All of this makes me wonder: will business be the first to adapt to self driving vehicles, as opposed to passengers? or are there still significant legal barricades to impede either one now?
For consumer deliveries at least. However, (I suspect) much of the trucker industry goes to businesses, which would be much more willing to have an employee unload the truck when it arrives.
Truck drivers don't get commercial licenses so they can drive a truck across the country on a highway. They get them to prove that they can back a truck up, turn around tight corners, not run over pedestrians, and most importantly, to be able to navigate an unpredictable, and sometimes rapidly changing world...one where a loading dock might be underground, or it might be around back in that tight alley that doesn't look an inch over 9ft wide...and where your route may go as planned, but it may also require a detour at moments notice because the Highway Patrol is hurredly moving cars off the road so they can set a spike strip to catch a vehicle in a high speed chase.
That isn't to glamorize nor humanize the profession...merely to show the obstacles that truck drivers deal with that are still too fringe to be modeled correctly or trusted in a non-supervised environment. There may be a not-so-distant future where driverless trucks take over long haul drives, with actual drivers handling the last mile. But don't expect the trucker to die quite so quickly.
Watching a 16+ wheeler go down a winding driveway backwards when its only got about 1 foot of space on each side is far more entertaining and impressive than half the events at the Olympics. I could watch this all day.
Shouldn't it be possible to build stations where self-driving trucks can easily stop, and drivers can take over for the "last mile"? This eliminates the dangerous, boring part, allows drivers much more stable lives, but doesn't eliminate them entirely
Trucks are larger and heavier. That means they take a lot longer to stop, so you have predict things around you further ahead. Also, you can't jackknife a car - I'm guessing the physics of driving a Mac truck with a heavy trailer and 18 wheels is a lot more complex.
But the physics (mass of the load/center of mass of the truck load system, their moments of inertia, N on each of the tires , etc) can be factored into the equations and solved in real time, no?
How far is the line of sight for google self-driving cars?
I wonder if we'll even need trucks. Instead of large trucks carrying lots of goods, what about having more vehicles each carrying less stuff. Something like a cargo van.
I wonder if the reason we use large trucks is so that we can have only one driver and not pay for more. I wonder if having multiple vans instead of a single truck uses a similar amount of fuel (per pound of cargo).
1) The space needed to drive safely behind the car/truck in front of you would be wasted. Cargo, in a container (semi-van, etc.) does not need to travel a safe distance behind the cargo in-front of it; it is tightly packed, and there is a lot of 'cargo'. If all cargo was transported via. cargo vans, the wasted space in-between vehicles (distance for the same volume of cargo traveling with a semi-truck) traveling down the highway would add up to a HUGE distance. Btw. Lets see it in practice:
- The average distance a Truck Load semi-truck travels down the highway is ~856-miles
- DOT Guidelines suggest a three-second rule for driving behind a vehicle. So... at an average speed of 55 m.p.h. A car is traveling at 81ft/second. At three seconds this is 243 ft behind the car in front of you.
- A normal truck container is 48' (we'll go with 48' but there are 53'), and holds 24 pallets. 12 and 12 (side-by side), from front to back.
- I am not sure how many pallets a cargo van could take, but let's go with 2 (it is probably less than this).
At 2 pallets for each cargo van, we would need 12 cargo vans for the equivalent of shipping 1 semi-truck.
At an average of 55 m.p.h. on the highway, 12 cargo vans would total 2,916 ft of wasted space in-between. That's more than a 1/2 mile
* we, keychainlogistics.com have over 40,000 shipments on our system, right now, that would go on a single semi-truck. Most for today. In calculating needing cargo vans for these loads (sure they very in size, but lets go with a total size of 24 pallets per shipment) it would equal 12 * 40,000 = 480,000 vehicles.
With an average of 2,916 ft of wasted space in-between each truckload worth of shipment (calculation referenced above), we are talking a total of 40,000 (combined 12 cargo vans here) * 2,916 ft = 116,640,000 ft of wasted space which = 22,090.91 miles wasted
1.b) Think about the congestion on highways!
2) Large items needing to be shipped: Equipment, Logs, containers, etc.
3) Freight containers from ports. They are a standard size, and the maritime shipping industry, until 1950's or so did not use containers. The book - The Box: How the Shipping Container Made the World Smaller and the World Economy Bigger - gives an amazing/detailed understanding to the efficiency of containers. Which ultimately you need a semi-truck to transport a container.
4) The time to load palletized goods (something that would likely not fit in a cargo van) is much shorter than loading individual boxes
How would a pneumatic cannon that launched my package from the truck at the curb be any different from the current driver who slings it from the driveway onto my doorstep?
That is true. I guess it just made me wonder since he was going over how much trouble incorporating the human element into the equations is, and maybe trying to do without might be more practical (or maybe more predictable) going forward.
My strong suspicion is that it's going to be closed-loop and business-oriented services that adopt autonomous vehicles first. Deliveries within a factory or campus complex, people-movers, and the like.
Delivery in rural areas where there are long stretches between deliveries (so that loiter times and waiting for someone to come and receive a package isn't a large overhead), and the vehicle could page recipients in advance, skipping those who don't respond, or where deliveries are headed for depots (e.g., local warehouse or distribution center, food/grocery deliveries, etc.).
Self driving vehicle still need a conductor. It's not safe enough to have a vehicle that have no one to stop it. Metros, trains and planes have drivers even if they are doing nearly nothing. They are there in case of a problem (which happen too often...).
