A "drivered" lead truck is leading one or more driverless trucks in this case.
I drive the stretch of highway these trucks are on fairly regularly. I don't know that I've seen a group of them yet but I'm keeping my eye out.
I'm probably just showing my age, but I like the idea of a "drivered" truck leading driverless trucks versus a completely autonomous system. It's similar to my attitude on crewed spaceflight-- I like the idea of the ingenuity and capacity for independent thought supervising an automated systems, versus autonomous automated systems.
next level would be to hook these "platoons" together physically and then centralize the propulsion in a super efficient package. And then we could move them off the highways and onto specialized "tracks" that guarantee they don't deviate from the planned routes.
speculative, alien technology, admittedly, but some day our scientists will figure it out i bet!
The problem with railroad is exactly the other side of this: that you can't trivially and automatically detach a single car at any point. I know businesses that literally have an old railroad branch line right up to their door, but they can't actually order anything meaningful via rail.
The existing rail system has at least the following constraints:
* Uses steel-on-steel friction, rather than rubber-on-rock. Cars that can do both exist but are rare.
* Can only travel on the specially-prepared rails, not installed at the last-mile, related to the next point.
* Poor cornering and elevation changing.
* Difficulty in changing speeds (over a thousand meters and over a minute, compare to about a hundred meters and less than ten seconds for road vehicles)
* Very limited lanes, usually no passing. Track reservations will be voided if you aren't exactly on schedule.
* Almost all of the "intelligence" (both computer and human) is at one or both ends; the cars in the middle are all "dumb".
My previous company, Parallel Systems is working on this. The solution looks a lot like trucks on rail: individual locomotion, so you get the flexibility of trucking, but the energy efficiency and automation ease of rail. With modern braking, you can stop a Parallel vehicle about as fast as a truck. There's a ton of rail that's underutilized, particularly in Metro areas, so you almost get a fresh highway for free. Vehicles can platoon or separate at will.
I’m not seeing much rail that is under utilized out here int he west, if anything it is over subscribed. The energy savings in having one or two diesel electrics pull a long chain of cars is substantial, I get the feeling that if you just put trucks on rails you’d lose a lot of that.
You also need to be more conservative with elevation changes, right of ways, and turning radiuses, so lots of tunneling and viaducting ala the Chinese HSR network. You are still probably going to have a lot of roads since rubber works better for going up and down, twisty turns, and can deal last mile stuff flexibly. Not everyplace is going to be as simple as the island of sodor.
most of Europe north of the alps is fairly flat in elevation. Railways are oversubscribed because they are not expanded enough, defunded if you like, to expand and fund the highway network.
It is stupid to travel thousands of kilometers by trucks. It's inefficient, expensive and nit scalable. Currently we use mostly huge container ships and empty them with trucks, absolutely insane. There's quite a bit of river boat activity in Europe luckily, which is great if electrified. Though the sorry state of the railways is just human-made and not didtated by economics.
>the sorry state of the railways is just human-made and not dictated by economics
I'm not sure about the world in general but I've followed the HS2 line in the UK and the problems are pretty much economic. We have a couple of north south lines along the UK but they are basically at capacity so the idea was to build another and make it high speed but it's proved incredibly expensive, partly due to property ownership and housing along the line and partly due to environmental regulations leading to £100m shelters to avoid disturbing a few bats. (bat thing https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2025/jan/25/environment-...)
They can all be changed, but then the capital costs for rail infrastructure would balloon and diminish the 3-5x cost advantage rail has over trucking. The modern rail business is structured (physically and, especially, financially) to squeeze every last cent out of existing infrastructure with minimal investment. I doubt that will change significantly anytime soon. The public road infrastructure subsidizes trucking (even after factoring in use and fuel taxes), and perhaps more importantly trucking companies don't have to contend with legal hurdles like land acquisition--the government handles that. (Land acquisition delays have been the biggest barrier for CAHSR.)
>The problem with railroad is exactly the other side of this: that you can't trivially and automatically detach a single car at any point. I know businesses that literally have an old railroad branch line right up to their door, but they can't actually order anything meaningful via rail.
Because companies have invested in JIT because low cost of trucking, an industry which is heavily subsidized (https://www.cbo.gov/publication/50049), allows it.
If trucking costs reflected their true cost, railroad would look a ton more attractive along with not doing JIT.
You can. It’s called multimodal and basically is just picking a shipping container off a train car with a crane and putting it on a truck platform or a ship. 1 platform supports all modes.
This works great for finished consumer goods, but bulk cargo that makes up a significant portion of both rail and truck traffic like grain, liquid products (crude oil, gasoline, vinyl chloride), ore, etc. have very specialized transports that don't work well with the existing multimodal system.
The problem with rail is that we allowed the national rail network to be privatized. Maybe we’ll see some privatized lanes on interstate highways in the next 15 years.
The bigger issue is that roads are immensely subsidised compared to rail. Even on private roads that are completely covered by usage charges, trucks pay maybe a factor of 2-10 more than cars, however they cause about 40000 times more wear (let's even disregard how they also cause disproportionately more traffic...). Obviously this calculation becomes even worse if we consider that most roads are subsidised by all tax payers. Trucks would be much less profitable (especially for long haul traffic) if they would have to cover their actual cost to society. But they are just another example of privatising profits and socialising the costs.
that 40000 figure is the product of one study. I have always been suspicious of it and wished people could cite more than one study written 40+ years ago
The European rail network is strongly liberalized, starting with the First Railway Directive 91/440/EEC. The physical infrastructure now usually falls under a state-owned enterprise, which provides access to any company wanting to use it, at a fair and non-discriminatory pricing. In practice this means that the usage fees have to pay for all upkeep and maintenance, with occasional cash injections from the government for things like constructing new railway lines. Importantly, this infrastructure company is expected to either have a neutral result, or run a profit: the railway users have to pay the true costs of operating the railway.
The roads are a different story altogether. They are owned, constructed, and maintained directly by the government itself. Road upkeep comes out of the general budget - just like education or defense. Road users pay via a vehicle tax and/or fuel tax, but there is zero expectation that those taxes pay for the full cost of the road network. After all, you profit from the presence of a road network - even if you don't drive a car yourself.
France has fairly high tolls on roads and Switzerland has that sticker you have to buy to use the expressways.
Japanese rail companies must get some sort of subsidy on tracks, the passenger rail system runs at a loss and only turns a profit on renting space in train stations. Roads are also heavily tolled (similar in China).
> I know businesses that literally have an old railroad branch line right up to their door, but they can't actually order anything meaningful via rail.
A century ago they would have found it at lot easier: if you wanted to send just a few cars to the back of a factory, many rail operators would have found a way to make it happen, and at a reasonable price too - now they’ll tell you the service is uneconomic to provide, unless you charter an entire locomotive for $$$$
As repairing roads costs so much, it annoys me that we don't make some attempt at penalising the heaviest vehicles. As road damage is roughly proportional to the fourth power of weight, it would make a lot of sense to prevent logistics companies from just using the largest vehicles that they can - it should work out costing less if loads are broken up and delivered via multiple, lighter vehicles. However, as the public bears the cost, it means that logistics companies will just look at their expenses (drivers' wages, fuel etc).
Problem is those railroad cars usually don't share origin and destination. And spending a day or two on the switchyard for every couple of hours of actual travel isn't what customers want.
The beaty of platooning is that trucks can join and leave while traveling at speed, all they need is a free lane on the side.
And if you really want to tease out all the efficiencies of rail, without suffering the drawbacks, you make electrified lanes that also have embedded tracks (like those of a tramway, but designed for higher load) and make the trucks multimodals that can switch while moving. Actually just those trucks that would see an economic advantage, trucks designed for light, high volume loads would likely stick to road wheels only.
A setup like this could actually be super economical compared to two because a rail network needs huge separation between trains because rails are terrible for braking fast. Multimodals on the other hand could be designed to be able to switch to their road wheels in an emergency. And a rail network needs an ungodly amount of nines in terms of reliability and rarity of maintenance, because there is no plan B network. Reliability nines are expensive. Multimodals on the other hand could easily be diverted to a dirt road for a bit when the main lanes are defective or going through maintenance. Where they would be running on the same batteries they carry anyways, for the last couple of miles on regular, non-electrified roads.
Would that be faster though? You still have to stop the entire train just to get one unit in or out. And if it's more units, chances are that parallelization hits a capacity bottleneck because of the inherent cost trade-off between having lots of cranes on standby vs just waiting a little longer in the rare moments of action. Are container cranes used for routing within a rail network at all? Might well be that they are only ever used for mode change at the edge, despite having been mature and available technology for decades.
Hmm. That sounds like it might lead to a monopolization of these tracks, as networks consolidate, and then ultimately evolve into a stagnant industry more focused on cutting costs than innovating...
I suspect that's why a competent government might invest more in these tracks as they might contribute a lot to delivery infrastructure. Especially in a consumer-based economy where shipping goods is important.
Don't forget geography, and by extension type of freight.
The United States doesn't have a lot of navigable waterways, and none go east-west. This means that any bulk goods you want to transport have to go via rail. There is no other option. As a result the railway network has been optimized to do bulk transport at the lowest price possible, even if it means sacrificing speed and quality. After all, coal doesn't care if it sits in a siding for several days.
It's true that the US is shipping an awful lot of tonnes via rail, but this doesn't say anything about its ability to ship regular goods. Getting a single wagon from point to point in a timely manner is significantly more complicated than doing the same with an entire train.
Let me know where you can find a competent government not currently trying to burn down its own consumer-based economy with tariffs and xenophobia and which doesn't consider trains a communist plot. And whether they take American passports.
Rail freight's share of shipping has been on a steep decline for decades in Europe:
> Freight rail’s modal share has been in decline across Europe, both in terms of market share and the profitability of major operators. In France for instance, modal share declined by 50 percent, from around 30 percent in the 1980s to 15 percent today. By contrast, road transport has been steadily increasing. In 1980, less than 50 percent of goods were transported by road. This rose to more than 75 percent by 2018.
By contrast, for most of that same period (1980-today) rail freight was growing its share in the US, though in the past decade or so growth has favored trucking.
Not to take away from that fact, but the share of train-moved freight (over time) is more interesting. It probably highlights the complications of scaling train networks easily.
I'm not sure governments learn by seeing the mistakes of other governments. But consecutive New Zealand governments have made some big mistakes. Capitalist party sold the national rail to an Australian company because rail was inefficient and costing a ton. Privately run cut back staff significantly. A few years later the story was that that was failing privately run, so the socialist party bought it back at exhorbitant cost. Now current governmentis trying to sort out a massive budget blow-out to get "rail" ferries between North and South Islands working (roll-on roll-off). The private ferry (Bluebridge) is doing okay I think.
I believe the lesson is that rail sucks here, economically speaking (whether privately run or publicly run). Unfortunately old voters love rail so the politicians pander to them.
The problem about New Zealand is that they hate investing in infrastructure and everyone loves the kiwi myth of the number 8 wire which means they just build provisional solution on top of provisional solution. The example of the ferries is a good one, the cost blow out was because they needed to build a new dock in Wellington. So instead of just living with the fact that yes building infrastructure as become expensive in a country which has seen a massive building boom (like many other places), the new Conservative government decides to cancel the ferry order without any alternative in place, and now the most important connection of the country is running on failing ferries which are more than 25 years old (there have been several incidents in the last couple of years where they were drifting powerless), and (especially considering the massive penalty for cancelling the contract) the new ferries will be just as expensive as the cancelled ones just being much smaller (the old contract was actually signed at quite advantageous economic times) and arriving much later.
This is certainly not an example of rail not working. Trucks on the road are a massive disaster as well. Most roads are single lane, so it's not uncommon to be stuck behind trucks for long stretches, this is especially annoying considering that many roads are very windy and truck speed up when coming to passing lanes.
Dumb American, so I could be totally off base. But New Zealand appears small enough on the map that just doing a shit ton of barges along defined coastal water routes makes a lot more sense than trains. In the US trains could be efficient, but we are also like 2,500 miles coast to coast.
The problem with water travel in New Zealand is that weather often closes ports.
But it is true that NZ lacks the scale that many existing rail systems rely on, and also lacks high-speed roads (a good rule of thumb for driving anywhere in NZ is: look at how many miles it is on the map, calculate how fast you could go that far in America, then double the time).
New Zealand doesn't have inland waterways the way the US does so barges don't seem sufficient. They did actually get a fancy self-propelled barge for use transporting minerals on the West Coast of the South Island last year and it got pushed aground by a storm in its first couple weeks of service. It's been sitting in port in Nelson ever since being refloated.
Trains have been with us for over a century and aren't going to suddenly change on their own to solve all transport problems. Self driving tech may help make them work better by handling the station to end location bit cheaper or more efficiently than human workers.
Jokes aside, Germany trialed a hybrid catenary truck system which was really neat.
Diesel to get you from the warehouse to the highway, extend your pantograph and boom, you're electric in the right lane (outside lane) all the way to your exit.
Never looked into how it penciled out but I always thought that was a great idea. Seems like there is a path to add in driverless aspects to the system as well given you have contact with a wire the whole time.
Yeah! Then those same engineers will notice how much single point of failure that model leads to, and how rigid that is. So they will be looking to leverage the existing much denser, much flexible, more connected and redundant network that exists alongside those rare tracks.
It’s almost like this evolution did not happen before.
So why aren't trains automated yet? I mean, beside the inter-airport shuttles. Seems like a much more constrained set of parameters to deal with. I'd think this would be a good "first" project to tackle for an AV company, even if the economics of replacing locomotive drivers/engineers weren't super compelling. Is it an insurance thing? Because a train wreck could be much more disastrous and costly? Or is it a union thing? Others?
