obvious fact that there's plenty more to do.
Not sure why people are disagreeing. That seems a blindingly obvious comment. There's so much today that would seem almost like magic to pretty much everyone living in 1960. But coice assistants? (And even just voice recognition.) almost certainly seemed like relatively "easy" problems. Perhaps less so to AI researchers than the general public but still.
I don't know about "magic." A modern smart phone might be "magic" to someone in 1860--it operates based on technologies that didn't exist back then. But by 1960, the building blocks of modern computing were already in place: digital von Neumann computers built out of transistors, radio communications, signal processing, etc. AT&T used frequency-division multiplexing of multiple voice channels in phone transmissions in 1918. The mathematical framework for modern technologies like LTE was in place by the 1950s and 1960s. Would it really have surprised anyone that transistors would continue to get smaller and faster, allowing higher complexity, higher-throughput signal processing, which would allow Facebook?
They were off on size/weight, but they guessed the capacity just about right (IBM 0681). I don't think extrapolating out pre-existing trends, for sophisticated people, be "mind blowing." Would your mind be "blown" if you learned that by 2048 you'd have a 100 petabyte drive using, say, magneto-resistive memory (or something else based on anticipated, if not fully developed physics)? Seems like hyperbole (and setting a low bar for peoples' imagination).
Reading stuff written in the 1960s about what today would be like, what strikes me is that technology is so incredibly not mind blowing compared to what we had back then. Even in the area of computers. Hell, we haven't even come up with an input device that beats keyboards, which were invented in the 19th century (electro-mechanical keyboards, not typewriters).
I think the difference is that we today have a lot more reference points for technological advances than people in the 1960s did.
Just continuing with the storage example, for decades now we've all been witness to data storage sizes growing massively, while the housing of said data storage has shrunk in size tremendously - as has the cost.
So when a couple MB of incredibly slow storage weighs thousands of pounds and costs millions of dollars, I do think the concept of tens/hundreds of GB of super fast flash memory contained within an object the size of a thumbnail would be mindblowing, whereas your example of
>a 100 petabyte drive using, say, magneto-resistive memory (or something else based on anticipated, if not fully developed physics)
wouldn't, just because we already all know how far technology has come since the 60s.
It's not so much the hardware as the combination of things. GPS+the Web+smartphones+... But, yeah, physical infrastructure has a lot of friction. So we have amazing pocket devices with access to much of the world's knowledge. But traffic jams.
They where vastly off in terms of size, weight, transfer speed, latency, and cost. In 1990 you could get a cheap RAID array so pick do you want 100x that capacity for far less than that price and weight.
Cheap in terms of multi million dollar hardware budgets.
1980: IBM introduces the first gigabyte hard drive. It is the size of a refrigerator, weighs about 550 pounds, and costs $40,000.
That’s ~1/10the the cost and 1/4 the weight they where looking for. You really could do vastly better in 1990. For ~2,300$ you could get a 700 MB HDD buy 3 and your talking 1.4 GB with redundancy for ~1% of his budget.
PS: If I extrapolate current trends and say we might get a self driving 400 HP Honda Civic in 2050. Then someone says sort of a Tito costs 3,000$ has 50,000 HP but nobody drives that under powered piece of crap. It would be a shift in how you think about things.
That must have changed rather quickly. In 1972 Alan Kay wrote "A personal computer for children of all ages". Here is the abstract:
> This note speculates about the emergence of personal, portable information manipulators and their effects when used by both children and adults. Although it should be read as science fiction, current trends in miniaturization and price reduction almost guarantee that many of the notions discussed will actually happen in the near future.
The paper is a great read. He basically imagined that in the future we'd develop the iPad and some high quality educational software for children. Forty years later, we can proudly say we've successfully developed half those things.
>> People used to say this about every single thing that computers can do better than people.
Who were those people, who said those things (i.e. where they AI researchers, or computer scientists?). And what exactly did they say?
There have always been strong criticisms of AI (e.g. [1]) and opinions dismissing computers voiced by people who did not have an adequate understanding of computers.
The interesting thing is to see what the people in the know actually thought over the years and what they think right now.
Edit: to clarify, what AI researchers usually do is overhype the capabilities of their systems and claim they can achieve things that they never manage to show they can- completely the opposite than saying that "computers can't do that".
> when they do have accidents they will seem bizarre and inhuman mistakes that even the most incompetent human driver would never make.
I agree -- but it's even worse. Even if robots do make human-like mistakes, that doesn't mean humans will be forgiving of the same mistakes. For one thing, I might forgive a human being unable to react due to a 1/2-second reaction time, but I sure as heck wouldn't be that forgiving for a robot. I would expect and demand an order of magnitude better. For another thing, people have more tolerance for mistakes made by "closer kin", if you will. (e.g. if my own child steals from me, even 10x as much as a random thief does, that doesn't mean the thief can expect more lenience than I had for my kid.) Self-driving cars pretty much have to be strictly _and_ significantly better than more than the majority of humans for people to trust having them around. Merely being better than average, even if it's in all respects, isn't necessarily enough to cut it.
While that's true, the debate rages around "the devil you know x the one you don't." Death traps on wheels are known (and risks ignored), their autonomous modes...not yet.
The funny thing here is we might already have the best solution to the "easy" automation scenario: Trains. It's a shame they're so expensive and require special tracks. If we could invent a hybrid train / car, that behaved like a train, but didn't require special track...that might actually be a better direction.
You're pretty much describing a truck or a bus in that breaking up a train is one of the things you need to do to allow it to travel on non-dedicated/special right-of-way.
And, with respect to freight, a lot of the easy automation is handled by trains. A huge amount of truly long distance freight in the US (including but not limited to bulk cargo) goes by train for much of its overland transport.
Why are you so sure? Waymo demonstrated that they can handle correctly a duck-chasing wheelchair rider that used a broom.
I’m not sure that all the human drivers would have handled it so well.
And Uber demonstrated that incorrectly classifying a detected obstacle is solvable by running it over. I'm pretty sure that no sane human driver would have handled "could be a bike or a human or an animal, but it sure is something in my path" by ignoring it for six seconds before the collision and even afterward.
"But we should let it out on the road, it drives on par with an insane, legally blind and completely drunk driver" is not a very convincing proposition.
> Automate that which is easier to automate: the long distance highway driving
Long distance highway driving except that one highway exit on 101 that kills you. I'm just saying that when human lives are at stake, bottoms up approach may not be as feasible as with web software.
> except that one highway exit on 101 that kills you
The conversations on the topic that I've heard involve building special, dedicated exits, sort of like truck weigh stations. And having them live not particularly close to urban centers.
So it a bit more of a holistic approach than bottom up, and something that will take a while to implement since you're not able to roll it out everywhere at once.
Not to say that there still won't be issues. I'm sure there will be. And I'm sure there's a long way to go still. But its also not a black and white issue.
At this point I'm starting to think engineers for self-driving vehicles need to find a way to explicitly map out every possible scenario on a given stretch of road... and from that - in real time - derive a custom template for each individual vehicle, tailored to the range of possible interactions between the vehicle in its current state (i.e. tire pressure is significant) and the current scenario playing out on that road.
Much of the process of getting close to this point can be done with the latest A.I. tools, but I have this nagging feeling we're going to need humans to fine tune a whole lot of 'last mile' stuff.
Unless you ban all human drivers from that road, and find a way to keep out pedestrians and animals, there will always be an infinite number of possible scenarios. Mapping everything out in advance can't possibly produce the level of safety that the general public would demand.
That's one more of those "irrational exuberance" regarding the future of autonomous driving. It would never even come close to being legal if it's only better than the average driver. It will need to be better than the 95th percentile of human drivers at the very least. 48% of the human population are not going to accept a more dangerous, potentially deadlier, car ride because it's "safer on average".
I'm just spitballin' here, but perhaps they could make something that was better than the average driver, and wouldn't swerve or accelerate into stationary objects like highway barriers? That sounds like something a lot of people would want.
The model of truck to the railhead, rail for long distance, the back onto trucks for the final leg already exists. Trains have large economic advantages over trucks for well known routes. So what are the advantages of self-driving trucks in this scenario?
Side hustle or masters degree? Pilots don’t work another job while autopilot is in use, and neither should truck drivers monitoring its autonomy system.
A self-driving vehicle would be a step beyond current autopilot, and asking any human to constantly monitor an autonomous system is going to result in pretty catastrophic failure. An autonomous system needs to be fail-safe to be used.
Plane autopilot only works because air is so empty and flying in the same direction at constant elevation is unlikely to result in any problem. There are repeated examples of both pilots falling asleep and planes over-shooting destination airports, for example.
> A self-driving vehicle would be a step beyond current autopilot, and asking any human to constantly monitor an autonomous system is going to result in pretty catastrophic failure. An autonomous system needs to be fail-safe to be used.
I think the idea we’ll attain this in the next decade or two is borderline delusional, but to each their own.
Commercial aviation is one of the safest transportation mechanisms in the world; aircraft can go runway to runway in mostly automated fashion (auto throttle/TOGA [take off go around] for takeoff, autopilot for cruise, autoland for landing). We (customers and regulators) still require human attention the entire time.
My comment was unintentionally overgenerous. I’ve corrected my statement after reviewing the aviation stackoverflow site, and flushed it out with more details (specific aviation terms).
At that point you're getting no more bang for your buck, since the operator is going to be subject to the same limits on time behind the wheel as a driver of a non-autonomous truck. And you're not getting any more safety, because, as Uber and Tesla have been illustrating for us so vividly, a self-driving system that needs a human overseer can't drive safely, and a human who isn't physically in control of the car at all times can't oversee safely.
(Edit: This is, naturally, not accounting for the need for a transitional period while getting the technology bootstrapped. But that's time invested in developing the tech, not time where the tech generates any profit.)
> At that point you're getting no more bang for your buck, since the operator is going to be subject to the same limits on time behind the wheel as a driver of a non-autonomous truck.
Human lives and property loss are expensive. The average cost of a fatal crash is well over $3 million. The average cost of a large truck crash that does not involve a death is approximately $62,000. Settlement payouts due to big rig accidents are roughly $20 billion per year.
