Seems like everyone have completely forgotten everything else a trucker does except driving the damn truck on the highway. They assist with loading and unloading the goods, make sure the goods are adequately stacked and strapped and obeying laws and regulations (at least in my country truckers must have a bunch of certificates to be allowed to transport dangerous goods), handle paper work (this is probably the easiest problem to solve) and probably a lot of other stuff I know nothing about. In addition to automating the driving, you must offload these activities to warehouse workers and others who ship/receive goods.
The autonomous truck also have to be able to handle all kinds of tight and busy city streets, badly thought out warehouse terminals and a million other things that is an annoyance for a trucker but a huge problem to automate.
I had a mental model of trucks going from waiting lot to waiting lot on the freeway, and going the last couple miles either by switching cabs or having local drivers take over.
I think you reduce a lot of the challenge with freeway-only driving between large staging lots adjacent to industrial areas and allowing humans to do the “hard” part of the first + final mile.
In fact, the NY State Throughway already has something like this, but for a different purpose: Combining and separating double-bottom trucks (which are allowed on the Throughway, but not on many local roads around it).
> They assist with loading and unloading the goods, make sure the goods are adequately stacked and strapped
This seems like a problem already solved in the airline industry.
* Pilots don't load and unload the planes. Baggage handlers and gate agents do that. Flight attendants ensure that self-loading cargo is adequately strapped.
* Airline dispatchers (a job which requires an FAA certification) handle much of the flight planning, weather monitoring and other paperwork.
In other words, many of the "other things" a truck driver does are outsourced in the airline context to other employees who are not controlling the airplane.
I don't really see why the DoT couldn't create an analogous "truck dispatcher" position for OTR trucking, who handles all or most of the things you described.
One long-term consequence is that it would further entrench the scale effects of volume shippers (like ports and Amazon warehouses): A dispatcher at the origin would be the responsible person to verify that loads are correctly stacked and strapped, and shippers below a certain scale would not be able to fully use a full-time person in that role.
The autonomous truck also have to be able to handle all kinds of tight and busy city streets, badly thought out warehouse terminals and a million other things that is an annoyance for a trucker but a huge problem to automate.