Didn't we almost see a national rail strike 2 years ago? It seems like reducing that risk would be an incentive enough to make the transition, even if overall costs are low.
And it means someone on site to react sensibly when things go wrong.
Think of the Miracle on the Hudson. The pilot said "This is the captain. Brace for impact." The flight attendants picked up on that and immediately began directing the passengers on what "brace for impact" means. Without that how many would have reacted properly (the info is on the safety card, but how many have read it well enough??), how many would be asking for information, how many would just generally be panicking?
If a freight train is unstaffed, who would brace for impact?
Anyway, labor costs to have a couple engineers aboard is much less than if the load was travelling by truck, even if the trucks have no driver in them, they're likely supervised at a ratio with more humans than it takes to operate a long freight train.
Wouldn’t it be great to enable electric cars to go long distances with platoons? Like a bus system for electric cars to go between cities and charge while you drive. The ‘bus’ is basically a big efficient generator that can charge up the cars behind it. A lot like mid flight refueling for fighter jets.
Generator powered by what? If its a diesel powered generator, that's even less efficient and more polluting than just using diesel trucks in the first place.
Sounds like something that would require a lot of infrastructure that wouldn't make a lot of sense to build in the most rural areas of a country, unlike roads which can be quite cost-effective even without towns nearby.
This reminds me of an oft recommended book "Digital Apollo". One of the driving topics is the human interaction component and the difference in designing a fully automated system versus one that is designed with an operator that can intervene. If I recall correctly, the book presents a dichotomy between the rocketeers and pilots (automate entirely and strap people on for a ride vs design a system controlled by a human).
I think they both have their place, but I think acknowledging it as a system design choice is so helpful even in basic business processes (how will I handle exceptions, how will the person remember to handle a rare exception).
I find myself thinking of this problem frequently. We have lots of modern words for it like observability but I think that removes one a bit from the actual problem.
> A "drivered" lead truck is leading one or more driverless trucks in this case
My bet is this goes nowhere. It’s a horseless carriage that doesn’t have enough time to pay itself back versus fully-automated platoons with remote back-up.
It seems like there's an aerodynamic advantage to the platoons. Placing an autonomous truck in the lead of one of these platoons, down the road, seems like a reasonable "upgrade" strategy.
> Placing an autonomous truck in the lead of one of these platoons, down the road, seems like a reasonable "upgrade" strategy
Sure. I just don’t see the time-to-market advantage of starting with a human lead outpacing the core technology advantage of being fully autonomous from the get go. (Counterpoint: Waymo using Uber to manage the front end in Atlanta.)
But the company that figures out platooning can also work on self-driving, or can partner with or sell itself to the company that does figure out self-driving.
Working on platooning - assuming it's a more or less viable business idea on its own - doesn't need to be a distraction that prevents anyone from developing fully autonomous trucks.
Right up until there's an accident and the lead truck suddenly has to slam on the brakes. Depending on the length of the 'platoon' and traffic density, that could get really messy really fast.
If we can fly a drone halfway across the world, why can’t we have human augmentation for self driving trucks. Have a human, rested, and alert monitoring several platoons back at HQ. The only reason you want a person on the train is security and paperwork.
The teamsters, the CDL mills, the driver trade groups, all the people who've joined hands with the hand wringing types to prevent modernization of our trucking regulations will see the writing on the wall, pull out all the stops, lobby to allow human steering wheel holders to work to their full potential and full automation will stagnate for 20+yr while tech is instead deployed to solve other nuisance problems that limit truck sizes and productivity.
Someone should develop an ad-hoc platooning network for truckers. Install a platooning cruise control package on your rig and then get an alert on your dash when another truck in the network is in your vicinity looking to platoon. Lock in the cruise control behind the lead vehicle, and the app automatically calculates the fuel savings and divides the savings equally between the operators.
Edit: Various sources say that platooning can cut fuel use by 4-15%.
The return of the highwayman is exactly what this century needs next.
But in seriousness, what’s the next step? You drive off with five semi trucks worth of stuff? It seems like it’s just a worse way to steal trucks. Especially autonomous trucks that are going to be very well-instrumented and remote accessible.
> I'm probably just showing my age, but I like the idea of a "drivered" truck leading driverless trucks versus a completely autonomous system. It's similar to my attitude on crewed spaceflight-- I like the idea of the ingenuity and capacity for independent thought supervising an automated systems, versus autonomous automated systems.
Did you read a lot of classic sci-fi growing up? This sounds very I, Robot.
> I'm probably just showing my age, but I like the idea of a "drivered" truck leading driverless trucks versus a completely autonomous system. It's similar to my attitude on crewed spaceflight-- I like the idea of the ingenuity and capacity for independent thought supervising an automated systems, versus autonomous automated systems.
Great example because spacecraft are fully autonomous. The weakest link in that platoon is the driver.
Precious few drunk drivers on orbit. Or activists blocking traffic, or any number of other interesting situations.
Also, it eases the pain of introducing automation by removing a major roadblock to incremental adoption. With the Pareto Principle in mind, get rid of most of the drivers relatively quickly, then work on the holdout cases.
I am of two minds about all this. On the one hand, I see the clear, long-term potential given that half the people I see while driving are somehow on their phone. From that perspective, it can't come soon enough. Some people need to be off the road. On the other, I am annoyed that we are effectively beta testing those on public roads with public paying the price.
Is it fair to say they are "beta testing" on public roads with the public paying the price after they've done four years with a supervised driver in the cab?
Waymo, which appears to be doing an excellent job of handling it. Their robotaxis consistently seem to have a better track record than humans (although it's possible the limits put on them taint the comparison.)
Cruise, which had a whole bunch of problems with edge cases and last I knew wasn't allowed to operate anymore.
I'd share the road with a Waymo truck (not that their system can do that yet), I wouldn't want to share it with a Cruise truck.
Once the technology has been proven it should be possible for fast followers to catch up. We can't let the market be captured by whoever passes the bar first.
But that’s the winner takes it all situation thanks to software patents in US. The first one patents everything and the rest can catch up later or think about really different approach.
It's an interesting bar to set. And it shows how we're willing to bend that safety bar to allow seniors to drive on the roads despite their clear cognitive disadvantage.
Let's look at some raw data. Mind you, we have 100x more data for the human drivers below. ie, billions of miles vs millions for automated drivers.
Pop examined Fatal-crash rate
All Level‑4 automated‑driving tests in the U.S. 1.5–1.7 per 100 M mi
Drivers 70‑74 yr 1.7 per 100 M mi
Drivers 75‑79 yr 2.1 per 100 M mi
Drivers 80‑84 yr 4.3 per 100 M mi
Drivers ≥ 85 yr 7.6 per 100 M mi
So statistically, you are much more likely to be killed by a senior citizen.
So to make a consistent argument using data around safety, we should maybe be revoking the licenses of older folks?
edit: Jesus, 19% of all US fatal crashes in 2023 invloved seniors. While they make up 15% of the driver population.
I think it is a fair question to ask. I personally might be too influenced by what I see in gaming these days, where the game arrives in unfinished state. The difference there is, there are some clear ways of telling they are unfinished ( or finished ).
How can we tell in this case? Do we wait for accident reports?
<< What would be a better indicator to you than 4 years of driving records?
"In four years of practice hauls the trucks’ technology has delivered over 10,000 customer loads. As of Thursday, the company’s self-driving tech has completed over 1,200 miles without a human in the truck."
It would be a start, but we don't seem to have that. Or, at least, the article does not have them. What we do have is a press release and an indication that the load was delivered. No indication of the issues that arose. Just the simple fact that no issues are mentioned suggests there is a massive amount of information that is being omitted, because, I am sure you will agree, it is close to impossible for any kind of rig to run for 4 years and not have issues.
edit:
Tangent. I am starting to feel real fatigue from seeing those gaping holes and just about all articles I read each day. Even FT had some weird omissions in something I saw the other day. And that is just one problem. It gets even worse, when you read something you have some expertise in and the author gets it very, very wrong.
> What we do have is a press release and an indication that the load was delivered.
I like how you didn't seem to notice that there are 1,460 days in four years.
I get the impression that ten semi-truck hauls a day is a lot. If you hit someone (or wreck the truck) you're not going to make your next haul... you're going to be talking to the cops and/or having a wrecker drag you back home.
But only 1,200 miles without a human accompanying the truck. I assume those 10,000 loads weren't all in that same category -- unless it was going a few hundred feet back and forth each time!
110% transparency. We have no clue how they actually tested, how they cheated, what they're lying about, and all the other nefarious BS corporations constantly pull.
A single person could turn all of these things into Decepticon in seconds. We need to know that that is intentionally made impossible, and no one will ever make it possible in secret. It could give someone the power of a global army.
> A single person could turn all of these things into Decepticon in seconds. ... It could give someone the power of a global army.
We're talking about an ordinary semi truck with attached trailer and a bevy of sensors. This isn't a war machine. The worst thing that can happen here is the same thing that can happen with an inattentive or exhausted driver.
I suppose various LEOs are worried over nothing then. I will say this though. Car, like so many other things, is just a tool and like with most, if not all, tools, the question of whether it is a war machine is a rather pragmatic one. Can it be used for war purpose?
It’s indeed a war machine. Even going at slowish 60 mph. Trucks go through all barriers and 20 passenger cars over before stopping. The pictures of accidents with asleep truck drivers are shocking.
Sure .. if by "beta testing" you acknowledge a decade of driverless 100 tonne+ trucks operating in large fleets on private mining sites mixed in with "regular" driver vehicles.
This might be the first foray onto a subset of open public roads but it's not the first serious use of semi autonomous trucks mixed in with human traffic.
I think most mining sites I've been on there isn't mixed large truck and passenger vehicle traffic on any road way. Those trucks simply cannot see you and so it's strictly forbidden, driverless or not.
They usually map out the site and show you which roads you can take in your vehicle and they are completely separate from the operations roads. There are only intersections and it's always the responsibility of passenger cars to come to a complete stop and wait for any cross traffic to pass before proceeding.
I remember this well because we had a job servicing specific equipment on a particular mining companies sites in northern Minnesota. One time we drove on the wrong road. A security vehicle saw us and drove up on us at an extremely high rate of speed to clear us off the truck road and onto the proper passenger road. He spent a good few minutes yelling at us once we were clear. People have been killed this way.
Agreed, I think these systems may perform well in the short term with brand new and maintained equipment but will start to fail with age and once the fleet is large enough they push maintenance schedules.
The biggest problems with American rail infrastructure are related to passenger service. The US has one of the largest freight rail systems in the world by whatever metric you want to use: total miles (#1), annual tonnage (#2), ton mileage (#3) or modal share (#7).
In any case, semis occupy a largely separate mode of transportation that aren't cost competitive with freight rail where it's viable. Autonomous semis are competing mainly with the limitations of human drivers, not freight rail.
>mainly with the limitations of human drivers, not freight rail.
Which are regulatory more than technical at this point and could change overnight.
Obviously drivers need to sleep but the tech to make doubles and perhaps even triples workable exists but isn't worth deploying because our regulations are stuck in 1980.
Create a hub and spoke system with automated container sorting at the hubs. Basically build a national rail distribution system that works like a modern distribution warehouse. Long haul trucking should not exist.
We run the largest freight rail in the world and ship more stuff via train than any other nation. BNSF Railway's revenue is $24 billion a year. Same with Union Pacific. They dwarf the major truck freight companies like Fedex Freight or
Knight-Swift.
This is a good thing IMO, it’s too late to play catch up with rail infrastructure, we should just skip to the next big thing and let the rest of the world have their antiquated rail structures.
... The next big thing is rail. Until we figure out energy-efficient levitation, rail is the most efficient way to move mass at speed. That's the ideal end-state.
> help bolster a critical sector of the American economy, which often can't find enough drivers.
They can find enough drivers, but won’t pay them enough or give them any dignity. The industry has a 90% turnover rate per year. So obviously they are finding drivers all the time…they just don’t keep them.
"Cut to 2022. Wages are still down 30% to 50% in key markets, and the job is as dangerous and taxing as ever. Naturally, the pool of people wanting the job would reduce accordingly. Thus, when demand for truckers increases, there’s a “labor shortage.” But, as Peter Greene noted in Forbes when debunking a related myth of “teacher shortages” in 2019, it’s not a lack of willing workers: It’s a severe lack of incentives—wages, unions, benefits—needed to entice workers to take on the difficult work"
I wish it were possible to get this through to the NOBODY WANTS TO WORK ANYMORE crowd. Ironically, they're the ones who would benefit from better working conditions, compensation and a stronger safety net. It's a similar phenomenon to the working class folks I know who "hate unions" ... just as long as it's not theirs or one they might be able to join.
Thank you. This is no better than that terribly disingenuous argument that "nobody wants to work". No, we'd love to work. But we also value not starving to death and having some semblance of work-life balance.
Someone dug into newspaper archives and found an example of the "nobody wants to work anymore" phrase every year for the last 100 years. The phrase likely predates the printing press.
Or every generations' younger crowd that think the olds are senile fools that have no clue about anything today and mainly tolerated and polite to as long as they are in the room, but then immediately make fun of them as soon as they leave. As if there's no wisdom that could be shared from their experience. The folly of youth thinking they are invincible is equal to this so called claiming of moral degeneration.
Democratic socialist actually. I believe markets are fine but that there needs to be strong worker protections. (I know you were joking, but I figured I'd answer honestly anyway. Hehe.)
I used to drive this route every few months for many years. Lots of seas of warehouses at the edge of both of these metro areas. I-45 is in pretty good shape with a lot of recent overhauls over the last decade along the whole path. You don't need to do any difficult overpasses or interchanges. 99% of this is just stay in the right lane and drive straight. You could almost do this with just adaptive cruise control. Which I mostly did a few times, just turn on cruise control and stay in the lane and you're there in a few hours.