You don’t need to replace the driver to see significant upside.
Even if this was only available on Interstate 40, I think you would make a lot of money. Trucking is something like $800B industry, and a lot of that flows on I-40.
And if only there was some mechanism to get freight from rail yards to its final destination, without the inflexibility of rails. Perhaps some sort of steerable vehicle ...
Not sure how the context of what I said changes this? Yes, trains already exist and have existed much longer, and yet have obviously lost out to the truck.
> Yes, trains already exist and have existed much longer, and yet have obviously lost out to the truck.
That may be in large part due to the substantial government subsidation of car/truck traffic through public roads, not the merits of one against the other.
Which was worth more, the government funding of the interstate project, or the almost unchecked power and monopoly of the robber barons of the Gilded Age?
It would be foolish for me to attempt to quantify what worth "more"; however, it is worth keeping in mind that the railroads we're very heavily subsidized in their time as well.
Trains have in no way "lost out" to trucks. Rail transport is a huge and growing industry. But long haul trucks are sometimes preferred because they're faster. Our cargo transportation system needs both.
Trains didn't "lose out" to the truck, they're both widely used, along with ships, pipelines, airplanes, bicycle messengers, and every other conceivable means of transporting goods.
I'm not saying I think trains will disappear, if anything, it seems they would likely benfit from increased capacity in the intermodal system, allowing them to move more of the type of freight they are well suited for.
It'd be nice if we had some more rail expansion. Rails are so efficient, and are just more impressive mechanically the entire system is like a giant computer with actual switches. There was an article posted here a while ago about how rare train accidents are and how incredibly fail safe those systems are.
1. (As others have mentioned) a lot of freight is intermodal so containers in particular shipped for long distances by train also travel by truck for the first and last X miles.
2. A lot of freight is relatively local in nature, so it makes more sense for it not to be intermodal.
Remember: not all the roads are the same everywhere.
Self driving cars and trucks is a very hard topic.
With the today's technology, it might work only on hypothetical straight and perfect roads and during the day.
Work in progress, floods, snow, holes, traffic and /r/IdiotsInCars are factors not taking into account for today's algorithms, because the data and the tests are missing.
I see that the automated trucks might be the vehicles of the future, but a driver (or "operator") should be always present onboard, just like it happens for planes and ships
I agree that there's a case for improved efficiency, but I'm not sure if the economies of developing all the tech from scratch adds up. One accident can endanger the entire company, a problem they're still reeling from with the bicyclist fatality. The car they were trying to automate has much better stopping (and overall safety) performance than any truck, yet they're still experiencing all the woes of developing new tech. Now imagine an automated truck accidentally punting a Grayhound buss full of band kids off the road.
This venture kind of scared me to be honest. Having known a few truck drivers and having a good friend who was permanently disabled by a tractor trailer I know this industry needs to be made safer. I'm not convinced total automation is the solution as well but maybe somewhere in-between is good enough to improve things. Just doing this for pure profit is irresponsible. There is also the issue of if they are going to put any more trucks on the highways and interstates more roads need to be built first. The ratio of big rigs to commuter cars is presently out of control!
> Having known a few truck drivers and having a good friend who was permanently disabled by a tractor trailer I know this industry needs to be made safer.
Having known a few truck drivers myself—including my father—and having a very good friend who was permanently paralyzed by another friend driving a standard car, these things don’t influence each other. The trucking industry is far safer than your average driver[0].
> The ratio of big rigs to commuter cars is presently out of control!
The numbers disagree with you. That ratio is currently about 1:135[1].
I never implied that these were hard facts they were my opinion. What is your opinion? We need more trucks on the road? To me 1:135 is out of control- that's my opinion.
You stated your opinions as if they were facts. You said you know the trucking industry needs to be made safer—that sure sounds like an implied statement of fact, not sharing of opinion. I shared a ton of data that disagrees with what you know—ahem, believe. That should encourage updating your opinions.
Given the facts available on safety records of licensed, commercial truck drivers vs normal drivers—the latter of whom outnumber safer drivers 135:1—it seems sensible to me to form an opinion that the 135 less-safe drivers need to be dealt with before we get too worried about the 1 safer driver. The overwhelming majority of multi-vehicle accidents with big rigs find the passenger car driver to be at fault—we’re talking from 70-90%, based on types of crashes. Non-truck crashes outnumber truck crashes by roughly 3:1 per 100M vehicle miles traveled.[0] This seems to indicate non-truck drivers pose the greatest threat on the roads to public safety.
So sure, form any opinion you like. But maybe be more careful to share them as obvious opinions that aren’t implying they are actually fact-based—by stating you know something is true or declaring the ratio of something is out of control—or someone is likely going to call out those statements as being questionable when compared to the facts of reality. There’s no clear evidentiary basis for arriving at an opinion on a correct ratio of trucks:non-trucks, other than the data we have seems to indicate that fewer passenger cars on the roads is the surest way to increase public safety.
There are already rules in place for human truck drivers that push the limits of what a human should be called upon to do for many hours at a time. Human truck drivers already have regular accidents due to fatigue. Replacing or augmenting long haul trucking can only be a positive.
What rules are you referring to? Current regulations prohibit drivers from having > 14 hours on the clock, iirc. Ignoring any drivers—or the companies who employ them—who are overtly ignoring these rules and faking their log books to be active longer than 14 hours, there are mandatory 10-hour windows drivers must not be working. That 14 hours encompasses all activity—loading, unloading, weighing, weight redistribution, driving, etc. Driving time itself is capped at 11 hours of an allowed 14-hour workday. Newer trucks even have cameras in them to monitor drivers, as well as other systems that report violations and actively prevent the truck from being used in a way that violates regulations.
> Human truck drivers already have regular accidents due to fatigue.
Fatigue accounts for 13% of truck driver-caused accidents according to DOT[0]. Fatigue is coded twice as often for passenger vehicles as it is for commercial truck drivers.
Moreover, the rate of commercial rigs involved in accidents with passenger vehicles is quite low. The rate of single-vehicle accidents is also lower among commercial trucks. Commercial trucking continues to grow increasingly safer every year since we’ve been keeping track in the 70s[1].
Maybe relevant disclaimer: my father is a truck driver and we regularly talk about this stuff. His experiences have led me to do a bit of research and study on the matter. I don’t work for or on anything trucking-related.
My father is a retired truck driver, it'd be great to curse at each other sometime. :)
My understanding is that the industry (and maybe this has changed or was not good anecdata to begin with) is rife with gaming of the regulations, which in my opinion are already grueling. A human being, no matter how accustomed they are to driving, should not be asked to sit and drive down long mundane stretches of road at a high degree of alertness for 11 hours per day, multiple days per week. I understand that the new time tracking systems will reduce the ability to game the system, but I feel the fact that regulators are calling for these devices and driver awareness monitoring devices should be an indication that maybe we can find a solution that doesn't involve a human.
Your evidence seems to contradict what you are saying. From your second link:
"A total of 3,986 people died in large truck crashes in 2016. Seventeen percent of these deaths were truck occupants, 66 percent were occupants of cars and other passenger vehicles, and 16 percent were pedestrians, bicyclists or motorcyclists. The number of people who died in large truck crashes was 27 percent higher in 2016 than in 2009, when it was the lowest it has been since the collection of fatal crash data began in 1975. The number of truck occupants who died was 47 percent higher than in 2009."
You’re misreading the data presented. Yes, 2016 was worse than 2009, but it was far safer than ‘75 and the decades that followed. That other particular stat on fatalities is only looking at the fatality rates of truck drivers vs passenger car drivers in accidents that are between a passenger vehicle and a commercial rig—and is not a surprising rate considering one ought to expect a truck driver to have a higher likelihood of surviving such a crash compared to a passenger car occupant. When you look at the comparative rates among non-truck accidents and fatalities, truck drivers are far safer. If I correctly recall the data, the rate at which truck drivers are at fault for accidents with passenger cars is also lower than the reverse. When you look at the comparative rates of truck accidents vs passenger car accidents, non-commercial drivers continue to be the most dangerous drivers on the road, and there are vastly more of them putting others at risk.
> The number of truck occupants who died was 47 percent higher (in 2016) than in 2009.
Do you have numbers for dead truck occupants per mile driven? It could be that this is due to truck traffic being lower overall during the 2008/2009 crisis.
Can the robot perform a brake check? Can the robot ensure a load is properly secured? The act of driving the truck is only one of the many jobs a trucker does.
They're addressed by established process and routine - 2 things machines do better than us. Can a machine monitor braking or perform the current brake check - absolutely. Could we shift the responsibility of check the load tie-down to the freight facility and monitor ongoing status with sensors. I'd hope so.
You should be asking "can a robot drive for 12+ hrs without fatigue?" or "can we eliminate the restrictive, expensive and often gamed system of keeping drivers within their hours?" This is were long-haul transport could be "disrupted"
>> Can a machine monitor braking or perform the current brake check - absolutely.
I'm not sure you understand what a "brake check" means. It isn't checking the brakes for current functionality. It means a visual inspection of all the brake parts to ensure they aren't going to stop working somewhere literally down the road. It is checking for pins, debris, excessive or unusual wear, or leaks. It would require 3d vision backed up by some serious AI to understand what is going on. And you would probably need some sort of robotic actuator to remove any debris blocking inspection areas.
When you see a truck stopped by the road with the driver walking around the trailer, he is probably doing a legally mandated "brake check". It isn't just pumping the brakes to see they are still there.
It is also checking brakes for functionality before you set out. There is an in-cab procedure too, not just a visual inspection. But I believe that both can be automated. The in-cab brake check is testing for certain pressures in the system under certain circumstances, and could be automated via software-hardware combo. The visual inspection could be done via a series of cameras under a bay the truck rolls over, with software to detect issues with the braking system components visually. Or either of these functions could be performed manually by a human at a waystation before the truck heads out on the (next leg of the) trip.
I don't think people are claiming computers can load or unload a truck.
Computers can check if a brake is working or if the cargo is well balanced better than a human. One could do those today with cheap (on the 100's of dollars) electronics and few lines of code. Nobody does this because it's 100's of dollars more than letting the driver do the same.