Is anyone working on an electric truck system where the battery is on the trailer? Many businesses are constantly rotating the same dry van trailers between hubs. If you charged the trailers at the doc during loading/unloading, the rigs could run 24/7, only stopping to swap trailers.
Work/worked for a place that was doing this. There's a couple problems:
* More battery weight means less cargo weight
* Trailers are dumb; the standard hookup (in NA) is lights and air. I hear CAN is common in EU though.
* Trailers are cheap and almost disposable.
The trucking industry is very slow moving, and probably 20 years behind passenger cars. So changing any of this stuff, even though none of it sounds particularly major, is at least 15 years out to start. Then you're left with the hundreds of thousands of "legacy" trailers that need to be retired or retrofit. The tractor to trailer ratio out there is like 1:10.
One interesting use case for this though is refrigerated (refer) trailers. They're often diesel-electric so they can plug in to shore power. Add a battery to this and maybe you can dump the diesel motor. Again though, weight is an issue... diesel is an order of magnitude more energy dense than the best batteries we have.
how are the trailers getting charged? there are a lot more trailers than tractors, and having enough charge capacity for trailers seems like a lot. There are a lot of trailers that are just a frame with wheels for a shipping container.
trailers have to sit at docks to get loaded and unloaded. they can charge then. meanwhile the truck can leave instantly. maybe a two part system of flatbed trailer with battery + cargo container sitting on top that?
I expected to find some of the tech that snow plows use on Donner Pass for lane keeping, RRDPS, but couldn't find any info indicating that they are using highway embedded sensors to aid the autonomous trucks.
> The RRPDS must maintain an estimate of the vehicle state
(i.e., position, velocity, heading, and heading rate) relative to the roadway with position accurate to a few
centimeters.
Most autonomous vehicles localize by using a point cloud map of the route with "ground truth" position data (often via GPS). The vehicle looks around and finds the closest point cloud that matches the map, and makes some adjustments for vehicle state (aka pose). GNSS is usually a secondary input if it's used significantly at all.
They do - I build those for john Deere. basic high school geometry is all it takes once you have gps accurate to a few cm. been working for more than 10 years (though until reciently hard to settup)
the important part to note as those systems don't have detection of anyone/thing that might be there. In a rural field no problem as nobody is there but on a city road there will be plenty of things to watch out for. We are working on the safety parts, I'm not in that area so I'm not sure what the current state is.
I can't wait to hear the new versions of the "Texas Hammer" Jim Adler's commercials. (for those outside of his market, he has an injury law firm, and has over-the-top ads for those injured by 18 wheelers)
He's been around long enough that his son is now (has been for a while) appearing in these ads taking over the family business. He's quintessential ambulance chasers. I'm sure there's a dictionary out there somewhere with his (their?) picture next to the definition
The roads between the Austin/SanAntonio, Houston, DFW triangle would be ideal for driverless trucks with each market having a depot where the driverless truck could exchange trailers for drivers to pick up for the local in-town "last mile" delivery.
One company's name was conspicuously absent from the article. Does anyone believe Tesla is still a player in the autonomous driving game? They always seem to be playing catch-up.
I feel like the ideal scenario would be to prioritize self driving truck at set times and set long haul freeways (i.e. Long Beach to Las Vegas or Galveston to Dallas) during the night time when there is no regular auto traffic - for example from 1 am-6 am.
That way if a human driver is concerned, they can choose not to drive during this period of time.
Perhaps run the trucks in a train style configuration where a "conductor" can sit in the lead truck and manage any emergency issues that arise (i.e. security, crash or weather related).
If fully autonomous, I could see securing the cargo being real issue - what would stop a few cars passage in front of the truck and helping themselves to the cargo.
> Why do you think a trucker would risk life or even their truck in a highway robbery?
That's an armed robbery whereas stealing from a robo-truck is more like breaking and entering. Robberies require the willingness and ability to commit violence. Having a human witness present means more risk of things going wrong, even if they don't intervene. I think all these factors prevent a lot of potential crimes.
No one cares if a human isn't involved because it becomes a line item on your logistics costs.
You simply iterate on the problem and see if the percentage goes down.
Not to mention you're proposing somehow making off with the contents of a semi truck in a covert way, even though it's so much stuff if takes a semi-truck to move.
These trucks are already covered in cameras. The self driving ones even more. How does this highway robbery even work? You force the autonomous truck to stop, take an angle grinder to the doors, then... unpack all the crates and boxes and hope you find something good that's also small enough to get away with? it just doesn't pass the sniff test for me.
Huh? Why not? That sounds exactly like what I would expect to happen. Show up with a stolen truck (or cover the license plates), track down some truck on a route between cities, pop it open and see what you get. If it's good, pile it in the truck and drive off.
As to why that doesn't happen now? If you try to rob a piloted truck in the middle of nowhere, whether or not you plan on hurting the guy, he's going to fear for his life (why would he trust your good intentions if you're robbing him?) -- and if he fears for his life, there's a good chance he pulls his gun on you. That means you need to come prepared to commit violence and risk him doing the same
> Self-driving cars are currently proving safer than manually-piloted ones.
As a general thing, no, we've not really had study confirming that. The stats we have are biased by the feature preselecting good drivers, good weather conditions, known road segments, and other things.
Actually interestingly the primary benefit of doing this would actually be trucking companies. The AI software could probably work way better and have less liability if not having to deal with corner cases of irrational human drivers.
The problem with this is we live in a 24 hour world. When I worked 2nd shift, I got out of work at 2am so I would have to “choose not to” use the highway to get home. Also, emergency vehicles also use highways.
> I feel like the ideal scenario would be to prioritize self driving truck at set times and set long haul freeways (i.e. Long Beach to Las Vegas or Galveston to Dallas) during the night time when there is no regular auto traffic - for example from 1 am-6 am.
But why though? These trucks will be safer than humans at the wheel. The most dangerous thing on the road will continue to be the humans driving next to the truck.
> That way if a human driver is concerned, they can choose not to drive during this period of time.
Why should we care about the concerns of a human driver? I don't get a choice to opt out of pedestrian smashing SUVs.
> Perhaps run the trucks in a train style configuration where a "conductor" can sit in the lead truck and manage any emergency issues that arise (i.e. security, crash or weather related).
What possible value will a human offer in that circumstance? We already have weather reports. Anyone willing to provide security is going to be prohibitively expensive and doesn't need to actually be in the truck. Autonomous vehicles are better at avoiding and responding to accidents than humans.
> what would stop a few cars passage in front of the truck and helping themselves to the cargo.
Logistics. Unless you know exactly what's in the cargo, it's probably not wortht he effort because you might get a load of toilet paper. Also getting your ill-gotten gains away from the scene is going to be a lot of work, how much stuff are you going to be able to unload before the cops show up and how many vehicles will you need to get it? You'd be better off stealing the truck itself.
The freight rail network is fairly expansive[0] -- sure not as much as the Interstate road network, but has pretty good coverage.
The reason trucks are so popular and necessary is because they go beyond the interstate highways. Until self-driving trucks handle that portion safely and successfully, they're not much more useful than trains.
This wildly misunderstands the nature of modern trucking. Trucks have many different roles, they're not just trains that don't need tracks. Trucks can work as on-demand transport, they can do low-volume, infrequent trips, they can aggregate and offload containers much easier, they're universally receivable at both ends with a minimum of infrastructure, etc. These autonomous trucks are competing with long haul human-driven trucks taking stuff from one depot to another, not short haul trucks.
Yeah, sounds almost like Musk's hare-brained plan to put self-driving teslas (driving with only a couple metres separation) in paved tunnels. I guess some people really hate sharing the bus/car/train with poor people
Quite the opposite - right now (or at least in the future unless interventions are added) poor people have no option but to submit themselves to driving sandwiched amongst with 10 ton trucks driven by who knows what, vibe coded, beta tested, "AI" software.
Yes - agreed if we had dedicated truck train roads.
The proposal I would prefer is to do more of a time based multiplexing of the road between daytime auto traffic and night time truck train traffic. And I'm not saying autos couldn't drive at night, just people could decide whether they want to trust the autonomous truck software.
As it stands we probably won't get that choice and its just shoved upon us.
I think having some kind of a sign/light on a vehicle (especially big one) saying that it's being operated autonomously could be quite useful. You can't wave at an autonomous vehicle and expect it to understand from the context why you are waving at it.
I'm really unfamiliar with autonomous cars, but how do they handle cases like constructor workers or even regular people (in case of an accident), manually handling the traffic by waving at drivers to go or stop? Are they systems smart enough to recognize these? Or is there someone on the other end, getting remote access to the vehicle if the road situation gets weird?
I remember reading an online study that listed the jobs most likely to be replaced by automation and "truck driver" was listed at the top.
For the keen eye, automation creates new jobs as it replaces others. Someone has to design, implement, and maintain these systems. There is always a higher level of abstraction where a human being is needed to oversee things.
Generally it creates comparatively few of those new jobs, and they are concentrated in a different geographic location, than the substantially more vast economic violence of destroying an industry.
> There is always a higher level of abstraction where a human being is needed to oversee things.
These become progressively more difficult jobs. Not likely the truck drivers who find themselves out of job will implement these systems.
I can already see the LLMs becoming better at computer programming than I am: they're good at the very high level, and they're good at implementing any self contained function. What's left for me is the glue code, creating the API, deciding which functions should be exposed... Soon, I won't be needed either!
There's a national truck driver shortage, with a particular lack of young drivers [1]. Perhaps automation technology will become widespread just in time for the current generation of drivers to retire.
The terms "shortage" and "surplus" are usually meaningless for most economic situations.
Generally, your chosen price determines how much you get (unless you set your price at 0, where you get nothing, OR if you set your price to infinity, where there literally doesn't exist 1 more of the thing you're talking about).
So in this context, there's really no shortage because all you have to do is raise the price you pay truckers and it's pretty much guaranteed that retired truckers and others with CDL licenses start putting their hands up and saying yes to that job.
I think most people agree on that point, but what are truckers going to do after they lose jobs to the robots? In the USA, there is never any planning for that, they just say "oh well" and in a generation those folks die out, having lived a shitty, destitute life with no chance of recovery.
The fact that there are too few younger truck drivers means that most young people have already found higher paying, better jobs than current truck driving jobs.
There's an ideological assertion when automation happens: the workers will retrain and be better off.
If it was true, Youngstown Ohio and Flint Michigan would be jewels of the Midwest - bustling metropolises of highly skilled retrained workers in wondrous utopias. You'd have AI unicorns popping out of Huntington and Wheeling, West Virginia.
Whether you count number of bankruptcies, overall mortality rate, number of offspring, percentage that own versus rent... The fervent assertion that going from a union job to hustling for say Postmates, is somehow the rising tide lifting all boats is baseless.
Doesn't matter though. It's ideologically, not materially based so evidence is irrelevant.
There Are state interventionist ways to make it work. China moved from agrarian to industrial. South Korea, Taiwan Japan.... The difference is they don't have this pentacostal snake handling level blind faith in the free market where they go around like Peter Popof preaching Hayek and Rothbard like it's sacred scripture.
I know this is a convenient meme and narrative but this post is literally the consequence of having to pay more for labor, you get more people trying to automate it. We're talking about logistics, probably the most important component of the economy. Trucking salaries are probably the closest thing to "market clearing wages" that exists. Pay more -> more expensive shipping -> less demand to ship things -> lower wages.
If you woke up tomorrow and the clearing price for gas was $10/gallon it would still be accurate to call it a shortage. I can buy a crappy house for $2m tomorrow, it’s still a housing shortage.
But also automated long-haul trucking has been pretty clearly on the short term horizon for the last decade. I think most young people know that this is coming, and hence trucking is probably not the best career to invest your time in.
No mention of pay. Also not mention that for about the past 10-15 years, we've also been telling young people AI was going to make truck driving a job of that past also. I remember in 2014 (we are all getting old, that was more than 10 years ago), hearing about comments Elon made that truck drivers were gonna be a thing of the past any day now. Granted, that didn't end up happening, or at least not as quickly. But the fact is, when kids hear a good chunk of their life that a job is gonna be antiquated, we can't be surprised when kids grow up not wanting to be the people to fill those jobs.
“We study teamsters at the dawn of the motor truck, current occupations threatened by computerization, and truckers dreading robotic trucks. As predicted, wages in threatened occupations rise, employment falls, and the occupations become ‘grayer’. Older workers become more likely to enter and less likely to exit the occupation than young ones and sometimes even increase in number.”
It’s not as lucrative anymore because the trucks are effectively speed limited, location constantly tracked and hours micromanaged. Some setups even have a front facing and in cabin driver facing camera recording at all times. Also, they are paid per mile so the many hours they spend at the loading and unloading stations are effectively unpaid.
It’s not as lucrative to the folks that enjoyed pretty much total freedom outside of the start and end points.
The guys with all of the money don't like paying people now when people actually deliver value with their labor. No way they do it once they can just have machines work for them.
I don’t know why you’re being downvoted. It is absolutely in the cards for the ownership class to send out swarms of drones to kill us all.
The best we can hope for is to all end up in permanent slums picking through garbage to survive.
One peep of protest a little too loud and suddenly we’ll all be living the same scenario that’s visible all over the “combat footage” portions of the web: you are walking along outdoors, you hear a buzz, and then suddenly you look up to realize there’s a drone coming at you. You panic and try to run but by the time you hear it, it’s too late. It catches up to you easily and drops a bomb on you. Or maybe it’s a smaller more targeted (and disposable) one that zips straight at your forehead and explodes on contact, destroying your brain.
People may say I’m a doomsayer but just look back at the history of labor in the US. They sent out privatized security to shoot anyone who didn’t cooperate. And that was when they still needed the workers! Just imagine what they’ll do when they no longer need anyone!
There's a lot of truth to that however the supply chain for everything today has never been longer or had more intermediaries. It's like a house of cards built ever higher and no one has budgeted anything for resilience. JIT, outsourcing, etc, everything is cheaper at the cost of resilience.
Oh yes I’ve thought of that, but I’m sure they have too. If AI advances to the point where everyone is out of work, then it will have also likely advanced to the point where it can aid in getting around the current supply chain fragilities.
That angle unfortunately just doesn’t give me much hope.
I agree. I'm a pretty die-hard free market proponent, but as we move away from labor scarcity via automation there's just no other choice than redistribution that allows a basic lifestyle for the unemployable. The transition will be tough though.
That's not how any of this works. Automation like FSD will lead to cheaper shipping costs via trucks leading to more Trucks on the road and more needing to load/unload and manage last mile logistics and driving routes that can't be automated resulting in
... more trucking jobs, more loading/unloading jobs, more FSD operations jobs, more truck repair jobs, more software engineering jobs
This reminds me of how ATMs created more banking jobs because people started to use the bank more along with ATMs. ATMs handled the simple transactions and tellers dealt with the more complex tasks.
We'll see. There will be a loss of little industries that depended on truckers though, like truck stops and inns.
I also hope that this results in more jobs that are fulfilling.
Your little credit union lacks the capital to have automated systems handle more complicated stuff... for now.
Used to work at a bank that had a few local branches as a teller when I was a senior in HS. Had old, antiquated technology but had a "person on the phone whenever you needed help".
I'm going to guess that the bank that bought them out was quite a bit more advanced, and the banks that do the same will be buying out the less advanced ones.
And there's like hardly any branches anymore, used to be one in every major village/small town per bank, now there's double the people and a third the banks
"Not to mention" doesn't make sense here. Everything else in this thread is talking about reducing the demand for trucking labor. Your post is talking about reducing the supply.
Doubtful. The trucking industry has been screaming for years that they can’t find enough people, almost every 18-wheeler I see on the highway has a “we’re hiring” ad on it, and so on. This is automation coming in to replace humans who are willfully exiting.
They are hiring, but the reason they can't find people isn't because there aren't people out there willing to do the job if it's fairly compensated. The problem is that trucking has lost a ton of upside over the last few decades, particularly after the Motor Carrier Act of 1980. Drivers are often paid per mile instead of per hour, which means long unpaid periods waiting for loads or stuck in traffic.
So as usual, "we can't find people" is code for "we tried to exploit the workers until they bled and for some reason we can't figure out, they went elsewhere."
Since COVID happened until this year I would have told you "we can't find people" too, but this year the applications have flooded in. So at least they'll come crawling back eventually.
The Motor Carrier Act of 1980 deregulated the industry, which led to a sharp increase in competition among carriers. Over time, this pushed down freight rates and put pressure on companies to cut costs at the expense of drivers. Many drivers are now classified as independent contractors rather than employees, meaning no benefits or wage protections.
Obviously this also happened against the background of a broader trend towards deregulation that proceeded under Reagan, so it's not just that act.
I've been hearing about the truck driver shortage for > 30 years. Back then it may have been more local, though. Places like North Dakota have been short of drivers for at least 30 years.
Regardless of the pay, I just can't imagine people really being excited to drive all day alone. I hate driving and I do it as little as possible. People like to be around other people when they work too.
To each their own. I’m not a driver either but I could see how trucker life harkens back to the American mythos of the solitary pioneer calling their own shots and working hard as they see fit.
Modern trucking is nothing like that, and often they are independent contractors in name only, driving someone else’s truck and being evaluated against strict performance criteria.
With 14,000 drivers there's going to be continuous turnover.
Edit: Also, Wal-mart's standards are incredibly high -- several years of clean driving experience. Most commercial truck drivers do not meet those standards. Despite the high standards, they still readily fill their positions. If they were having troubles, they'd lower their standards.
There is also just turn over, from my understanding from a former co-worker who had a kid go into truck driving, that truck drivers very rarely stay at the same company long term. New drivers get their training paid for and have an obligation to fill (ex walmart pays for training and pays you while you do it, but you have a 2-3 year obligation to them). Once they do that, they move on to another company. I am assuming for better pay and benefits. And even then, swapping companies is pretty common. Then also a good number stack enough money to buy their own truck and contract. I had a neighbor growing up who owned his own semi and worked on contract.
That's the rule, but AFAICT Wal-Mart is the exception to the rule. They don't train anybody without years of loyalty to the company, I don't think they have obligations. It's the dream job for most truckers from what I hear, and once you get in you don't leave. Wal-Mart pays a solid 6 figures with great home time. You can make more than that with your own truck, but it's hard.
I'm sure it's like any job -- everything else can be great, but if you get stuck with a bad boss it can make you absolutely miserable and drive you out.
It will be interesting to see how this plays out with any impacts from tariffs if we keep playing that game long term.
I guess I should say its morbid curiosity. If we do in fact have a lot of drivers out of work because international shipping is way down, I hope humans are hired before these trucks.
comparing an elevator to a semi-truck and trailer as the same is disingenuous at best, and pointless at worst. as of now, i'm hard pressed to find a point to your question
okay, but automating an elevator is something someone from python bootcamp could do. automating a semi-truck is not. so again, to compare the two is ludicrous. if you honestly feel like they are the same, you are someone I would semi-politely make my excuse to leave the conversation at a party. hey, look, there's someone over there that i haven't seen and would really like to talk to them rather than you. enjoy the party
In the recent HN on Waymo non drivers seem pretty happy with them being safer than human drivers. I imagine there could be similar benefits with autonomous trucks. Also in the UK they make the motorways very crowded. If some autonomous stuff could go overnight when the roads are empty that could help.
Presumably cheaper (long term) shipping costs leading to cheaper goods overall? Fewer sleepy truck drivers on the road? Yes, I think the public would want that.
I'm assuming these are electric? Because even with a driver, longhaul electric trucks are not practical at scale right now, the energy infrastructure and capacity to support them is nowhere near there.
My point being (and please correct me), this is practical but 15-20 years away from widespread adaption, best case.
Such a stupid move. The first major accident (and there will be one, I see them every couple of weeks or so on I35) and they will be taken off the road for 10+ years while they are investigated or outlawed straight up by a reactionary Texas legislature
That depends on who is responsible for the wrecked vehicles. If they’re rich enough, nothing will happen to them, regardless and responsibility will magically shift to the poorer party.
Unlike "the way oversized cargo/load moves today," the chase vehicle is just another Peterbilt truck pulling cargo, but with a safety driver. It's not a flag car or something like that.
This is phrased like you're moving the goal post, and that's not really a good way to have a discussion about this.
I think this sucks, because my gut tells me it sucks, the same way AI in everything sucks -- it just sounds kinda weird. But, of course, when I think about it, it makes sense in a lot of places. The only way for me to have a valid counterpoint to that is if I move the goalpost. I implore you to not move that goalpost, even if it feels right.
It's good they're doing this first in a place that doesn't get long term snow accumulation on roads. But eventually there should be autonomous vehicle tests in places with non-cherry picked road conditions.
At least for trucking it's viable to cherry pick routes since so many endpoints can avoid dense urban areas, extreme rural areas, and residential zones.
That kind of thing could happen before autonomy. Our factory had someone turn up and say I'm the driver to pick up the truck over there, get given keys and make off with a truck load of stock.
Autonomous trucks will be fantastic. Truckers are compelled to work without sleep to finish routes with tight deadlines. It creates a lot of danger on the highway.
It feels like autonomous vehicles could become one of America's superpowers. We have so many miles of road and interstate highway. Autonomous vehicles could double down on that strength and flip the underinvestment in passenger rail on its head, making it much less of an issue.
>Truckers are compelled to work without sleep to finish routes with tight deadlines.
This is statement is somewhere between ignorant and an outright lie. There's a bunch of rules governing how many hours truckers can work. And those regulations are mostly followed. And when they're not it's typically some local outfit delivering fuel or groceries, not the long haul mega fleets
That's the problem. The human alertness cycle can't be forced to align with the ELT logged time schedule. Truckers used to drive longer when they felt awake and choose their own rest times as long as it averaged out.
How is this different from regulations for airline pilots requiring minimum downtime between flights? Or any other industry that requires minimum turn times. I've worked for feature film shoots that had to alter shoot schedules because days went long and the minimum required turn time forced the next day's call time to be pushed. It's always fun switching from a day to night schedule, and these minimum turn times are a god send
film industry is most definitely a union rule, but that's not the point. that's my personal experience with a minimum turnaround, and it is something that makes a huge difference. applying that to what pilots/truckers experience was my way of being empathetic rather than just sympathetic. i've personally been there, done that. i've also been on those stupid jobs where you work late into the night, yet the pointy haired bosses still expect you to be at your desk at the regular time. that absolutely sucks, and will not allow that nonsense to happen to me again.
> There's a bunch of rules governing how many hours truckers can work.
True!
> And those regulations are mostly followed.
Very false, at least as of 5 years ago.
I worked with trucker biometric data which for a large company which runs trucks all over North America.
The company itself keeps its hands clean: they required drivers to keep strict manual logs and have strict rules about compliance with regulation. But at every step of the way, the incentives are for drivers to lie in these logs. Particularly, per-mile pay incentivizes driving a lot of miles at times when there's less traffic on the road (night). If your truck isn't moving, you aren't getting paid, and drivers want to get back to their families and hobbies, so they minimize time spent sleeping in their truck in a random location. Additionally, missed deadlines can significantly impact your pay, and deadlines are set at levels which cut very close to regulation, so that any delays force drivers to break regulation to meet the deadline.
Biometric data shows flagrant violations of regulation, which we can't share with anyone (including the company), because it's medical data protected under HIPAA. The manual logs are corroborated by an electronic black box on each truck, but these logs aren't checked unless something goes wrong, at which point the company can use to show the trucker was in violation of their stated policies to reduce liability.
I've only seen data from one company (which I cannot name due to non-disclosure) but it's my understanding that most of the company's driver incentives are structured similarly to the reputable parts of the trucking industry. Other companies have mile quotas (or inversely, mile bonuses) which further incentivize lying in logs. There are extremely exploitative owner/operator outfits which force drivers to work desperately to pay off their trucks, likely resulting in worse violations.
So sure, on paper, the letter of the regulations are followed, but that's definitely not what's happening on the road.
> And when they're not it's typically some local outfit delivering fuel or groceries, not the long haul mega fleets
Even if there were true (which it isn't), a head on collision with a sleeping local fuel delivery driver is just as deadly as a head on collision with a long haul trucker. This is irrelevant.
The E-log requirement all but eliminates drivers cooking the books.
The book cooking happens when the company hires a sketchy firm out of eastern europe to provide the software who then cook the books on the back end. These carriers are a small minority (lest they become juicy targets for enforcement) and have high turnover.
So instead of improve their conditions we just fire them? Sure that won't have any negative repercussions...
That's even assuming this is actually remotely profitable compared to just using humans. Like a lot of this sort of automation it probably isn't, and it's true purpose is to be used as a threat against workers so they'll be even more "compelled to work without sleep to finish routes with tight deadlines"
> Sure that won't have any negative repercussions...
Does it suck for the truck drivers. Yes. Does that mean we should give them busy work even though their job can be automated? No. We don't know what the reprocussions will be. We do know, from 100% of past experience, that automating something opened new opportunties that ultimately resulted in more jobs that before. Whether that will be true this time as well no one has any idea.
The usual example is textile creation vs fashion. The loom put people who hand weave cloth out of business. But the abundance of cheap cloth created 100x the jobs in cloth making and fashion. It's why you probably have more than 3 shirts in your house/apartment.
On the other hand, the current administration is not interested in education or welfare though, or labor protections in general. Fired truckers don't have a whole lot of transferrable skills related to maintaining self driving vehicles, and they would all be competing for same openings anyway. You can't just get another job when you want it, and you need some way to take care of the bills until you can get hired.
Software and automation has a long history of putting people out of work. Many of the truckers are delivering loads for large companies who put mom and pop stores out of business. It's the circle of life.
We should bring back elevator operators. And station a traffic guard on every corner instead of traffic lights. Let’s bring back tool booth operators. And let’s delete Google calendar and bring back secretaries while we’re at it.
This sort of response misses the point. If the goal is to have jobs for everyone, then yes, bringing back all those things is actually the right move, and you're not going to convince the person who favors job creation otherwise. You seem to be under the impression that those jobs went away for a good reason, but you haven't bothered to articulate what that reason was.
I think the better point is that having jobs for everyone isn't the goal. Equitably distributing the results of our society's labor so everyone's needs are met is. If people are able to live in a house and put food on their table, they'll be less concerned with whether they have a job or not.
But that requires that you care enough about other people to not let people hoard unlimited resources, so I suspect most of HN will have some objections, and you'll never actually address what monkaiju is concerned about.
Yes? I would feel economic uncertainty and worry, but I’m not so egocentric that I would think that someone is raising hundreds of millions of dolllars and building factories in an elaborate scheme to make me work longer hours.
I wasn’t arguing for a social good, I’m ambivalent on that.
I thought I was pretty clearly questioning the claim that the motivation of DreamCo is somehow to threaten truckers so they work harder, as opposed to (wisely or not) trying to sell trucks.
If you’re not a union shop, it’s easy. Divide and conquer. Like most employees, truckers in general are stupid and greedy. They are in one of the easiest to organize jobs, but get brainwashed by the firehose of right wing radio.