I'm saying if you limit the scope to tractor trailers hauling only 20/40 ft ISO shipping containers, then "loading/unloading" can also be done in an automated fashion. I'm saying that if you limit the problem space, and try to approach even just a single use case such as this on a major artery like I-40, I don't see any way you end up in a worse spot than human drivers.
> I don't think people are claiming computers can load or unload a truck.
I think truckers would absolutely love it if this was the case. It would save them so much time waiting on loading/unloading, which decreases their pay.
I understand that the job encompasses other duties, my father is a retired truck driver. That said, my answer is "yes, I think they could, just as well, or better than any human".
You could have multiple cameras on the load using computer vision to detect movement. You could have weight sensors sending feedback to the system. I'm sure there are many ways to do this, and any of them would beat a human behind the wheel.
Huh? I'm not saying they exist, just that it's not impossible for me to imagine these problems being solved or being minimized to a level that is no worse than current human driver would perform.
dsnuh - I haven't seen anyone argue against "[software+hardware] would beat a human behind the wheel", its just that developing the tech to achieve this feat with the same level of accuracy as the top 10-20% of current CDL drives is extremely expensive and caries a lot of risk. Nobody seems to of cracked the nut on it.
You're right in that there are many ways to do this, but none have come even close to beating a decent human behind the wheel.
I don't see any indication in the article that they are stopping due to technical challenges. They already demonstrated it on the road, so it seems they were well on their way. It appears this project is a victim of politics and legal action.
Why do you think we need to get to the level of top 10%-20% of commercial drivers? How do you come to that cutoff point? If we had automated trucks that could move freight 24/7 with even 5% better than average accident rates (for example) would be a huge win.
I agree for the most part, but it's not quite as simple as just having better accident rates. That is one thing, but there are other considerations as well. When there are accidents, are they predictable ones, or is it completely random? Did it make a decision that we cannot explain which led to the accident? People aren't going to like completely random accidents, even if there are slightly fewer of them. Can we assign fault in the case of an accident, sometimes, always?
That wouldn't work everywhere, in my country trucks aren't allowed to drive after about 2100 until 0600 in the morning due to the noise they generate (trucks are pretty bad noise-wise).
Just yesterday, I saw a (German) news report about Volvo's line of electric trucks which is coming out next year. They said that Volvo hopes that those trucks will be allowed to drive in cities at night because they don't make engine noises, thus helping to partly alleviate the traffic issues that cities are dealing with at daytime. (Not sure if that adds up; a large portion of street noise comes from the tires.)
Tire noise will be the major issue there, I did take a course on environmental protection (fire and noise, Brand- und Lärmschutz) and they did mention the engine is only 50% of the total noise for a large truck. Mostly because it has lots of tires.
Whisper asphalt is also still somewhat rare and doesn't solve the problem entirely.
50 hours? Can this truck fuel itself? Inspect its load? React to a load that becomes unsecure mid route? How about when the truck is pulled over for an inspection? How will it deal with a stowaway? Brake inspection before a big hill? All the rare events add up to significant barriers to actually removing the human from the truck.
Who cares? That's how trucks are different. Somebody at the company just calls the fuel station and say "Hey, I want to refuel my trucks there, when they get there, you refuel them, and I pay you at the end of the week. Deal?"
> React to a load that becomes unsecure mid route?
How common is that? You basically have the truck phone home and send somebody there to solve the issue. Depending on the likelihood it can be a major cost by hiring people every so distance, or a delay you just deal with to something that is solved by dispatching people by plane.
> How will it deal with a stowaway?
Most likely, it won't.
> Brake inspection before a big hill?
By braking and checking the acceleration, just like a human. In two axes and paying attention to frequency responses, what a human can't do.
> > React to a load that becomes unsecure mid route?
> How common is that? You basically have the truck phone home and send somebody there to solve the issue. Depending on the likelihood it can be a major cost by hiring people every so distance, or a delay you just deal with to something that is solved by dispatching people by plane.
First off, how do you detect a load that has become unsecured? I saw bees on a flatbed getting hauled. How do you detect that the net is no longer tied down securely besides looking at it occasionally.
Hauling livestock is one of those difficult hauling items. If you accelerate or decelerate too fast, they die.
Or how about the tale of the worst load ever - Oregon Potato Chips to Texas ( https://www.dat.com/blog/post/my-worst-load-ever-hauling-ore... ). While that one has a "ok, this needs to be another factor in the routing" - local barometric pressure could cause a problem.
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Brake inspections are likely less of an issue than chains for that storm that just hit. The storm that dumps a foot of snow on I80 over the Sierras. That's not too much - but everything needs to chain up unless its a 4 wheel drive pickup trick. That includes the semis.
> The bridge that typically enables travelers to pass over the Straits of Mackinac has been closed to all vehicles except passenger cars, passenger vans and empty pickup trucks, authorities said.
> Motorists permitted to travel across are advised to reduce speeds to 20 miles per hour and to be prepared to stop.
A vehicle inspection at a rest and check
stop should include the following:
• All lights are clean and in working order.
• There are no air leaks.
• All the wheels are secure, and tires are
properly inflated and are not hot.
• There are no broken or loose items on
the vehicle.
• The load is secure.
• The dangerous goods placards are
clean and secure (if applicable).
• The trailer locking mechanisms are
secure and in good condition.
• The brakes are properly adjusted.
These procedures assume human eyes. A robot might be able to tick all the boxes via sensors, but that isn't going to be enough to constitute due care when something goes wrong.
I think 50 hours would get you across Interstate 40 nonstop. But you wouldn't need to have the trucks go all the way. Just have transfer stations every 500 miles or so where the truck transfers the trailer and recharges/refuels. Even if it was a manual process to transfer the trailer and refuel the truck, you would more than make up for stoppage time with human drivers.
Let's assume that the fuel economy of an autonomous semi truck is comparable to that of a regular semi truck. supposedly the average fuel economy is 5.9 mpg which is honestly better than I thought it would be. For a trip from Seattle to Miami that's a 49 hour trip according to Google Maps which adds up to 3305 miles. That only adds up to 560 gallons of diesel which sounds like a lot, but look at the existing fuel tanks on a semi truck. Those things are massive. 150 gallons per side isn't uncommon for long haul trucking. Adding enough fuel to go nonstop from Seattle to Miami only adds 260 gallons of fuel which at 7lbs per gallon for diesel means 1,820 lbs. The maximum weight for a typical semi is 80,000 lbs so that's still only 2.3% of the weight that could otherwise go to cargo. But one thing to keep in mind is that without having to cater to a driver you can remove most of the weight of the cab. There's no need for a dashboard, heater core, air conditioning, steering wheel, seats, windows, doors, giant empty space on top for the driver, etc.
It would not surprise me if even with all of the extra fuel (which wouldn't even really be realistic because no one has a route from Seattle to Miami) if the weight difference was a wash between the two. At the very least so long as it can be loaded with fuel at the origin and destination it's not really a concern.
> It seems like everything about automating a truck would be more expensive (cost of 1 truck = 5-6 cars),
Yes, the initial cost is about that. But, the truck is directly making money whenever it's rolling, and an automated truck would presumably roll more than a driven truck, since that's an advertised feature. A car is usually only indirectly making money at best during the few hours of the day that it rolls (getting you to work, or to the park and ride).
BTW, there has been a partial solution to "trucks don't make money when the driver sleeps" problem for years. Team driving. You have two drivers, and one sleeps in the back while the other drives. That gives a truck up to 22 possible hours per day, 11 federally regulated hours per driver.
> Edit: even on 'simple' point A to point B route that involve 99% highway, what happens when a small part of the highway shuts down for whatever reason (flooding, multi-lan accident, fire, etc) and all traffic is routed on smaller adjacent streets? Automating a truck is as hard or harder than automating a car, there's no way around it.
As I mentioned elsewhere, if automated trucks are on the road, what you describe would already be solved by necessity, because you already have to go through surface streets to get you your shipper or receiver. Or, in an often imagined scenario, to get to the "freight yard" where humans would drive the first and last miles. Yes, automating a truck is at least as hard as automating a car.
The actual problem in your emergency scenario is getting the truck to follow the diversion. Right now it's cop-eyeball to trucker-eyeball communication, or even just an orange sign on a saw horse. That'll have to be worked out, plus fallbacks, but it will.
From my uninformed point of view, most of those things apply to human drivers as well.
Automated trucks seem appealing because they solve (what appears to me to be) a large problem with human drivers - fatigue and allowable working hours.
Building a fixed-route automated truck seems more doable than a self-driving car that can handle arbitrary roads. I don't know if it's actually any easier, but the problems that need to be solved seem smaller in scope.
I think you trade one complexity (fixed vs variable routes) for many other complexities (larger vehicle with more demands). Think of the complexity of getting a driver license for a passenger sized car vs a commercial driver license, there's a lot more rules (physics and human regulations) around a CDL. So yes, you have a fixed route, but is that really the hard problem to solve, the route to take? Isn't the hard part monitoring road conditions, identifying objects, stopping for emergencies, etc?
Let's say we limit the application to just ISO compliant steel shipping container transport. It seems like we could apply much of the self balancing technology to trailer design to account for various load weights and distributions. Even without some redesign of the trailer, it's not too difficult for me to imagine software being better at controlling the truck than a human. The things that are difficult for humans to learn about driving a truck don't seem all that challenging, especially when given the limited problem space related to what is trying to be achieved with self-driving cars replacing all human transportation in cities.
Fixed route is already solved by trains and trains can be made self-driving or be remoted easily. There is a problem in variable-route, variable-size transport.
If they platoon or draft (or whatever the word is where like five travel right on top of each other and save fuel based on avoiding air resistance incurred only by the front one), there can be substantial savings if that is automated.
You’ve made an argument that it’s easier to automate cars rather than trucks, not that there’s an economic advantage.
Among other things, I’m guessing most americans who own a car don’t do it because they’ve crunched the numbers compared to other transit options and figured out that a car is cheaper. It’s a convenience thing where it’s an option at all.