First step is to isolate the smart ones, which are the people with hazmat endorsements. Treat them well and praise effusively to build resentment. Then take the routes that are cost effective for robots, and offer premium pay and bonuses to the people, but with goals that can’t be met without cutting corners. Encourage reporting of rule violators.
Your goal is to create a toxic and miserable environment that pays just enough. Make them kill each other for a dwindling number of slots. You keep the people agitated and fighting each other, and they won’t notice their toys getting taken away.
My brother is in this business. There’s overlapping jurisdictions that shady operators leverage hard to squeeze more out of people and equipment.
Chinatown busses are the perfect example, they’d run routes designed to avoid federal jurisdiction and adopt routes and schedules to avoid weigh stations and routine inspection. Busses were unsafe and drivers unlicensed in many cases. Most were owned by Chinese mafia organizations and killed people. When they weren’t doing that, they were huge human trafficking operations.
The federal motor carrier safety administration had a robust, science based program to improve safety and improve conditions in most scenarios. My understanding is that 80% of the staff was fired and resigned, so it’s a Wild West environment. The advice I was given was avoid the busy trucking corridors (I-81/85/95) at night.
> The federal motor carrier safety administration had a robust, science based program to improve safety and improve conditions in most scenarios. My understanding is that 80% of the staff was fired and resigned
When was that? And is there anything public we can read about these things?
Isn’t it true that truck drivers are the most common profession in basically every state?
I think it’s “funny” how corporate leaders in basically every industry are enthusiastically barreling toward a world in which they have no employed customers to buy their products created by their automated robot workforce.
Nobody in politics is coming close to addressing the societal problems that are incoming in the near future.
It’s not corporate leaders. It’s owners. We’re moving to a feudal environment. The billionaires are pulling sovereign capital from the Saudis. They need to keep their treasure, that’s the priority.
Politics isn’t pretending to address anything. We’re breaking the system to extract as much rent from the populace as possible. Caesar type stuff. Destroying the income tax means you’ll pay taxes based on consumption. We’ll be poorer. The overlords will be great.
Agriculturists enthusiastically barreled toward a world with no employed farmers to buy their food, and the societal problems took care of themselves because having lots of cheap food is good.
All of that unrest eventually resulted in the new deal. We have had relative peace in the postwar period thanks to a lot of pain being resolved over a long period of time, but that lack of friction is not guaranteed to last forever.
I would argue that America’s backslide into the election of a reactionary, dare I say fascist government is all about declining prosperity.
To me, a vision of the future in which people do jobs robots could do, just to create jobs, is a dystopia. The future I want to see is one in which humans live lives of play and leisure while robots do all the labor, and the results of the robots doing labor are distributed equitably.
The problem is, there's no historical precedent for this, and we're still letting people who do almost no labor amass most of the results of other people's labor. If we follow the current trajectory, we'll have a society controlled by a few people who own the robots, and everybody else fighting over their table scraps.
The solution to this isn't rejecting automation to create artificial jobs: that's just fighting over table scraps by a different name. The solution is to stop rewarding generational wealth with more wealth, and distribute resources more equitably.
I wouldn't want to drive a truck. To be frank, I really don't want to answer Jira tickets and write plumbing code either. I sincerely hope that none of what most of us do today has to be a job in fifty years.
> The truck driver gets the next-least-undesirable job.
That the promise but is it the reality? Deaths of despair suggest it isn't.
Deindustrialization is an issue once you move supply chains overseas or to the robots, with it whole parts of country die. No truck drivers means less money spent on truck stops, motels (for sleep), and in their local economy (no pubs, bowling alley, etc.)
But the threat isn't just replacing drivers, it is replacing entire eco systems of jobs.
The future is here. Truckers are one of the largest employers in the country. We are moving fast towards a new era. We need to start thinking about how we adjust as a society
Phone operators have gone the way of the dodo as well. We should embrace these changes with a forward-looking attitude and look at how such systems create brand new roles in society.
None of those numbers are impressive. Longhaul only from Dallas to Houston. What's missing in the article is the huge number of issues that the system most certainly has.
We've been promised driverless technology for over 10 years now. If you can't do it with cars, then why does anyone think we would have it with delivery trucks?
Please use critical thinking for one second. I beg you HN. This is just another tech company scam that will get dumped as soon as they get the investor money.
There's also a trial of "platooning" of driverless trucks on I-70 in Ohio and Indiana: https://www.forbes.com/sites/richardbishop1/2025/04/24/ease-...
A "drivered" lead truck is leading one or more driverless trucks in this case.
I drive the stretch of highway these trucks are on fairly regularly. I don't know that I've seen a group of them yet but I'm keeping my eye out.
I'm probably just showing my age, but I like the idea of a "drivered" truck leading driverless trucks versus a completely autonomous system. It's similar to my attitude on crewed spaceflight-- I like the idea of the ingenuity and capacity for independent thought supervising an automated systems, versus autonomous automated systems.
next level would be to hook these "platoons" together physically and then centralize the propulsion in a super efficient package. And then we could move them off the highways and onto specialized "tracks" that guarantee they don't deviate from the planned routes.
speculative, alien technology, admittedly, but some day our scientists will figure it out i bet!
The problem with railroad is exactly the other side of this: that you can't trivially and automatically detach a single car at any point. I know businesses that literally have an old railroad branch line right up to their door, but they can't actually order anything meaningful via rail.
The existing rail system has at least the following constraints:
* Uses steel-on-steel friction, rather than rubber-on-rock. Cars that can do both exist but are rare.
* Can only travel on the specially-prepared rails, not installed at the last-mile, related to the next point.
* Poor cornering and elevation changing.
* Difficulty in changing speeds (over a thousand meters and over a minute, compare to about a hundred meters and less than ten seconds for road vehicles)
* Very limited lanes, usually no passing. Track reservations will be voided if you aren't exactly on schedule.
* Almost all of the "intelligence" (both computer and human) is at one or both ends; the cars in the middle are all "dumb".
Which of these can reasonably be changed?
My previous company, Parallel Systems is working on this. The solution looks a lot like trucks on rail: individual locomotion, so you get the flexibility of trucking, but the energy efficiency and automation ease of rail. With modern braking, you can stop a Parallel vehicle about as fast as a truck. There's a ton of rail that's underutilized, particularly in Metro areas, so you almost get a fresh highway for free. Vehicles can platoon or separate at will.
I’m not seeing much rail that is under utilized out here int he west, if anything it is over subscribed. The energy savings in having one or two diesel electrics pull a long chain of cars is substantial, I get the feeling that if you just put trucks on rails you’d lose a lot of that.
You also need to be more conservative with elevation changes, right of ways, and turning radiuses, so lots of tunneling and viaducting ala the Chinese HSR network. You are still probably going to have a lot of roads since rubber works better for going up and down, twisty turns, and can deal last mile stuff flexibly. Not everyplace is going to be as simple as the island of sodor.
most of Europe north of the alps is fairly flat in elevation. Railways are oversubscribed because they are not expanded enough, defunded if you like, to expand and fund the highway network.
It is stupid to travel thousands of kilometers by trucks. It's inefficient, expensive and nit scalable. Currently we use mostly huge container ships and empty them with trucks, absolutely insane. There's quite a bit of river boat activity in Europe luckily, which is great if electrified. Though the sorry state of the railways is just human-made and not didtated by economics.
>the sorry state of the railways is just human-made and not dictated by economics
I'm not sure about the world in general but I've followed the HS2 line in the UK and the problems are pretty much economic. We have a couple of north south lines along the UK but they are basically at capacity so the idea was to build another and make it high speed but it's proved incredibly expensive, partly due to property ownership and housing along the line and partly due to environmental regulations leading to £100m shelters to avoid disturbing a few bats. (bat thing https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2025/jan/25/environment-...)
Estimates for building it have gone from £38bn in 2011 to £136bn in 2023. They are still building some of it but brexit britain doesn't have that many spare £136bns lying around. https://www.economicshelp.org/blog/3088/economics/pros-and-c...
Always upvote electric trains!
They can all be changed, but then the capital costs for rail infrastructure would balloon and diminish the 3-5x cost advantage rail has over trucking. The modern rail business is structured (physically and, especially, financially) to squeeze every last cent out of existing infrastructure with minimal investment. I doubt that will change significantly anytime soon. The public road infrastructure subsidizes trucking (even after factoring in use and fuel taxes), and perhaps more importantly trucking companies don't have to contend with legal hurdles like land acquisition--the government handles that. (Land acquisition delays have been the biggest barrier for CAHSR.)
>The problem with railroad is exactly the other side of this: that you can't trivially and automatically detach a single car at any point. I know businesses that literally have an old railroad branch line right up to their door, but they can't actually order anything meaningful via rail.
Because companies have invested in JIT because low cost of trucking, an industry which is heavily subsidized (https://www.cbo.gov/publication/50049), allows it.
If trucking costs reflected their true cost, railroad would look a ton more attractive along with not doing JIT.
You can. It’s called multimodal and basically is just picking a shipping container off a train car with a crane and putting it on a truck platform or a ship. 1 platform supports all modes.
This works great for finished consumer goods, but bulk cargo that makes up a significant portion of both rail and truck traffic like grain, liquid products (crude oil, gasoline, vinyl chloride), ore, etc. have very specialized transports that don't work well with the existing multimodal system.
Most of those have their own specialized transport systems that work well already though.
The problem with rail is that we allowed the national rail network to be privatized. Maybe we’ll see some privatized lanes on interstate highways in the next 15 years.
The bigger issue is that roads are immensely subsidised compared to rail. Even on private roads that are completely covered by usage charges, trucks pay maybe a factor of 2-10 more than cars, however they cause about 40000 times more wear (let's even disregard how they also cause disproportionately more traffic...). Obviously this calculation becomes even worse if we consider that most roads are subsidised by all tax payers. Trucks would be much less profitable (especially for long haul traffic) if they would have to cover their actual cost to society. But they are just another example of privatising profits and socialising the costs.
that 40000 figure is the product of one study. I have always been suspicious of it and wished people could cite more than one study written 40+ years ago
Are you just talking about the USA? I would bet that rail in Europe and Eastern Asia is also pretty subsidized, as much as or even more so than roads.
Rather the opposite in Europe, actually.
The European rail network is strongly liberalized, starting with the First Railway Directive 91/440/EEC. The physical infrastructure now usually falls under a state-owned enterprise, which provides access to any company wanting to use it, at a fair and non-discriminatory pricing. In practice this means that the usage fees have to pay for all upkeep and maintenance, with occasional cash injections from the government for things like constructing new railway lines. Importantly, this infrastructure company is expected to either have a neutral result, or run a profit: the railway users have to pay the true costs of operating the railway.
The roads are a different story altogether. They are owned, constructed, and maintained directly by the government itself. Road upkeep comes out of the general budget - just like education or defense. Road users pay via a vehicle tax and/or fuel tax, but there is zero expectation that those taxes pay for the full cost of the road network. After all, you profit from the presence of a road network - even if you don't drive a car yourself.
France has fairly high tolls on roads and Switzerland has that sticker you have to buy to use the expressways.
Japanese rail companies must get some sort of subsidy on tracks, the passenger rail system runs at a loss and only turns a profit on renting space in train stations. Roads are also heavily tolled (similar in China).
> I know businesses that literally have an old railroad branch line right up to their door, but they can't actually order anything meaningful via rail.
A century ago they would have found it at lot easier: if you wanted to send just a few cars to the back of a factory, many rail operators would have found a way to make it happen, and at a reasonable price too - now they’ll tell you the service is uneconomic to provide, unless you charter an entire locomotive for $$$$
railroad maintenance is also incredibly expensive.
Especially compared to when you can offload the road maintenance to the state / rest of the population.
As repairing roads costs so much, it annoys me that we don't make some attempt at penalising the heaviest vehicles. As road damage is roughly proportional to the fourth power of weight, it would make a lot of sense to prevent logistics companies from just using the largest vehicles that they can - it should work out costing less if loads are broken up and delivered via multiple, lighter vehicles. However, as the public bears the cost, it means that logistics companies will just look at their expenses (drivers' wages, fuel etc).
Intramotev is working on autonomous rail car retrofits to make the cars in the middle move on their own to their destinations.
Problem is those railroad cars usually don't share origin and destination. And spending a day or two on the switchyard for every couple of hours of actual travel isn't what customers want.
The beaty of platooning is that trucks can join and leave while traveling at speed, all they need is a free lane on the side.
And if you really want to tease out all the efficiencies of rail, without suffering the drawbacks, you make electrified lanes that also have embedded tracks (like those of a tramway, but designed for higher load) and make the trucks multimodals that can switch while moving. Actually just those trucks that would see an economic advantage, trucks designed for light, high volume loads would likely stick to road wheels only.
A setup like this could actually be super economical compared to two because a rail network needs huge separation between trains because rails are terrible for braking fast. Multimodals on the other hand could be designed to be able to switch to their road wheels in an emergency. And a rail network needs an ungodly amount of nines in terms of reliability and rarity of maintenance, because there is no plan B network. Reliability nines are expensive. Multimodals on the other hand could easily be diverted to a dirt road for a bit when the main lanes are defective or going through maintenance. Where they would be running on the same batteries they carry anyways, for the last couple of miles on regular, non-electrified roads.
switchyard
Why not just use container cranes like docks? There's no reason they won't work inland.
Would that be faster though? You still have to stop the entire train just to get one unit in or out. And if it's more units, chances are that parallelization hits a capacity bottleneck because of the inherent cost trade-off between having lots of cranes on standby vs just waiting a little longer in the rare moments of action. Are container cranes used for routing within a rail network at all? Might well be that they are only ever used for mode change at the edge, despite having been mature and available technology for decades.
And indeed they exist every 200 miles or so.
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Hmm. That sounds like it might lead to a monopolization of these tracks, as networks consolidate, and then ultimately evolve into a stagnant industry more focused on cutting costs than innovating...