Meanwhile, it’d be fairly easy to demonstrate marginal savings in a business where transit costs are already under high scrutiny.
> It seems like everything about automating a truck would be more expensive (cost of 1 truck = 5-6 cars)
Isn't that a good thing for adoption?
Here in the agricultural industry, self-driving technology can cost tens of thousands of dollars to add it to your equipment. But when a tractors cost hundreds of thousands of dollars, it seems like a drop in the bucket, so the buyers are willing to put down the money. You don't see many tractors around these days without it.
On the other hand, tens of thousands of dollars on a $30,000 car, potentially doubling the purchase price or more, makes for a much more difficult pill to swallow.
Humans aren't exactly well known for their rationality. Even if the technology provides tens of thousands of dollars worth of utility to the car owner as it does to the farmer, many will struggle to accept paying 100% more for the same car plus one more feature. Farmers see it as a 5% increase in price for one more feature, so, hey, why not tack it on?
The best way would be a hybrid model where on easy, predictable highways (say 90%)use automation and for the rest of the route (say 10%) have a human driver ready to tackle it. And in future the driver part can be avoided as well if you can engage a driver remotely like say using a VR headset with 360.deg view. It can also then handle the emergencies like highway blocks etc. Yea but like any kind of self driving it's scary, a single mistake can get the entire company sued vs the single driver getting sued before.
If anything, it would be much easier for a computer to follow the extra regulations than humans, who routinely violate such regulations in the first place, in the same way that autopilots only follow approved routes for planes.
Add in the fatigue and long, repetitive drives that are a feature of long-distance trucking, and it seems like a situation more ripe for automation.
I don't mean to be sarcastic here, but I hear developers (myself included) throw out "it would be much easier to..." or "this should only take an hour to automate..." all day long.
If it was an easy and profitable problem to solve it would have been solved by now. I agree that it would be very beneficial for everyone if trucks/truck routes were automated (except maybe the truck drivers getting laid off) but it's obviously a very hard and very risky problem to automate.
In fact, Otto probably suffered negative impact from its association with the Waymo scandal, coupled with the recent bad press for Uber's autonomous vehicles. It sounds like Uber is retrenching in favor of just automating cabs for now.
My brother in law works as a recovery driver for a very large trucking company 10000 + Trucks. He really doesn't make that much (50k-65k)considering he is at the top of the pay scale, so I am under the impression that the driver costs are pretty low. Fuel, Insurance, Break Downs, Regulations, and just waiting for loads that are not ready are the largest costs.
Part of his duties is to fly out and bring back new trucks and he was telling me that some of the new trucks have lane assist, cameras, an automatic distance feature where his speed to stopping distance is calculated and the if he crosses that threshold the truck will apply the brakes to slow him down to a safe driving speed (I think he mentioned he can override this feature). He also said there are alarms to let him know when he gets to close to a lane line, etc. I imagine that eventually there will be sensors in the steering wheel that can measure his condition/attention and relay that back to dispatch so they can monitor his wellness and how alert he is, etc.
Lots of interesting technology is making its way into the cab to help the driver be safer on the roads and probably is the result of some of this new self driving tech filtering it's way down.
> He really doesn't make that much (50k-65k)considering he is at the top of the pay scale
~~I find that surprising, but it may be because he works for a large trucking company. The vast majority of truckers on the road are Owner-Operators and can easily pull down 150K+.~~
While looking for some facts to back this up, I came across this link [1] which talked about how even though drivers earn 183K on average, expenses eat that away and the average take home is 50-60K.
It's a tough business. When he started out driving he barely broke even. After a year or two the company he drove for offered to sell/lease him a truck and trailer and he could contract for them as an Owner Operator. He decided to decline and just kept driving and eventually ended up moving up the ladder to recovery driver (the very top of the ladder for drivers). Now most of his expenses are covered so he can earn a decent living.
As a recovery driver he flies around the country picking up brand new trucks or trucks that have been abandoned by a driver (sometimes they just walk away), or a driver quits because he realizes he can't earn a living, or gets fired. A few have been when a driver passes away. Typically the only folks getting rich in Trucking are the big companies/owners.
For bespoke truck fleets, eliminating the driver might be practical. A substantial fraction of truck freight isn't on bespoke fleets. The driver is often involved in loading and unloading. For dock service the driver moves the goods fore and aft for pickup and delivery respectively. Securing and unsecuring separate shipments. Rearranging shipments to make room and balance loading for safe travel. What your friendly UPS driver does with small packages, semi-drivers often do with larger shipments. They often carry pallet jacks and employ helpers.
In terms of economics, the trucker provides a set of hands exactly when the truck arrives. The alternative is a set of hands waiting on the loading dock...docks, one at each end of the route and all stops in between. The trucker is the one person authorized to move all the different shipments within the trailer. The cost of employing a driver is often rounding error compared to the value of the goods being transported. Picture UPS but where customers load and unload their own packages.
I'd put it this way, the least interesting part of truck automation is on the highway. And that's still in moonshot territory.
I think self-driving trucks are going to replace truck-drivers for most large companies in the near future. However, I'm glad that a company run by a bunch of spoiled, sociopathic idiots completely bereft of any sense of ethics has shut down its self-driving truck program. They should get out of the self-driving automobile industry in general before their pathological desire to cut corners kills enough people to trigger over-regulation and the demise of the entire concept.
You could even have human pilots meet up and drive them through cities, and let the trucks drive themselves on the interstates, just like ships have maritime pilots navigating harbours.
Yeah, I don't understand why they aren't doing something like this. Seems like a no-brainer to have a number of staging facilities along major transport corridors that the self driving trucks deliver to, leaving the last X miles to human drivers. The truck unhitches, fuels up, picks up a new trailer, and is back on the highway in 30 minutes. You could have these operating 24/7, with human drivers picking up loads for delivery during human working hours.
Self driving experts can easily pull in salaries of $5M plus per year, and this stuff takes many years. To build a team of those people, you need to burn an insane amount of cash.
That much cash is only available from investors if the reward is huge. Replacing all interstate trucking is a much smaller potential reward than replacing all human transportation.
Hence everyone is working on the harder, but much higher reward projects.
> Self driving experts can easily pull in salaries of $5M plus per year
I think this is an exaggeration by almost an order of magnitude, unless you are referring to the handful of people that have had successful exits in this space.
It would surprise me if another company didn't pick up the torch here. It sounds like Otto had a working demo of the technology. There's $800B+ on the table, someone is going to crack this market.
And often surrounded by land I would wager the government owns, which could be used to build the transfer stations upon. Maybe even a susbsidised incentive to get companies on board, so they don't have to spend their own time and capital acquiring land.
If it has space for a parking spot it has enough space to transfer a trailer to a different rig. No one is talking about unloading anything, it's just lowering the legs on the trailer and unlocking the fifth wheel to let the autonomous truck pull away and back the new truck up to it.
Yes, I am imagining something like this, with self driving electric tractor trailers being orchestrated at huge stations with solar collecting roofs along the transportation corridor. Inspection and maintenance could be performed by human workers if needed. If the trailer is destined within half the distance of the next station, the load is dropped, and a human driver does last mile(s) delivery.
Kind of how like many ports have pilots that have specialized local knowledge and handle the finesse piloting into berth? Example: Lake Charles in Louisiana - http://www.lakecharlespilots.com/
They are trying to automate these on the Mississippi with machine learning and sonar maps, I met a developer with that task not so long ago in New Orleans. Can't imagine Lake Charles would be too far behind.
The liability issues might make it pretty difficult, I don't know what they ship on the Mississippi, but Lake Charles has a ton of LNG tankers with tight traffic restrictions.
Harbor pilots are viable because of scale. Even a shipload of iron ore is valuable enough to justify the cost. But it's at the other end that scale really comes into play. Job scheduling is in NP and even for a busy port n is small enough that ships can be scheduled to harbor pilots by hand. The same is true of freight trains.
When n is at the much larger scale of trucks, efficient scheduling requires a large number of "slack" pilots to handle modest variations in demand.
Why dont we have autonomous single-line rail connections between cities where we just put cars of stuff on the line and it conveys itself to the next endpoint?
We basically just need to dig two N-foot-wide trench lanes and have a loop of cars constantly flowing between them, simply like a gondola where the shipping containers get swooped up by crane-lift once they exit the loop.
Cover the trench so that people cant mess with it...
Why do train systems need to involve so many humans?
Have you looked at the complexity of driving a semi trailer? There is a ton that can go wrong even in the best of conditions.
Also, nothing about driving extra long distances in remote areas where there may not be any type of cell signal, or in places where GPS can be lost (no line of sight to satellites, or places where there are tree/building cover, etc) is predicable.
Loads of people within Netherlands use an app called "Flitsmeister" which does this and more. It basically gives you traffic information by determining where you're going to. It's different from Waze/Google Maps and so on that primarily it a) can auto start if you're using a bluetooth carkit b) it just looks at where you're currently headed. Not needing to set a navigation is quite handy because often you're headed towards the same places (e.g. work) and do not want to setup your navigation 2x/day.
Things it warns about: emergency vehicles (!), open bridges, speed/red light cameras (name is based upon this), (dynamic) speed limits (if on a highway it shows e.g. 70 instead of 130 the app will know), stopped vehicles, bad road, etc.
I'm guessing they had to cooperate with a lot of different government bodies to make all of the functionality possible. Anyway, it works quite well in practice. Also, emergency vehicle notification is automatic, it's not based on people needing to report it!
Any road that fits the situation I described. Not all driving is on interstates. Many US, state and county highways are two lane blacktops; as a truck driver I drive them often.
You arrive from the northwesternmost link, the outer lanes south are blocked, so police opens up the service link (which is normally physically closed by a barrier and correctly mapped as "no access") and routes the traffic through it, into the inner lanes.
Now you also have an indecisive truck sitting in the mess, waiting for a human to intervene.
Computer control of vehicles is a magnitude of order worse by any data we have. This assumption that computers are going to outperform humans driving any time soon is wrong. I blame sci-fi.
Interstate travel (especially here in Australia) means that sometimes the soonest someone can get there will be DAYS, purely from the tyranny of distance.