I suspect that's why a competent government might invest more in these tracks as they might contribute a lot to delivery infrastructure. Especially in a consumer-based economy where shipping goods is important.
US is already the largest shipper of freight by train in terms of shipped tonnage and also total tracks.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rail_transportation_in_the_Uni...
Not a very interesting data point since it doesn’t account for nation area, utilization, etc.
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Freight_Shipping_in_...
Here’s tonnage miles by class.
For comparison. There is only 20,000 miles of railway that Amtrak operates on. Thats a fraction of passenger railway compared to China and EU.
Don't forget geography, and by extension type of freight.
The United States doesn't have a lot of navigable waterways, and none go east-west. This means that any bulk goods you want to transport have to go via rail. There is no other option. As a result the railway network has been optimized to do bulk transport at the lowest price possible, even if it means sacrificing speed and quality. After all, coal doesn't care if it sits in a siding for several days.
It's true that the US is shipping an awful lot of tonnes via rail, but this doesn't say anything about its ability to ship regular goods. Getting a single wagon from point to point in a timely manner is significantly more complicated than doing the same with an entire train.
Let me know where you can find a competent government not currently trying to burn down its own consumer-based economy with tariffs and xenophobia and which doesn't consider trains a communist plot. And whether they take American passports.
Trains are as popular as ever almost everywhere in Europe.
Rail freight's share of shipping has been on a steep decline for decades in Europe:
> Freight rail’s modal share has been in decline across Europe, both in terms of market share and the profitability of major operators. In France for instance, modal share declined by 50 percent, from around 30 percent in the 1980s to 15 percent today. By contrast, road transport has been steadily increasing. In 1980, less than 50 percent of goods were transported by road. This rose to more than 75 percent by 2018.
https://www.mckinsey.com/industries/infrastructure/our-insig...
By contrast, for most of that same period (1980-today) rail freight was growing its share in the US, though in the past decade or so growth has favored trucking.
Trains move as much freight as ever in the USA.
Not to take away from that fact, but the share of train-moved freight (over time) is more interesting. It probably highlights the complications of scaling train networks easily.
I'm not sure governments learn by seeing the mistakes of other governments. But consecutive New Zealand governments have made some big mistakes. Capitalist party sold the national rail to an Australian company because rail was inefficient and costing a ton. Privately run cut back staff significantly. A few years later the story was that that was failing privately run, so the socialist party bought it back at exhorbitant cost. Now current governmentis trying to sort out a massive budget blow-out to get "rail" ferries between North and South Islands working (roll-on roll-off). The private ferry (Bluebridge) is doing okay I think.
I believe the lesson is that rail sucks here, economically speaking (whether privately run or publicly run). Unfortunately old voters love rail so the politicians pander to them.
The problem about New Zealand is that they hate investing in infrastructure and everyone loves the kiwi myth of the number 8 wire which means they just build provisional solution on top of provisional solution. The example of the ferries is a good one, the cost blow out was because they needed to build a new dock in Wellington. So instead of just living with the fact that yes building infrastructure as become expensive in a country which has seen a massive building boom (like many other places), the new Conservative government decides to cancel the ferry order without any alternative in place, and now the most important connection of the country is running on failing ferries which are more than 25 years old (there have been several incidents in the last couple of years where they were drifting powerless), and (especially considering the massive penalty for cancelling the contract) the new ferries will be just as expensive as the cancelled ones just being much smaller (the old contract was actually signed at quite advantageous economic times) and arriving much later.
This is certainly not an example of rail not working. Trucks on the road are a massive disaster as well. Most roads are single lane, so it's not uncommon to be stuck behind trucks for long stretches, this is especially annoying considering that many roads are very windy and truck speed up when coming to passing lanes.
Dumb American, so I could be totally off base. But New Zealand appears small enough on the map that just doing a shit ton of barges along defined coastal water routes makes a lot more sense than trains. In the US trains could be efficient, but we are also like 2,500 miles coast to coast.
The problem with water travel in New Zealand is that weather often closes ports.
But it is true that NZ lacks the scale that many existing rail systems rely on, and also lacks high-speed roads (a good rule of thumb for driving anywhere in NZ is: look at how many miles it is on the map, calculate how fast you could go that far in America, then double the time).
New Zealand doesn't have inland waterways the way the US does so barges don't seem sufficient. They did actually get a fancy self-propelled barge for use transporting minerals on the West Coast of the South Island last year and it got pushed aground by a storm in its first couple weeks of service. It's been sitting in port in Nelson ever since being refloated.
https://maritime-executive.com/article/barge-to-innovate-new...
Switzerland?
Austria, France and Italy are currently copying Switzerland in building base tunnels [1] to mostly carry rail freight.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Base_tunnel
dammit
Trains have been with us for over a century and aren't going to suddenly change on their own to solve all transport problems. Self driving tech may help make them work better by handling the station to end location bit cheaper or more efficiently than human workers.
Jokes aside, Germany trialed a hybrid catenary truck system which was really neat.
Diesel to get you from the warehouse to the highway, extend your pantograph and boom, you're electric in the right lane (outside lane) all the way to your exit.
Never looked into how it penciled out but I always thought that was a great idea. Seems like there is a path to add in driverless aspects to the system as well given you have contact with a wire the whole time.
It penciled out by striking it through. Meaning they all have been built back, and aren't in operation anymore, with no further experiments planned.
Also disinterest by truck manufacturers.
Yeah! Then those same engineers will notice how much single point of failure that model leads to, and how rigid that is. So they will be looking to leverage the existing much denser, much flexible, more connected and redundant network that exists alongside those rare tracks.
It’s almost like this evolution did not happen before.
Imagine having rails instead of roads, and roads instead of rails. The same argument would apply, only roads would lead to less efficiency overall.
So why aren't trains automated yet? I mean, beside the inter-airport shuttles. Seems like a much more constrained set of parameters to deal with. I'd think this would be a good "first" project to tackle for an AV company, even if the economics of replacing locomotive drivers/engineers weren't super compelling. Is it an insurance thing? Because a train wreck could be much more disastrous and costly? Or is it a union thing? Others?
Almost all of the currently automated rail systems in the world have two things:
1. Full grade separation with no level crossings (often including platform edge doors along any station platforms the trains move through too)
2. Full fencing along the corridor.
Those are two things that isn’t true for almost any freight line.
Not to say it’s not possible with extremely extensive sensor and decision making systems but we’re probably not really there yet.
Lots of trains are.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_driverless_train_sys...
> So why aren't trains automated yet?
Why? The labor of a conductor is a fraction of the total cost to move the cargo, to the point it’s a rounding error.
Didn't we almost see a national rail strike 2 years ago? It seems like reducing that risk would be an incentive enough to make the transition, even if overall costs are low.
Automating the conductor job doesn’t necessarily mean there won’t be anybody around to strike, I think.
This. Most of the jobs are in infrastructure and servicing (loading, maintenance etc). Those are using as much automatization as possible already.
And it means someone on site to react sensibly when things go wrong.
Think of the Miracle on the Hudson. The pilot said "This is the captain. Brace for impact." The flight attendants picked up on that and immediately began directing the passengers on what "brace for impact" means. Without that how many would have reacted properly (the info is on the safety card, but how many have read it well enough??), how many would be asking for information, how many would just generally be panicking?
If a freight train is unstaffed, who would brace for impact?
Anyway, labor costs to have a couple engineers aboard is much less than if the load was travelling by truck, even if the trucks have no driver in them, they're likely supervised at a ratio with more humans than it takes to operate a long freight train.
And the job creates a sense of community too.
At some point it’ll probably be automated, but yeah, what’s the point.
> beside the inter-airport shuttles
Singapore and Sydney would like a word.
Nuremberg(partially), Hamburg(partially, soon), too.
https://www.grandparisexpress.fr/new-metro
Ah, you're thinking of the world famous Las Vegas Hyperloop!
turns out, the US has already done this at a scale larger than anyone else https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_rail_tr...
Wouldn’t it be great to enable electric cars to go long distances with platoons? Like a bus system for electric cars to go between cities and charge while you drive. The ‘bus’ is basically a big efficient generator that can charge up the cars behind it. A lot like mid flight refueling for fighter jets.
Generator powered by what? If its a diesel powered generator, that's even less efficient and more polluting than just using diesel trucks in the first place.
Hydrogen
> next level would be to hook these "platoons" together physically and then centralize the propulsion in a super efficient package.
You don't need the tracks, and its called a 'road train'
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Road_train
Google Australian road trains.
And people could just vote for things to be better!
Sounds like something that would require a lot of infrastructure that wouldn't make a lot of sense to build in the most rural areas of a country, unlike roads which can be quite cost-effective even without towns nearby.
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It's fascinating the frequency with which techbros invent "trains but worse".
This reminds me of an oft recommended book "Digital Apollo". One of the driving topics is the human interaction component and the difference in designing a fully automated system versus one that is designed with an operator that can intervene. If I recall correctly, the book presents a dichotomy between the rocketeers and pilots (automate entirely and strap people on for a ride vs design a system controlled by a human).
I think they both have their place, but I think acknowledging it as a system design choice is so helpful even in basic business processes (how will I handle exceptions, how will the person remember to handle a rare exception).
I find myself thinking of this problem frequently. We have lots of modern words for it like observability but I think that removes one a bit from the actual problem.
> A "drivered" lead truck is leading one or more driverless trucks in this case
My bet is this goes nowhere. It’s a horseless carriage that doesn’t have enough time to pay itself back versus fully-automated platoons with remote back-up.
It seems like there's an aerodynamic advantage to the platoons. Placing an autonomous truck in the lead of one of these platoons, down the road, seems like a reasonable "upgrade" strategy.
> Placing an autonomous truck in the lead of one of these platoons, down the road, seems like a reasonable "upgrade" strategy
Sure. I just don’t see the time-to-market advantage of starting with a human lead outpacing the core technology advantage of being fully autonomous from the get go. (Counterpoint: Waymo using Uber to manage the front end in Atlanta.)
But the company that figures out platooning can also work on self-driving, or can partner with or sell itself to the company that does figure out self-driving.
Working on platooning - assuming it's a more or less viable business idea on its own - doesn't need to be a distraction that prevents anyone from developing fully autonomous trucks.
Right up until there's an accident and the lead truck suddenly has to slam on the brakes. Depending on the length of the 'platoon' and traffic density, that could get really messy really fast.
All the trucks should have their own set of brakes, so the stopping distance should be similar for all of them, right?
Unless the front truck is actually hitting something, causing it to slow down more than the following trucks (and then quickly turn into a pancake).
If we can fly a drone halfway across the world, why can’t we have human augmentation for self driving trucks. Have a human, rested, and alert monitoring several platoons back at HQ. The only reason you want a person on the train is security and paperwork.
I'll bet one more cynical.
The teamsters, the CDL mills, the driver trade groups, all the people who've joined hands with the hand wringing types to prevent modernization of our trucking regulations will see the writing on the wall, pull out all the stops, lobby to allow human steering wheel holders to work to their full potential and full automation will stagnate for 20+yr while tech is instead deployed to solve other nuisance problems that limit truck sizes and productivity.
Someone should develop an ad-hoc platooning network for truckers. Install a platooning cruise control package on your rig and then get an alert on your dash when another truck in the network is in your vicinity looking to platoon. Lock in the cruise control behind the lead vehicle, and the app automatically calculates the fuel savings and divides the savings equally between the operators.
Edit: Various sources say that platooning can cut fuel use by 4-15%.
> There's also a trial of "platooning"
That's been tried before. See Demo 97, when CALTRANS had a demo of self-driving.[1] Worked OK, but took a lot of roadside equipment, like a railroad.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RlZEeIC_2lI
1997 was ten million years ago. Waymo doesn’t require any roadside equipment.
Wouldn’t remote monitoring be better, or the monitor is in the lead truck that is also driverless, monitoring the other trucks in the platoon?
Seriously, we are getting closer to shadowrun rigger territory, but without the neural implants that would have put us deeper in the loop.
Would piracy become a problem in this case? Pirates would only have to deal with one lonely driver to get to multipe trucks’ worth of goods.
The return of the highwayman is exactly what this century needs next.
But in seriousness, what’s the next step? You drive off with five semi trucks worth of stuff? It seems like it’s just a worse way to steal trucks. Especially autonomous trucks that are going to be very well-instrumented and remote accessible.
I mean. https://a-american.com/land-pirates-robbing-from-la-trains/
Completely driverless and I wonder when we’ll read about the first case of truck cargo piracy.
Its probably easier to hijack a truck with a driver, because you can bribe drivers to be the inside guy.
That seems likely to cause problems with drivers trying to merge.
> I'm probably just showing my age, but I like the idea of a "drivered" truck leading driverless trucks versus a completely autonomous system. It's similar to my attitude on crewed spaceflight-- I like the idea of the ingenuity and capacity for independent thought supervising an automated systems, versus autonomous automated systems.
Did you read a lot of classic sci-fi growing up? This sounds very I, Robot.
> I'm probably just showing my age, but I like the idea of a "drivered" truck leading driverless trucks versus a completely autonomous system. It's similar to my attitude on crewed spaceflight-- I like the idea of the ingenuity and capacity for independent thought supervising an automated systems, versus autonomous automated systems.
Great example because spacecraft are fully autonomous. The weakest link in that platoon is the driver.
Precious few drunk drivers on orbit. Or activists blocking traffic, or any number of other interesting situations.
Also, it eases the pain of introducing automation by removing a major roadblock to incremental adoption. With the Pareto Principle in mind, get rid of most of the drivers relatively quickly, then work on the holdout cases.
Thise are just obstructions. Call a waymo and experience it for yourself. Humans can’t achieve that level of awareness.