Some of the things these trucks transport is required for very large & expensive projects which get more so with excessive delays.
Paying a human trained in properly securing a load and changing a tyre nearly as big as the human is, to come along for the ride, is much cheaper than having a helicopter on standby every ~500km of the way and staff to be ready.
I don't quite get how you can have a self driving car but not also a self driving truck. If you have the sensors and code to power a self driving car you ought to be 99.9% of the way to a truck. It should be a relatively small effort to account for a trucks different physics.
For cabs, driver overhead is about 49 cents a dollar while for truck its 38 cents a dollar [1]. However average transportation cost for retail goods is only 2-3% of total revenue [2]. So the net increase in revenue is actually about 1% for retailers - although its significant savings for trucking companies.
Now consider the fact that each truck carries 100s of thousands of dollars of goods. The wages you pay to driver can easily compensate for the insurance benefits because insurance companies may cover for human mistake but not for the algorithms mistake. Even if autonomous algorithm was 10X better than human, when it takes on responsibility of driving 1000 trucks, it would commit 100X more accidents than an average human. If a truck driver gets in to serious accident every 20 years, an algorithms will be blamed for a serious truck accident every 2.4 months - even if it was 100X better than human! It's an inescapable law of large numbers. (PS: this doesn't mean there are more accidents in total. It means number of blames assigned to same entity is much higher even though overall accident count is smaller).
The autonomous trucking had been attractive only for one reason really: You can avoid last mile. Highways are much more easier for autonomous driving where you rarely have to deal with crossing peds, traffic lights, round abouts etc.
> If a truck driver gets in to serious accident every 20 years, an algorithms will be blamed for a serious truck accident every 2.4 months - even if it was 100X better than human! It's an inescapable law of large numbers.
You're comparing 1 driver driving 1 truck to 1 "algorithm" driving 1000 trucks and then comparing the nominal number of accidents.
I'm not an insurer, but I highly doubt they care about individual (human or otherwise) performance. I would bet they do care quite a bit about the accident rates you're attempting to dismiss.
Each insurance claim has two sides. Someone is ultimately paying someone else. If one algorithm that controlled 1000 trucks was being blamed for accident because of spurious very low probability mistakes, who do you think will be the payer?
> Even if autonomous algorithm was 10X better than human, when it takes on responsibility of driving 100 trucks, it would commit 10X more accidents than an average human. It's an inescapable law of probability.
Could you explain this? Are you comparing an algorithm driving 100 trucks to 1 human driving 1 truck?
The single algorithm will not outperform the individual driver if it drives more trucks, but it will outperform the aggregate group of drivers needed to drive the same amount of trucks.
My statement is true if each accident by human or algorithm was random error (i.e. not systematic error). When errors are random, you can reduce probability all you want but if you increase number of instances then you are back to square. BTW, this statement is not saying there is increased number of accidents in total. It is saying how many blames gets assigned to an entity. This is the distributed blame assignment problem. When 1000 humans drive 1000 trucks, blames gets distributed. But when same algorithm is deployed in 1000 trucks, each accident gets blamed on same algorithm. So same algorithm assumes all liability that was previously distributed among 1000 humans although total liability in the system might have been reduced.
The blame is assigned to some entity. But you cannot compare the entity of an algorithm, to an entity of one truck driver - you have to compare to the entity of the collective of all truck drivers.
If you do that, the numbers will favor the algorithm clearly.
The insurance companies are not stupid, they will easily see this logic. It is even in their own economic interest to see this logic.
This is simply a non-argument against automated driving, it does not make sense.
In many places the interstate system late at night in the US is majority trucks. There may be restrictions in residential areas, but on a highway you can drive a truck at any time of the night on whatever day you'd like.
>> Drivers need breaks, commutes, limited time of driving per day.
> Those regulations protect the people living next to heavy routes, not the drivers.
They're talking about amount of time in a driver's day spent driving, not what part of the day they drive. And those regs definitely are to protect the drivers, as well as all other involved parties and stakeholders.
Their problem is the huge infrastructure cost up front - this was built for cars as the interstate network...mostly during the Cold War, as a dual-use technology (military transports on railway are far more easily sabotaged).
I think that if you can figure out self driving trucks, you can figure out keeping it fueled as well. As a quick and easy solution I would imagine large enough fuel tanks on the truck itself, and a couple of gas stations with people fueling the trucks at places. One for every large industrial place would already make it very widespread. Another solution would be mechanical arms attaching to the truck.
You can always pay a human to do what a computer can't, until it can.
Some truck stop fuel islands have a lane where a human will come out and check/fill your tires. You pay for the service, and it's not much.
Most humans, or the occupations, are cheap, as you can see when you think about all those humans paid to stand on street corners and wave signs. Cheaper than paying to plant the sign on property, and a cheap enough workaround when you can't plant the sign at any price.
Worst case, it signals a human fueler in advance of it's anticipated need to stop for gas, and the fueler meets it and handles fueling.
Over time, though, building a network of compatible automated fueling stations to support the trucks makes sense, and you can use data from the trucks for siting decisions.
Trains are far more economical per ton-mile. The issue arises at the "last mile" if you do not happen to have both ends of your shipment adjacent to a rail line (preferably with its own siding so you don't have to deal with demurrage fees, etc.) and then have to do a truck-based leg.
Assuming you need to terminate by truck on at least one end of the shipment, it takes about 500 miles for rail's natural efficiencies to make it cost advantageous. That's a very rough rule of thumb, but it's rare to be able to make the case for rail in less than that. (Some specialized situations, like mining ore in unit trains, are exceptions.)
The reason it isn't is passenger-to-driver ratio. It's already widely amortized to have a train driver. Sure it's an easier problem, but it's just so much less of the overhead of having a train.
The economics of new technologies can be hard to see/predict.
Automating personal vehicles has the potential for a lot of efficiency gain too, if people stop owning cars privately. Taxi drivers tend to buy "efficient" models, vehicles that will do a lot of miles/€, so there's a gain here. There would be a shift in consumption habits, as a response to pay as you go pricing. Possibly more ""efficient" consumption, maybe even some new forms of public transport.
In terms of infrastructure, you'd need less parking which frees up valuable and scarce space. It could eliminate the parking industry, rental industry, taxi industry and such. All (potentially scary) consequences of efficancy gains.
Back to commercial vehicles... One way to think of potential efficiency gains is (driver cost)/(total cost) of a journey. Trucks are expensive. A long distance truck journey uses a lot of fuel & maintanence. So, the driver's wages are a smaller overall part of the journey, a smaller potential efficiency gain per journey.
That doesn't tell us much about economy-wide gains, but it does tell us something about disruption. Self driving taxis could reduce the price of taxis by 50% or more. This has major implications for how and how much people consume. For long haul trucks, it probably changes the industry less.
Truck drivers must rest for considerable amount of time. For example, in EU truck drivers cannot drive for more than 9-10h per day and there are further restrictions (i.e.weekly)[0], so you either must send few drivers to a prolonged journey or truck will simply stand idling >50% of time. I'd say this reason only is enough to make autonomous trucks economically viable.
> And the majority of their time is spent on relatively predictable interstate roads, not the chaotic roads of a busy downtown, so they'd be simpler to automate.
No, they'd be at least as complicated as automating cars, because there are no delivery destinations on the freeway. You have to go through the same surface streets as cars, and it's much harder to drive a truck and trailer through busy and small surface streets than to drive a car.
Nah, just have "pilots" that wait at hubs. Trucks auto-drive the highways and pull into a staging area where they are prioritized for a human driver to bring them the last mile.
Even so trucks are more difficult to drive than cars. They need longer following distance and they need to react sooner to traffic jams or obstacles ahead. They have so much more momentum than a passenger vehicle. And they are much less nimble in handling. Anyone who thinks driving a truck is easy because they travel on highways has never driven one.
This is how it's done, and has been done, with rail-shipped containers for 70-80 years. The intermodal industry already has all the complex contractual plumbing and logistical framework to handle this with ease, but it's an extremely automation-averse industry. They still use faxes extensively ffs.
Not just intermodal. To get paid for delivering a trailer, I have to fax in the receiver-signed bill of lading to my company. You can do that at virtually every truck stop, or at a company terminal. I use an employer-provided phone app and my phone's camera to do that, but the fax is still heavily used by many or most drivers.
You could work with them the same way intermodal rail container operations function, where trains carrying hundreds of containers are last-miled by specialized drayage companies that pick the containers up at rail yards and bring them to consignees (destination customers).
Doing the same but with pools can of driverless trucks all dropping off trailers at a designated transfer yard would require very little modification to this very mature but little known niche of freight logistics. The economics would be similar.
Agree. I figured the first step would be cruise-control-on-steroids: trucks from the same owner would have communicating distance sensors and brakes, enabling "convoy" driving at sub-meter vehicle spacing. Because of drafting in the convoy, you'd save fuel and money even with a driver in each truck.
Commuting is a bigger potential market than freight by 2 orders of magnitude, and an autonomous truck company that doesn't do the first and last mile is begging to be disrupted by the company that does.
I'd expect the utilization for commuting to be much lower though. The truck could pretty much run 24/6. What's the car doing at night? Even utilization of the fleet won't be the same during the middle of the day.
The freight rail network in the US is very robust and generally runs at or near capacity. About twice as much freight, percentage-wise, moves by rail in the US as in Europe (though this varies somewhat depending on whether the denominator is tons of product or dollar value; there are more bulk commodities shipments, e.g. coal and grain, within the US that are almost invariably shipped by rail). Many people fail to appreciate how much stuff is shipped by rail in the US, because it is largely raw and intermediate goods traffic, and also perhaps because they extrapolate the poor state of US passenger rail and assume that freight rail is somehow equally poor (it is not; in fact some of the problems with US passenger rail stem from the system being optimized for freight).
I would expect there to be more raw interest in automated or semi-automated trucking in Europe than in the US, and perhaps there will be once the technology is proven and regulatory issues are ironed out.
OTOH, I'd imagine you are correct that the interest in driverless passenger cars is related to the car-centricity of US cities and the lack of public transport options. Many people are seemingly looking to "driverless Uber" as the solution for congested cities, ignoring the established solutions to the same problems, because they aren't things the private sector can deliver.
What about a Fast and the Furious situation i.e. when humans start hijacking trucks? It was a ridiculous plot when you have a human driver, but not so much when trucks are automated.
The truck couldn't travel at a higher MPH (they already travel at highway speed limits). What they mean is that the truck would get there faster because a human truck driver legally needs to rest for 10 hours every day, but a self-driving truck does not.
The money you'd save is by not having your truck sit idle while the driver slept. You could thus deliver the same amount of freight with fewer trucks. However, trucks would wear out faster due being run for more hours per day.
There was an article in The Economist about improving road transport in India with clever logistics. If I remember correctly, one of the significant savings was that by swapping drivers every few hundred miles you can arrange for each driver to sleep at home most nights, which makes the job more pleasant, so you don't have to pay them so much.
The new CEO continues to impress. When he took over, Kalanick had Uber in something like a hundred side-businesses, a massive waste of focus, effort, brand and capital. This isn't the first or will be the last black hole side venture Dara is getting Uber out of. And he's already established his 100x better at PR and building/protecting the brand than Travis was.
Uber never needed to be in the automated trucks business, there are zero synergies with their core business, and it's not even clear that will ever be a good business to be in. Is Uber Eats next on the chopping block? That would probably be my choice.
> Is Uber Eats next on the chopping block? That would probably be my choice.
Are you saying this because you don't use Uber Eats and don't see a value for it? I and people I know in my city heavily use Uber Eats and it provides Uber drivers who are already on the road (here in over abundance to the point that they're barely making any money) additional income.
UberEats is in a competitive space, but I don't think any of them have realized how to make a profitable model out of it yet, so Uber getting out would be consistent with the new direction of burning VC cash less rapidly...
It does on the supply side. It keeps drivers on the Uber network, which is good for both the rides business and the Eats business due to more consistent supply, and good for drivers due to higher total volume of work.
The eventual result is that Uber can operate more efficiently than competitors that only do rides or food, allowing them to compete better in both markets.
ubereats is a flanking product, meant to protect the core business. strategically, uber really only has market power on the supply side, and ubereats is primarily about protecting that advantage and less about being a standalone business (although i'm sure they'd be thrilled if it succeeded as a standalone business).
i'd be surprised if ubereats went away any time soon. at least, not without something else replacing it.
In European markets there is literally no overlap between Uber Eats and Uber. Uber drivers are driving Toyotas, Uber eats drivers are riding mopeds and bicycles. You can't just switch from one to the other.
I'd say that Uber has zero moat in it's core business, anyone with a little bit of cash can roll out a competitive alternative in any city onces Uber raises prices.
But with Uber eats, a competitor has to also roll out meal delivery in order to be equally profitable and thus competitive.
Still not a huge moat, but a little bit harder to beat.
Uber has a huge most that Eats adds almost nothing to. Every day millions of people reach into their pockets to request a ride using the Uber app. Competing with Uber means
a) recruit large numbers of drivers so your app has rides to offer.
b) convincing large numbers of people to download your app.
c) convincing them to make your app their primary ride share choice.
Even tackling a small city would be horrendously expensive. If it truly was easy Uber would be getting eaten alive by numerous small startups in every major city they operate in.
UberEats brought a kind of a consistent experience to what-ever-i-want-food-delivery. I researched this stuff heavily for a food delivery startup maybe 4 years ago, met with drivers from different options (back then there weren't many, Postmates wasn't popular in TX at all) and it seemed like Eat24 and GrubHub were the big ones where I was (in terms of options, etc). Personally I can't believe Favor didn't absolutely bomb but I digress and great work guys.
The experience was absolutely awful back then. That's why I wanted to get into it. You'd have restaurants on FOO that didn't even know they were on FOO, so you'd make an order then FOO would literally call in and place the order acting like a customer doing a regular pickup (possibly screwing it up). Then FOO would find a delivery person in that area, like around college towns they'd call the local delivery food couriers and pay them to go pick it up. They'd make deals with groups and have to switch them out constantly. If one courier closed at 9 but your ordering at 11 who knows who would be delivering the food if you got it at all. I don't know how many times my food vanished into the night and I just never heard anything.
The experience absolutely sucked. And a transaction that can already be rife with issues (restaurant forgetting an item, etc) now had even more possibility of giving the customer a bad experience.
Now it's not all perfect now and there's definitely issues and always will be but UberEats actually seems to have forced some sort of standardization upon the entire process and the competitors have really had to just GET BETTER in general because of it. I can see my driver, see their GPS, the menu tells me if something is out of stock, the restaurant controls their menu, the restaurant knows it's UberEats, etc.
From the restaurant perspective they get to tap into UberEats population, use their drivers which is a streamlined process, UberEats has it's own software to see analytics, the popularity of their dishes, etc.
I could've been the Food Delivery King but I decided to work on a SAAS! C'est la vie. Kidding. I'd probably just be bankrupt now. "What if Uber, Yelp and Facebook get into this?" was never a thought that crossed my mind..
The business case is that by using the same fleet for ride hailing and delivery they can provide the service for a lower cost than competitors that only do delivery.
Also, Uber’s are popular during commute hours, but in city deliver is popular during business hours. Uber eats picks up during meals. Different services leverage the same fleet at different times of the day
The idea that there is any synergy with Eats is a classic "bad business decision" based on hoped for benefits with a core business instead of a business that can stand on it's own legs. Driver and customer acquisition costs are high enough in their core business, why hemorrhage money in Eats spending to acquire drivers for it? In hopes that keeps some percentage as Uber drivers?
He's also been aggressively pursuing new partnerships focusing on the core problem of getting a person to where they are trying to get to, including public transit tickets, car rentals, e-bikes, and scooters.
It is, and it's huge. It's 10% of their revenues now. Which means it's burning more cash than any other vertical at Uber by far. Why does Uber need to fund this "business" for years to come? How does it benefit them to keep throwing money at it?
Answer: It really doesn't. It's a huge distraction that might never be profitable.
It comes down to this question: are they Viaweb or are they Amazon?
If they're Viaweb then they should only do "taxi-like" stuff and should throw away all the automation and other businesses.
If they're Amazon then they are in transportation. Eats acts as a flywheel - more pay for drivers, more demand for drivers, more supply of drivers, more loyal customers, more revenue from customers. They should do automation, be involved in trucking, eats, scooters... add more flywheels.
What's the right strategy? We'll know in 5 years and all proclaim that it was obvious!
Amazon had positive cash flow from early days and has mostly kept positive cash flow ever since (even though they don't report profits, they generated cash). Because of that they've rarely raised debt or equity, and only when they want to on their terms, never when forced to.
Because of that discipline they could work on leveraging into new businesses that had synergies with their current business. But they never tried to do them all at once. Again they were disciplined. At first it was books only. Then they moved into new products bit by bit, and established each as a good business for them before moving into new ones.
GrubHub, a direct publicly traded competitor, is profitable and has a market cap of 11.6B (and is growing tremendously). Considering that Uber Eats already has a gross sales run rate larger than GrubHub, I do imagine it's a pretty good bet. There are also a lot of horizontal synergies between the business models.
That's a very good counter argument, but the real question is whether Uber Eats is profitable or close to being profitable. If it is, you are right and I'm totally wrong and they should kill every side project (including probably driverless car technologies) and keep Eats and Ride Sharing.
If Uber Eats isn't close to profitability it means they are far behind GrubHub despite their advantage of their massive synergy, and have little hope to catch up (in profitability, even if Uber Eats can give away enough services to outgrow Grubhub in revenues that would be a pyrrhic victory).
Wouldn’t using drivers who are already on the road, who drive to point A to pick up a person and drop them off at point B, make perfect sense to pick up food at point A and drop it off at point B? And considering food doesn’t take a pool spot, they could do everything simultaneously while picking up people. It makes perfect sense to me.
You have $6B left. Building out ride sharing will cost more than $6B. So will building out Uber Eats. What'll it be, ride sharing, eats, or more dilution? Oh, and one of these business you are the clear #1 in, and the other, you have a chance to be #2.
I particularly like that he is signaling publicly that the clear priority for the company is cars. They could have done this silently (to save face), but this has the benefit of making clear to the employees & investors that cars are #1.
In retrospect, trucking never made sense. The supply side & demand side are both different from cars. I expect he will shut down or try to sell the remaining trucking pieces (Uber Freight) before IPO. This is the pattern from his tenure at Expedia.
I highly doubt they cut it...UberEats makes a lot of sense for drivers to help smooth out the lulls in between passengers and is a convenient secondary service to Uber customers already used to the user experience. From what I've read, it's growing like gangbusters.
If you don't think protecting the investors money is not job one for any CEO, then you should never become a CEO or investor.
And no good CEO solely gets a company ready to IPO unless they are committing fraud. Getting ready to go public almost always (outside of super bubbles) means establishing your business model works. And usually that means generating profits, and generating profits means you are never forced to go public, you get to go only when it's most advantageous for the company.
Going public isn't an end-goal, it's a hugely expensive and distracting operation than only provides a single thing of value, slightly greater liquidity for your investors.
Then investors would start asking why there is so much cash in company accounts. Good CEO invests every penny into something (hopefully profitable), for example, Jeff Bezos.
A great CEO is a good resource allocator. Cook doesn't blow Apple's billions on dubious side projects, he returns it to shareholders.
In the case of a startup like Uber, it's mandatory to never run low on capital before you turn profitable, or you will soon be either out of business or soon be forced to take massive dilution to stay in business. The reason their burn rate is massive in a big part part because of these dubious side projects and distractions, and it's already costs them substantial dilution. And even after decapitating most of their side projects, they can easily justify keeping a few years cash in the bank because they have a huge potential market in ride-hailing that they haven't even come close to saturating and are still burning capital building out..
I'm generally pro-self-driving vehicles, and while I don't want to underestimate the difficulties, given how far related tech has gone in recent years I think it'd be a mistake to assume any of this is "never" going to happen.