I am of two minds about all this. On the one hand, I see the clear, long-term potential given that half the people I see while driving are somehow on their phone. From that perspective, it can't come soon enough. Some people need to be off the road. On the other, I am annoyed that we are effectively beta testing those on public roads with public paying the price.
Is it fair to say they are "beta testing" on public roads with the public paying the price after they've done four years with a supervised driver in the cab?
We have two examples to look at:
Waymo, which appears to be doing an excellent job of handling it. Their robotaxis consistently seem to have a better track record than humans (although it's possible the limits put on them taint the comparison.)
Cruise, which had a whole bunch of problems with edge cases and last I knew wasn't allowed to operate anymore.
I'd share the road with a Waymo truck (not that their system can do that yet), I wouldn't want to share it with a Cruise truck.
Once the technology has been proven it should be possible for fast followers to catch up. We can't let the market be captured by whoever passes the bar first.
But that’s the winner takes it all situation thanks to software patents in US. The first one patents everything and the rest can catch up later or think about really different approach.
Definitely. Since human lives are at stake, it is fair to have an extremely high bar for safety.
It's an interesting bar to set. And it shows how we're willing to bend that safety bar to allow seniors to drive on the roads despite their clear cognitive disadvantage.
Let's look at some raw data. Mind you, we have 100x more data for the human drivers below. ie, billions of miles vs millions for automated drivers.
Pop examined Fatal-crash rate All Level‑4 automated‑driving tests in the U.S. 1.5–1.7 per 100 M mi Drivers 70‑74 yr 1.7 per 100 M mi Drivers 75‑79 yr 2.1 per 100 M mi Drivers 80‑84 yr 4.3 per 100 M mi Drivers ≥ 85 yr 7.6 per 100 M mi
So statistically, you are much more likely to be killed by a senior citizen. So to make a consistent argument using data around safety, we should maybe be revoking the licenses of older folks?
edit: Jesus, 19% of all US fatal crashes in 2023 invloved seniors. While they make up 15% of the driver population.
Likewise younger drivers, as indicated by insurance rates.
You're not wrong. Data shows driver under 20 are involved in 4.8 fatal crashes per 100m miles.
Speed, alcohol, lower seat-belt use, and of course, inexperience are listed as the primary contributing factors.
I think it is a fair question to ask. I personally might be too influenced by what I see in gaming these days, where the game arrives in unfinished state. The difference there is, there are some clear ways of telling they are unfinished ( or finished ).
How can we tell in this case? Do we wait for accident reports?
What would be a better indicator to you than 4 years of driving records?
<< What would be a better indicator to you than 4 years of driving records?
"In four years of practice hauls the trucks’ technology has delivered over 10,000 customer loads. As of Thursday, the company’s self-driving tech has completed over 1,200 miles without a human in the truck."
It would be a start, but we don't seem to have that. Or, at least, the article does not have them. What we do have is a press release and an indication that the load was delivered. No indication of the issues that arose. Just the simple fact that no issues are mentioned suggests there is a massive amount of information that is being omitted, because, I am sure you will agree, it is close to impossible for any kind of rig to run for 4 years and not have issues.
edit:
Tangent. I am starting to feel real fatigue from seeing those gaping holes and just about all articles I read each day. Even FT had some weird omissions in something I saw the other day. And that is just one problem. It gets even worse, when you read something you have some expertise in and the author gets it very, very wrong.
> What we do have is a press release and an indication that the load was delivered.
I like how you didn't seem to notice that there are 1,460 days in four years.
I get the impression that ten semi-truck hauls a day is a lot. If you hit someone (or wreck the truck) you're not going to make your next haul... you're going to be talking to the cops and/or having a wrecker drag you back home.
But only 1,200 miles without a human accompanying the truck. I assume those 10,000 loads weren't all in that same category -- unless it was going a few hundred feet back and forth each time!
110% transparency. We have no clue how they actually tested, how they cheated, what they're lying about, and all the other nefarious BS corporations constantly pull.
A single person could turn all of these things into Decepticon in seconds. We need to know that that is intentionally made impossible, and no one will ever make it possible in secret. It could give someone the power of a global army.
> A single person could turn all of these things into Decepticon in seconds. ... It could give someone the power of a global army.
We're talking about an ordinary semi truck with attached trailer and a bevy of sensors. This isn't a war machine. The worst thing that can happen here is the same thing that can happen with an inattentive or exhausted driver.
<< This isn't a war machine.
I suppose various LEOs are worried over nothing then. I will say this though. Car, like so many other things, is just a tool and like with most, if not all, tools, the question of whether it is a war machine is a rather pragmatic one. Can it be used for war purpose?
It’s indeed a war machine. Even going at slowish 60 mph. Trucks go through all barriers and 20 passenger cars over before stopping. The pictures of accidents with asleep truck drivers are shocking.
Sure .. if by "beta testing" you acknowledge a decade of driverless 100 tonne+ trucks operating in large fleets on private mining sites mixed in with "regular" driver vehicles.
This might be the first foray onto a subset of open public roads but it's not the first serious use of semi autonomous trucks mixed in with human traffic.
I think most mining sites I've been on there isn't mixed large truck and passenger vehicle traffic on any road way. Those trucks simply cannot see you and so it's strictly forbidden, driverless or not.
They usually map out the site and show you which roads you can take in your vehicle and they are completely separate from the operations roads. There are only intersections and it's always the responsibility of passenger cars to come to a complete stop and wait for any cross traffic to pass before proceeding.
I remember this well because we had a job servicing specific equipment on a particular mining companies sites in northern Minnesota. One time we drove on the wrong road. A security vehicle saw us and drove up on us at an extremely high rate of speed to clear us off the truck road and onto the proper passenger road. He spent a good few minutes yelling at us once we were clear. People have been killed this way.
During that time did a tire ever blow out? Did one of the brakes ever fail? Did the fifth wheel ever fail? Did the steering gear ever break?
These are things that happen. How does the AI handle them? Do we know?
Agreed, I think these systems may perform well in the short term with brand new and maintained equipment but will start to fail with age and once the fleet is large enough they push maintenance schedules.
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In America, we are willing to do anything to avoid expanding or upgrading our rail infrastructure.
The biggest problems with American rail infrastructure are related to passenger service. The US has one of the largest freight rail systems in the world by whatever metric you want to use: total miles (#1), annual tonnage (#2), ton mileage (#3) or modal share (#7).
In any case, semis occupy a largely separate mode of transportation that aren't cost competitive with freight rail where it's viable. Autonomous semis are competing mainly with the limitations of human drivers, not freight rail.
To reinforce this, an article about how the US has a world leading freight rail system.
https://www.marketurbanist.com/blog/why-americas-freight-tra...
>mainly with the limitations of human drivers, not freight rail.
Which are regulatory more than technical at this point and could change overnight.
Obviously drivers need to sleep but the tech to make doubles and perhaps even triples workable exists but isn't worth deploying because our regulations are stuck in 1980.
Create a hub and spoke system with automated container sorting at the hubs. Basically build a national rail distribution system that works like a modern distribution warehouse. Long haul trucking should not exist.
The US already has the largest freight rail system in the world, there are just things rail can’t do
We run the largest freight rail in the world and ship more stuff via train than any other nation. BNSF Railway's revenue is $24 billion a year. Same with Union Pacific. They dwarf the major truck freight companies like Fedex Freight or Knight-Swift.
This is a good thing IMO, it’s too late to play catch up with rail infrastructure, we should just skip to the next big thing and let the rest of the world have their antiquated rail structures.
... The next big thing is rail. Until we figure out energy-efficient levitation, rail is the most efficient way to move mass at speed. That's the ideal end-state.
> help bolster a critical sector of the American economy, which often can't find enough drivers.
They can find enough drivers, but won’t pay them enough or give them any dignity. The industry has a 90% turnover rate per year. So obviously they are finding drivers all the time…they just don’t keep them.
Here is an article from 2022 that does a great job of explaining the issue: https://www.columnblog.com/p/us-media-celebrates-letting-18-...
"Cut to 2022. Wages are still down 30% to 50% in key markets, and the job is as dangerous and taxing as ever. Naturally, the pool of people wanting the job would reduce accordingly. Thus, when demand for truckers increases, there’s a “labor shortage.” But, as Peter Greene noted in Forbes when debunking a related myth of “teacher shortages” in 2019, it’s not a lack of willing workers: It’s a severe lack of incentives—wages, unions, benefits—needed to entice workers to take on the difficult work"
I wish it were possible to get this through to the NOBODY WANTS TO WORK ANYMORE crowd. Ironically, they're the ones who would benefit from better working conditions, compensation and a stronger safety net. It's a similar phenomenon to the working class folks I know who "hate unions" ... just as long as it's not theirs or one they might be able to join.
Would you apply the same logic to people who claim we need illegal immigrants to do the jobs “no one wants to do”?
Thank you. This is no better than that terribly disingenuous argument that "nobody wants to work". No, we'd love to work. But we also value not starving to death and having some semblance of work-life balance.
Someone dug into newspaper archives and found an example of the "nobody wants to work anymore" phrase every year for the last 100 years. The phrase likely predates the printing press.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32161426
Thanks for sharing. Here’s the snopes article confirming the articles referenced: https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/nobody-wants-to-work-anymo...
This doesn't surprise me in the least. It's the same thing with older people claiming moral degeneration with younger generations.
Or every generations' younger crowd that think the olds are senile fools that have no clue about anything today and mainly tolerated and polite to as long as they are in the room, but then immediately make fun of them as soon as they leave. As if there's no wisdom that could be shared from their experience. The folly of youth thinking they are invincible is equal to this so called claiming of moral degeneration.
Yes, that too. I fully agree. Both ends of the age spectrum have valuable contributions; one denigrating the other provides no value.
>But we also value not starving to death and having some semblance of work-life balance.
But the free market has decided you're barely worth the cost to keep alive, much less happy. What are you, some kind of communist?
Democratic socialist actually. I believe markets are fine but that there needs to be strong worker protections. (I know you were joking, but I figured I'd answer honestly anyway. Hehe.)
I think the free market is trying to decide if we’re even worth the cost of, well, anything.
Curious if there are specific route features that make this feasible or not, like traffic conditions or the roads or the warehouses on either end.
I used to drive this route every few months for many years. Lots of seas of warehouses at the edge of both of these metro areas. I-45 is in pretty good shape with a lot of recent overhauls over the last decade along the whole path. You don't need to do any difficult overpasses or interchanges. 99% of this is just stay in the right lane and drive straight. You could almost do this with just adaptive cruise control. Which I mostly did a few times, just turn on cruise control and stay in the lane and you're there in a few hours.
Is anyone working on an electric truck system where the battery is on the trailer? Many businesses are constantly rotating the same dry van trailers between hubs. If you charged the trailers at the doc during loading/unloading, the rigs could run 24/7, only stopping to swap trailers.
Work/worked for a place that was doing this. There's a couple problems:
* More battery weight means less cargo weight
* Trailers are dumb; the standard hookup (in NA) is lights and air. I hear CAN is common in EU though.
* Trailers are cheap and almost disposable.
The trucking industry is very slow moving, and probably 20 years behind passenger cars. So changing any of this stuff, even though none of it sounds particularly major, is at least 15 years out to start. Then you're left with the hundreds of thousands of "legacy" trailers that need to be retired or retrofit. The tractor to trailer ratio out there is like 1:10.
One interesting use case for this though is refrigerated (refer) trailers. They're often diesel-electric so they can plug in to shore power. Add a battery to this and maybe you can dump the diesel motor. Again though, weight is an issue... diesel is an order of magnitude more energy dense than the best batteries we have.
how are the trailers getting charged? there are a lot more trailers than tractors, and having enough charge capacity for trailers seems like a lot. There are a lot of trailers that are just a frame with wheels for a shipping container.
trailers have to sit at docks to get loaded and unloaded. they can charge then. meanwhile the truck can leave instantly. maybe a two part system of flatbed trailer with battery + cargo container sitting on top that?
who's managing/wrangling those trailers to keep them rotating to always stay charged? you just created a new job type at the ports
just have plugs at the docks? the same guy that opens the trailer doors can plug it in
Trailers do not sit at docks. They back in, get unloaded, and then pull away.
I expected to find some of the tech that snow plows use on Donner Pass for lane keeping, RRDPS, but couldn't find any info indicating that they are using highway embedded sensors to aid the autonomous trucks.
https://dot.ca.gov/-/media/dot-media/programs/research-innov...
> The RRPDS must maintain an estimate of the vehicle state (i.e., position, velocity, heading, and heading rate) relative to the roadway with position accurate to a few centimeters.
Most autonomous vehicles localize by using a point cloud map of the route with "ground truth" position data (often via GPS). The vehicle looks around and finds the closest point cloud that matches the map, and makes some adjustments for vehicle state (aka pose). GNSS is usually a secondary input if it's used significantly at all.
The farmers I know tell me that their tractors and combines use autonomous guidance, including turning at the end of each row.
They do - I build those for john Deere. basic high school geometry is all it takes once you have gps accurate to a few cm. been working for more than 10 years (though until reciently hard to settup)
the important part to note as those systems don't have detection of anyone/thing that might be there. In a rural field no problem as nobody is there but on a city road there will be plenty of things to watch out for. We are working on the safety parts, I'm not in that area so I'm not sure what the current state is.
Yeah, the farmers tell me that they still have to be watching from the cab. Apparently deer can be caught off guard for some strange reason.
I can't wait to hear the new versions of the "Texas Hammer" Jim Adler's commercials. (for those outside of his market, he has an injury law firm, and has over-the-top ads for those injured by 18 wheelers)
He's been around long enough that his son is now (has been for a while) appearing in these ads taking over the family business. He's quintessential ambulance chasers. I'm sure there's a dictionary out there somewhere with his (their?) picture next to the definition
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kP2bGvEMZ6Q
Having spent a good bit of time driving in Texas, I'd say the safety-average just measurably went up.