Despite this, I've been very nervously watching how truck driving and self-driving interact. I feel like city-to-city long haul driving will have a very rapid turnover once a certain tech threshold is hit. That threshold might be 5 years out or 20 years out or even further, but once it is reached a lot of jobs cease to be as profitable very quickly.
Trucking is a major source of strong employment for those without a college degree. It is a significant source of employment all across the US, and there are related effects - entire small towns and certainly many small businesses rely on the income from truckers. (Everything here is about the US because I know too little about non-US to have even these vague reactions)
Miners have become a synonym for workers displaced by technology - yet mining was always 1-2 orders of magnitude smaller than modern trucking and took multiple generations to decline. Trucking could lose a big chunk of the industry in the course of a decade or less, to the tune of a million drivers or more. Having a million or more drivers that are suddenly unemployed or under employed would have a huge impact on the economy and public faith in the economy. Having this occur is predictable even if we can't predict when. Yet how many have given serious discussion on how to handle the reaction once this starts coming to pass?
Could be confirmation bias on my part, but I see cases like this - where the effort proved to be more complicated than expected - to falsely create the narrative that this is not a real problem to consider, which just makes the eventual impact worse.
EDIT: Please stop thinking I want to "protect" trucking or "stop" self-driving technology. I want neither - I just want us (society) to take advantage of the time when we know a change is coming but isn't here yet rather than deny it as "not yet real" and then wring our hands in despair over the consequences once it IS real.
This attitude is nothing new. But I don't think people are seeing the big picture. Self-driving cars may cause a temporary spike in unemployment, but the economy and human workers benefits in the long term from the elimination of tedious work.
See how the length of the average working week has been decreasing in the USA:
> human workers benefits in the long term from the elimination of tedious work.
Given how many humans currently work at tedious jobs, the conclusion to come to is that they prefer that over no income at all. So simply eliminating that job isn't doing them any favors unless there's some solution for how they will still be able to pay their bills.
I don't think you are looking at the big picture either. New technology is constantly creating new jobs at the cost of old ones. Just like self-driving cars may displace truck drivers, so did new machines displace 19th century factory workers. However, this is such a small problem because the long-term economic benefits are enormous.
I think people fail to see what "economic benefits" actually means for them. It means that you start spending less time fighting off tuberculosis, dying from an infection, dying from childbirth complications, lowering the cost of living, etc. These things ultimately make it easier for any given person to sustain themselves, if it benefits society.
Take GMOs. They increase crop yields, making it cheaper to buy food. Sure it may have eliminated some jobs along the way, but then those guys ended up getting cheaper food at the cost of a having to find a new job.
And while productivity has increased constantly, wages have stagnated. Companies need to start paying their much more productive workers a lot more money, or the benefits from the increased productivity will never be realized as growth (because that money won't go back into the middle class who are the most effective economic engines of growth per dollar earned).
I don't think the reaction should be "Let's not do this, it could hurt jobs!". I also don't think the reaction should be "This is nothing to worry about, the jobs thing will work out over time".
Right now we have the option to anticipate and act to reduce any painful shocks. later we will not have the benefit of preparation.
That says "by persons engaged". I wouldn't be surprised if that's totally driven by people going from 0 work to some work, driving the average downward.
You're absolutely right! Trucking is a major sector of employment.
It's also a major source of life-shortening occupational health problems. The life expectancy of a trucker is 16 years shorter than the norm. Why are you so eager to protect jobs that are measurably killing the people who work them? Do you value these jobs so much that you're willing to pay for them in human lives?
For my own part, I'd rather have a million former truckers who need retraining and new skillsets than a million dead truckers. But that's me, and I'm known to be weird.
Great redirect, but you failed to answer the actual question. But first a rebuttable.
First of all the life expectancy between college education and highschool education is 12 years. So that's only a 4 year shorter gap. (Perhaps universal medical care would fix this problem)
Second, do you seriously think the US has the capacity to handle 2 million unemployed truck drivers in the course of a couple years? That's a 10% increase overnight, and I have news for you, schools are already overburdened. (Perhaps free college education would provide the money to improve capacity, and fix two problems with one stone)
Third, the real problem is the jobs. What job are they going to do once they get their degree. Millennials are already one of the most highly trained yes underpaid generations yet, and they have the advantage of youth. The jobs aren't coming back from these sorts of events. (Perhaps a universal basic income would fix this problem)
And finally the real question was: What are we going to do about it. It was a request to have a conversation about the solution. Not to stop it from happening. I've provided my solutions, in the spirit of conversation I would be curious to see what you identify as problems, and your proposed solutions.
Comparing college vs high school graduate life expectancies isn't valid because truckers aren't a subset of one or the other; they have a good proportion from both groups. Taking off 12 years is the maximum effect assuming there isn't a single trucker that has a college degree, which of course isn't true.
> Why are you so eager to protect jobs that are measurably killing the people who work them?
uh...I'm not. Don't know where you got the idea that I was. Rather, I'd like to spend this lead up time before that industry is heavily hit to try and make sure the hit isn't so negative. Skill training programs, driver involvement in determining how the (future) devices would best work, etc. Make this a semi-planned obsolescence instead of a long-expected "surprise".
> For my own part, I'd rather have a million former truckers who need retraining and new skillsets than a million dead truckers.
I think figuring out how to deal with displaced categories of workers is a tougher problem than automated vehicles.
In any discussion like this, when I hear "retraining," I think of some county workforce office teaching you how to use Microsoft Word and Excel, giving you a certificate, giving you access to their jobs database, and forgetting about you.
Exactly. Does the norm include women? Truckers are mostly male and women live longer.
Take the typical male life expectancy and knock off a few years as a result of sitting in a chair all aday the kind of diet you wind up having from always being on the road and "16yr less than the norm" seems perfectly reasonable
It’s also life-shortening to suddenly and unexpectedly lost your job, especially when you’re over 40 and “retraining” isn’t really an option, or when all the other jobs have been automated away.
>Do you value these jobs so much that you're willing to pay for them in human lives?
I don't really get what you're trying to say. Every hour I'm working at any job reduces my lifespan by one hour. The entire idea of work is that I'm paying with my own human life to obtain something else.
If the truck drivers get a new job they will still have to pay with their own life.
I think it's basically impossible to prepare for. Finding jobs for these folks can't be done effectively in a top down manner. Retraining programs haven't been found to be very effective. We might extend additional unemployment benefits to people, but that will be a purely political issue when it comes around, not something that really requires planning/infrastructure. And making any transitional moves for truckers is going to be hard because there is currently a shortage of truckers already.
It doesn't have to be a top-down manner. Truckers (and those that rely on truckers) aren't stupid. If you were to go to them as a group and say "hey, we expect 50% of you to lose your jobs, or at least too many working hours, over the next 20 years. How do you want this to play out?" I suspect you'd get a lot of denials, but you'd also get some interest in having a say over the future. The drivers would know where the jobs are harder, they'd be in a good place to nurture the transition. If they were doing so IN FURTHERANCE of their (evolved) job rather than just destroying it, I bet you'd find some folks with ideas. Others would want to transition to a related-but-new job. Or retire early. Or pick up skills for an UNRELATED job. All of which is easier to bring about over the course of years with people who aren't worried about how to pay their rent/mortgage/food/medical bills.
In no way is this _easy_ - the number of issues to solve is huge and complex. But since we know the problem is going to happen I'd rather TRY to work on it, be that ruling from top or empowering the bottom or any other strategy other than "Wait until it's an emergency".
I think the sad result of this story is that they are going to keep going with the self-driving car technology. During the investigation into the fatal crash accident they had, they showed how reckless they are. It would be great if they learned anything from the death of that person and rethink QA and decisions, but I doubt it.
Time will tell.
I really thought they'd pull out of self-driving tech after that. It's insane that they're right back on the roads a few months later. There's no way that's enough time to be sure your broken software isn't going to kill again.
Software didn't do anything wrong. Emergency braking was disabled and relied on the human driver.
It is just another example of how assisted driving (such as tesla autopilot et al) is much more dangerous than nothing at all - driver disconnects and isn't paying attention, disaster is only a matter of when.
Did you know that 1.3 MILLION people die in car accidents on a yearly basis? There are extremely good reasons to believe that a mature, self-driving car industry will lower that figure by orders of magnitude.
It is a shame that there have been a few accidents now that the technology is in its infancy, but it is very short-sighted to wish that Uber halts its experiments and delays the technology from taking off.
If you limit the trucks to only highway driving and design depots for them they might be easier but I think once you start trying to drive them on smaller roads there's a lot of issues that crop up. First and foremost is that there's a lot more vehicle to keep modeled and the dynamics of how to drive the cab to safely maneuver the trailer might require a way better model of the environment and the position of the trailer.
Thing is this puts it in a narrow band of competitiveness between human-driven trucks (less capital-intensive, more expensive over time) and trains or sea ports (more capital-intensive but still cheaper than automated trucks). A lot of bigger cities where it makes economic sense to have this kind of hub-and-spoke model will already have trains and ports too, so it's a bit dicey.
Doing that would require 100% autonomous and the legal allowances across the whole nation. There's also some very specific rule around what counts as rest for drivers and I'm not sure that would qualify as rest under the current rules.
Building all those distribution points would be fairly expensive and time intensive, a smaller market, and would still require contracting/employing a lot of medium distance drivers for the last X miles. 'Last mile' here is probably on the order of 20-50 miles at least with hundreds of distribution hubs.
Most of the big carriers already have the distribution points set up all over the place with a bunch of local drivers covering the last mile.
I (sort of) worked for Swift ~10 years ago and a lot of what I did was "drop and hook" at regional terminals or big warehouses. It was kind of uncommon to live (un)load -- mostly just drop the trailer I brought in where they told me, pick up an empty/loaded trailer and be on my way.
When I ran reefers it was totally the opposite, super rare to not have to live unload. A lot of the big places would have pre-loaded trailers waiting but delivery points were usually much smaller so didn't have a bunch of space for trailers to sit around. And then there were the times when I was live loading produce in the middle of a (literal) field...
> Most of the big carriers already have the distribution points set up all over the place with a bunch of local drivers covering the last mile.
> I (sort of) worked for Swift ~10 years ago ...
Then you know that many if not most of those distribution centers can only be reached by driving surface streets for one to many N miles.
Last week I picked up a trailer at the Loveland CO Walmart distribution center. I had to go through a roundabout to get to it. Those are fun.
Speaking of, that brings up a fun exception case. We drivers try very hard not to drive up on curbs, it's bad for the curb and whatever's behind it, and (eventually) bad for the truck and trailer and their tires and wheels; or even air lines, depending on what you rub up against.
I assume one of the many rules for autonomous trucks would be "don't run on the curbs." They'll probably be good at avoiding curbs where possible, but sometimes the geometry is impossible.
I further assume that an exception to the rule will have to be written.
And thousands to millions of other rules and exceptions.
It's not an easy problem, from the mundane to the catastrophic, and a scenario can easily go from one to the other in the flip of a bit.
I agree, particularly with the huge demand for truck drivers, a hybrid model, allow the self driving to take over on the expressway/long haul, it could quickly become profitable pretty easily.
Surprises me as well. From the people I know in trucking related industries, they all thought that was clearly an important market and a prime adoption route.
From a technical standpoint, a lot of the effort is probably duplicated, except trucks are heavier and less maneuverable so they have some added challenges.
Having experienced a winter car accident on a highway involving a semi truck where the truck wasn't damaged but my car was totaled, I am extremely grateful the truck stopped and its driver allowed me to wait in the heated cab while waiting for police to arrive.
The idea of all these massive trucks autonomously operating on our highways strikes me as a very dystopian future. I appreciate the humans in the machines accompanying me on cross-country road trips. Without the truckers, much of these vast spaces will become far more desolate and dangerous to travel through.
I'm fine with technology assisting truckers, but am hopeful there will continue to be a requirement of people being present with ultimate authority over the vehicle.
Great point. Out of curiosity, what happened in the accident that the driver was comfortable inviting you into his car? In many environments/scenarios that would seem risky, particularly after a traumatic event like a car accident.
He had almost crashed into me by suddenly changing into my lane on a snow-covered highway.
I braked to avoid the collision, he swerved back into his lane having seen me brake, but my car rotated from the too-agressive braking. I was able to prevent a spin, instead limiting it to some highway-speed unpleasant fishtailing, but the whole ordeal had brought my car awfully near his trailer which was now next to my car again due to his decelerating.
There was a lot of snow/slush accumulated between the lanes, and this kept pulling the right side of my car closer to his trailer, regardless of what I did, before the tires of his trailer struck the rear corner my car, violently forcing my car under the trailer, shattering the driver and passenger windows from the compression. At that point it was pure chaos from above and the steering wheel was ripped from my hands by a frontal impact with the landing gear.
Somehow after what seemed like an eternity my car broke free from captivity under the trailer and shot out the side and off the highway, through the air, before landing on an embankment and sledding down to a frozen water retention pond where it circled a few times before coming to a stop in complete silence.
I can't speak to what was going through the trucker's mind when I knocked on his passenger window and told him I was the luckiest person on the planet, and asked if I could wait in his cabin until the police arrived. My car was not even visible from the highway. He claimed to have no idea what happened, just that he saw my headlights disappear after he swerved. He had no idea my car had been under his trailer. Typing this story has been surprisingly emotional.
I'm a truck driver, and I was a little sickened reading it. Still am.
Back in driving school one of the other students was out on the road with an instructor and two other students in the back. A driver was texting, and ran into the back bumper of the trailer (the iron work below the back door), embedding the car by the engine under the bumper. The car was dragged from that point until the truck stopped.
The story the student and instructor told literally involved the phrase "... did you feel something?"
I think to do this right (safely) we need to start looking at how to integrate roads with self driving cars and trucks and at vehicle to vehicle communication.
At some point there needs to be standards set for these kinds of things and, really, the sooner the better.
I think we, as consumers, would be better served with a vehicle that could safely drive down the highway for long distances right now than a car that can drive us to work and back on city streets 10 years from now.
And if we integrate roadway to vehicle communication from the highways outward the transition will be more efficient, especially for trucks.
I agree road and vehicle to vehicle comm is important, but the work being done now by these companies is comparatively much more important. If there is an implementation bug on either side of one of these integrations or if the communication medium is bogged down, then what?
These systems must be able to handle diverse and unpredictable situations without being able to communicate directly with other agents in the environment, and must be able to act safely relying solely on their own percepts.
The only thing that made less sense than Uber focusing on trucks (Uber Freight, AV Trucks) is Uber Elevate (flying cars). The days of Uber testing crazy, new ideas is over.
The downside is that some of them actually worked. I can't see Dara ever green lighting Eats, which is now a great business. Note that Dara & Expedia completely missed the AirBnB phenomenon and had to play catch up many years later.
That's a really good point. I also wonder if the cyclist accident changed the mood and/or culture at Uber when it comes to autonomous vehicles. I have to be honest that it would absolutely gut me inside to know that my software caused a death.
I understand your point but the software didn’t exclusively cause the death.
The software was known to be unreliable. In that way it did contribute to the person’s death. But so did the driver tasked with correcting the vehicle (who was watching Hulu), the technicians who disabled emergency brakes, and the company culture/management that thought this was safe in the first place.
On a side note, my iPhone X knows when I’m looking at the camera to use FaceID. If I look away, am asleep, or otherwise occupied, it won’t open the phone. I’m not sure why Uber doesn’t use similar technology, in conjunction with steering wheel sensors to identify hands on the wheel, to force operators to stay alert. This seems particularly important if the software is unreliable.
When you're designing or building some things you are just GOING to kill people.
The right decision in designing a car (centre of gravity, stopping distance, thickness of gas tank) WILL kill many people.
Incompetence killing people is one thing (bad spec for o-rings, Therac 25 programming leading to massive radiation dose) but in some programming domains you just are going to make decisions that end badly. If you make the right decisions you'll kill fewer people than the alternative but still some are going to die.
I suddenly have the urge to research "Why was an interstate system built vice an interconnected railway system?" I'm guessing that the auto industry lobby team was stronger than the rail lobbyists, even though at this point it seems like the rail was the better choice economically.
Is this in any way related to the Levandowski lawsuit? The thesis of that suit was that Uber only bought Otto to get a hold of Levandowski and his Google knowledge...
Since autonomous driving technology is not there yet, I believe truck OEMs should focus on ADAS to enable lane keeping and lane change on highways only, as this is the easiest part of the job. Drivers would be require to intervene as soon as the truck exits the highway.
I presume this is what Tesla will do with their trucks although I am very concerned by their very dubious marketing when it comes to autonomous driving technology.
It seems like a smart transition technology would be truck driving roads. Basically install sensors on major freeways for longhaul routes which allows the road to take the wheel. You could have on/off ramps for this so people could take over the last mile.
I wonder how long it will take until public press will admit that the autonomous driving hype was just that, a hype to generate investor money. We aren't there yet, it was obvious already a few years ago when google and tesla began to push the media.
This is surprising to me as well. I have seen first-hand how tedious it can be to find reliable truck drivers, particularly in the Midwest. I am eager to see how this industry shifts in the next couple decades.
> Article didn’t actually say why they’re shutting it down.
It did. They want to consolidate limited development resources, and flesh out the tech in the easier car segment before then applying it to the superset truck segment.
Instead of fully automatic it would be good if they could be remotely operated for a short period of time, this would give the driver a chance to check their; phone, paper work, pee in a bottle.
I think they should focus on just one segment at a time and this is a good decision by them.
They have the market to put self driving car in use but they cannot do the same for trucks.
How about we start with self-driving _trains_ that don't fly off the rails when some train engineer ignores the speed limit, and don't run into each other due to mis-routing. That'd be a good start for this whole "self driving" thing.
Soon to be followed by: Uber shuts down, full stop. Sure, Softbank shoveled another shipload of money into the gaping maw of this capital furnace, but they're still burning it. Now, in addition to a tragically bad main business, they also don't have the fairy tale about how autonomous vehicles will eventually make them win.
Nope, this is actually a sign of Uber finally having adult leadership. Dara Khosrowshahi has only been there 9 months but he's doing an outstanding job, getting Uber's priorities straight and refocusing the company.
And their core business is a fantastic business. Bookings is still growing faster than 50% annually. It cut it's burn rate to $300M last quarter, despite the bleeding at dozens and dozens side projects like Trucks, Eats, etc, and still has $6B in the bank. Dana is getting them laser focused on their core business again, and they'll be profitable before you know it.
Are you at Uber? Speaking as someone who is at Uber, I wouldn't say this is the case at all. Dara's successes have largely been on the PR front (huge successes), some good partnerships and an exit in SENA which was probably the right move given circumstances but shouldn't have happened in the first place.
Things he hasn't done:
1) Kept Uber moving faster than competitors
2) Hired necessary leadership (CFO, CMO, CPO [he tried but the guy he hired originally was a total fraud. Huge swing and miss], etc.)
3) Driven focus on anything other than loyalty which is itself shaping up poorly
4) Gained back market share
5) Kept the best leaders. Losing Aaron Schildkrout alone was a massive loss, but there's been PLENTY of other leaders taking their sabbaticals and then quitting
Turning to Eats, if we got rid of that (no way we would) we would lose the most dynamic and fast moving part of our business. It's the only place that still has the talent and structure of Uber 1.0 but without the awful cultural problems.
I might be wrong on Eats, but I'm not wrong on the rest of the side businesses.
And Dara has gotten the most important things right in the few months he's been there. You don't have choices in keeping foreign subsidiaries if your predecessor put the business on the route to bankruptcy, you shed what you have to shed before your cash on hand gets so low you lose all leverage in keeping the business financed.
And if Aaron Schildkrout was so great, why was he working for Travis Kalanick, Stockholm syndrome? Why would you work for someone who constantly tarnished the company brand you needed in order to succeed in your job? It really sounds like Uber needs a complete house cleaning of it's entire upper ranks. You can play the "I was just following orders" card, but it also disqualifies you from being a true leader.
Otto (the self-driving truck company that Uber bought and is now shuttering) was the first I'd heard of that. It's a bit sad that they're shutting down.