The roads between the Austin/SanAntonio, Houston, DFW triangle would be ideal for driverless trucks with each market having a depot where the driverless truck could exchange trailers for drivers to pick up for the local in-town "last mile" delivery.
One company's name was conspicuously absent from the article. Does anyone believe Tesla is still a player in the autonomous driving game? They always seem to be playing catch-up.
I feel like the ideal scenario would be to prioritize self driving truck at set times and set long haul freeways (i.e. Long Beach to Las Vegas or Galveston to Dallas) during the night time when there is no regular auto traffic - for example from 1 am-6 am.
That way if a human driver is concerned, they can choose not to drive during this period of time.
Perhaps run the trucks in a train style configuration where a "conductor" can sit in the lead truck and manage any emergency issues that arise (i.e. security, crash or weather related).
If fully autonomous, I could see securing the cargo being real issue - what would stop a few cars passage in front of the truck and helping themselves to the cargo.
> if a human driver is concerned, they can choose not to drive during this period of time
Self-driving cars are currently proving safer than manually-piloted ones. There isn’t a good reason to segregate traffic like this.
> what would stop a few cars passage in front of the truck and helping themselves to the cargo
Why do you think a trucker would risk life or even their truck in a highway robbery?
> Why do you think a trucker would risk life or even their truck in a highway robbery?
That's an armed robbery whereas stealing from a robo-truck is more like breaking and entering. Robberies require the willingness and ability to commit violence. Having a human witness present means more risk of things going wrong, even if they don't intervene. I think all these factors prevent a lot of potential crimes.
No one cares if a human isn't involved because it becomes a line item on your logistics costs.
You simply iterate on the problem and see if the percentage goes down.
Not to mention you're proposing somehow making off with the contents of a semi truck in a covert way, even though it's so much stuff if takes a semi-truck to move.
These trucks are already covered in cameras. The self driving ones even more. How does this highway robbery even work? You force the autonomous truck to stop, take an angle grinder to the doors, then... unpack all the crates and boxes and hope you find something good that's also small enough to get away with? it just doesn't pass the sniff test for me.
>How does this highway robbery even work?
If you ask truckers they'll probably say something about blue lights and asking to see license and registration.
Huh? Why not? That sounds exactly like what I would expect to happen. Show up with a stolen truck (or cover the license plates), track down some truck on a route between cities, pop it open and see what you get. If it's good, pile it in the truck and drive off.
As to why that doesn't happen now? If you try to rob a piloted truck in the middle of nowhere, whether or not you plan on hurting the guy, he's going to fear for his life (why would he trust your good intentions if you're robbing him?) -- and if he fears for his life, there's a good chance he pulls his gun on you. That means you need to come prepared to commit violence and risk him doing the same
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> Self-driving cars are currently proving safer than manually-piloted ones.
As a general thing, no, we've not really had study confirming that. The stats we have are biased by the feature preselecting good drivers, good weather conditions, known road segments, and other things.
Actually interestingly the primary benefit of doing this would actually be trucking companies. The AI software could probably work way better and have less liability if not having to deal with corner cases of irrational human drivers.
Unfettered access to 5 lanes of freeway.
The problem with this is we live in a 24 hour world. When I worked 2nd shift, I got out of work at 2am so I would have to “choose not to” use the highway to get home. Also, emergency vehicles also use highways.
Agree -but the alternative is that at no point does anyone get to chose to opt out of driving amongst a sea of 10 ton self driving trucks.
I have some bad news for you: those trucks are eighty thousand pounds gross.
> I feel like the ideal scenario would be to prioritize self driving truck at set times and set long haul freeways (i.e. Long Beach to Las Vegas or Galveston to Dallas) during the night time when there is no regular auto traffic - for example from 1 am-6 am.
But why though? These trucks will be safer than humans at the wheel. The most dangerous thing on the road will continue to be the humans driving next to the truck.
> That way if a human driver is concerned, they can choose not to drive during this period of time.
Why should we care about the concerns of a human driver? I don't get a choice to opt out of pedestrian smashing SUVs.
> Perhaps run the trucks in a train style configuration where a "conductor" can sit in the lead truck and manage any emergency issues that arise (i.e. security, crash or weather related).
What possible value will a human offer in that circumstance? We already have weather reports. Anyone willing to provide security is going to be prohibitively expensive and doesn't need to actually be in the truck. Autonomous vehicles are better at avoiding and responding to accidents than humans.
> what would stop a few cars passage in front of the truck and helping themselves to the cargo.
The FBI? What stops highway robbery today?
What stops highway robbery today?
Logistics. Unless you know exactly what's in the cargo, it's probably not wortht he effort because you might get a load of toilet paper. Also getting your ill-gotten gains away from the scene is going to be a lot of work, how much stuff are you going to be able to unload before the cops show up and how many vehicles will you need to get it? You'd be better off stealing the truck itself.
In other words, trains
Slight difference is that there are more lanes and there's dual usage (daytime - regular auto access, nighttime - truck train access).
The benefit is to utilize existing access rights and infrastructure.
The freight rail network is fairly expansive[0] -- sure not as much as the Interstate road network, but has pretty good coverage.
The reason trucks are so popular and necessary is because they go beyond the interstate highways. Until self-driving trucks handle that portion safely and successfully, they're not much more useful than trains.
[0] https://external-preview.redd.it/VPeHZG0mzsNhJGAHJglxW1jn4Y0...
This wildly misunderstands the nature of modern trucking. Trucks have many different roles, they're not just trains that don't need tracks. Trucks can work as on-demand transport, they can do low-volume, infrequent trips, they can aggregate and offload containers much easier, they're universally receivable at both ends with a minimum of infrastructure, etc. These autonomous trucks are competing with long haul human-driven trucks taking stuff from one depot to another, not short haul trucks.
Can you come up with a plan to ship Budweiser beer to the consumers around the country via train?
I might, for a better tasting beer ;)
Yeah, sounds almost like Musk's hare-brained plan to put self-driving teslas (driving with only a couple metres separation) in paved tunnels. I guess some people really hate sharing the bus/car/train with poor people
Quite the opposite - right now (or at least in the future unless interventions are added) poor people have no option but to submit themselves to driving sandwiched amongst with 10 ton trucks driven by who knows what, vibe coded, beta tested, "AI" software.
Put the driverless truck in their own roads and you've just reinvented the train.
The only difference is how maintenance of the route is paid for.
Yes - agreed if we had dedicated truck train roads.
The proposal I would prefer is to do more of a time based multiplexing of the road between daytime auto traffic and night time truck train traffic. And I'm not saying autos couldn't drive at night, just people could decide whether they want to trust the autonomous truck software.
As it stands we probably won't get that choice and its just shoved upon us.
I think having some kind of a sign/light on a vehicle (especially big one) saying that it's being operated autonomously could be quite useful. You can't wave at an autonomous vehicle and expect it to understand from the context why you are waving at it.
Why would you be needing to wave at a vehicle?
If anyone else is just curious about the companies involved:
> autonomous trucking firm Aurora announced it launched commercial service in Texas under its first customers, Uber Freight and Hirschbach Motor Lines
https://aurora.tech/
I'm really unfamiliar with autonomous cars, but how do they handle cases like constructor workers or even regular people (in case of an accident), manually handling the traffic by waving at drivers to go or stop? Are they systems smart enough to recognize these? Or is there someone on the other end, getting remote access to the vehicle if the road situation gets weird?
I remember reading an online study that listed the jobs most likely to be replaced by automation and "truck driver" was listed at the top.
For the keen eye, automation creates new jobs as it replaces others. Someone has to design, implement, and maintain these systems. There is always a higher level of abstraction where a human being is needed to oversee things.
Generally it creates comparatively few of those new jobs, and they are concentrated in a different geographic location, than the substantially more vast economic violence of destroying an industry.
> There is always a higher level of abstraction where a human being is needed to oversee things.
These become progressively more difficult jobs. Not likely the truck drivers who find themselves out of job will implement these systems.
I can already see the LLMs becoming better at computer programming than I am: they're good at the very high level, and they're good at implementing any self contained function. What's left for me is the glue code, creating the API, deciding which functions should be exposed... Soon, I won't be needed either!
I'm sure that's comforting for the CDL guys who just got laid off.
Hmmmmm.
So we're going to have a lot of people potentially unemployed because of this...
There's a national truck driver shortage, with a particular lack of young drivers [1]. Perhaps automation technology will become widespread just in time for the current generation of drivers to retire.
[1] https://www.iru.org/news-resources/newsroom/worse-you-though...
The terms "shortage" and "surplus" are usually meaningless for most economic situations.
Generally, your chosen price determines how much you get (unless you set your price at 0, where you get nothing, OR if you set your price to infinity, where there literally doesn't exist 1 more of the thing you're talking about).
So in this context, there's really no shortage because all you have to do is raise the price you pay truckers and it's pretty much guaranteed that retired truckers and others with CDL licenses start putting their hands up and saying yes to that job.
"Why is this the case? Why are there so few women and young truck drivers? How can we get more of them behind the wheel?"
Well, it's like literally everything else.
Pay more.
No the solution isn't to pay more. We shouldn't be trying to figure out ways to get more people into shitty hazardous jobs.
You don't "pay more" to get more young people and women to apply to moving spent nuclear fuel, you give the job to the robots.
I think most people agree on that point, but what are truckers going to do after they lose jobs to the robots? In the USA, there is never any planning for that, they just say "oh well" and in a generation those folks die out, having lived a shitty, destitute life with no chance of recovery.
The fact that there are too few younger truck drivers means that most young people have already found higher paying, better jobs than current truck driving jobs.
I don't think B necessarily follows from A, here.
There's an ideological assertion when automation happens: the workers will retrain and be better off.
If it was true, Youngstown Ohio and Flint Michigan would be jewels of the Midwest - bustling metropolises of highly skilled retrained workers in wondrous utopias. You'd have AI unicorns popping out of Huntington and Wheeling, West Virginia.
Whether you count number of bankruptcies, overall mortality rate, number of offspring, percentage that own versus rent... The fervent assertion that going from a union job to hustling for say Postmates, is somehow the rising tide lifting all boats is baseless.
Doesn't matter though. It's ideologically, not materially based so evidence is irrelevant.
There Are state interventionist ways to make it work. China moved from agrarian to industrial. South Korea, Taiwan Japan.... The difference is they don't have this pentacostal snake handling level blind faith in the free market where they go around like Peter Popof preaching Hayek and Rothbard like it's sacred scripture.
I know this is a convenient meme and narrative but this post is literally the consequence of having to pay more for labor, you get more people trying to automate it. We're talking about logistics, probably the most important component of the economy. Trucking salaries are probably the closest thing to "market clearing wages" that exists. Pay more -> more expensive shipping -> less demand to ship things -> lower wages.
If you woke up tomorrow and the clearing price for gas was $10/gallon it would still be accurate to call it a shortage. I can buy a crappy house for $2m tomorrow, it’s still a housing shortage.
It won't just be truckers, there's always follow-on impact like people who work in diners along these routes, etc.
But also automated long-haul trucking has been pretty clearly on the short term horizon for the last decade. I think most young people know that this is coming, and hence trucking is probably not the best career to invest your time in.
Not one mention of pay? Really?
In other news, there is a terrible shortage of Lamborghinis at the $30k price point. When will the horror end?
No mention of pay. Also not mention that for about the past 10-15 years, we've also been telling young people AI was going to make truck driving a job of that past also. I remember in 2014 (we are all getting old, that was more than 10 years ago), hearing about comments Elon made that truck drivers were gonna be a thing of the past any day now. Granted, that didn't end up happening, or at least not as quickly. But the fact is, when kids hear a good chunk of their life that a job is gonna be antiquated, we can't be surprised when kids grow up not wanting to be the people to fill those jobs.
Survey of trucking company finds shortage of workers. Well I for one am shocked!
“We study teamsters at the dawn of the motor truck, current occupations threatened by computerization, and truckers dreading robotic trucks. As predicted, wages in threatened occupations rise, employment falls, and the occupations become ‘grayer’. Older workers become more likely to enter and less likely to exit the occupation than young ones and sometimes even increase in number.”
https://www.aeaweb.org/conference/2025/program/paper/eT2Ar7T...
It’s not as lucrative anymore because the trucks are effectively speed limited, location constantly tracked and hours micromanaged. Some setups even have a front facing and in cabin driver facing camera recording at all times. Also, they are paid per mile so the many hours they spend at the loading and unloading stations are effectively unpaid.
It’s not as lucrative to the folks that enjoyed pretty much total freedom outside of the start and end points.
UBI is inevitable imo; we're going to continue to see machines replace humans in roles like this.
The guys with all of the money don't like paying people now when people actually deliver value with their labor. No way they do it once they can just have machines work for them.
Well, not with being asked politely, at least.
> Well, not with being asked politely, at least.
yep, it definitely won't happen politely
Of all the countries in the world, it definitely won't happen in the United States.
true, but on the other hand when things get bad enough the guillotine plans will probably be open sourced and freely shared.
Swarms of murderbots are cheaper than UBI. This is going to get ugly.
I don’t know why you’re being downvoted. It is absolutely in the cards for the ownership class to send out swarms of drones to kill us all.
The best we can hope for is to all end up in permanent slums picking through garbage to survive.
One peep of protest a little too loud and suddenly we’ll all be living the same scenario that’s visible all over the “combat footage” portions of the web: you are walking along outdoors, you hear a buzz, and then suddenly you look up to realize there’s a drone coming at you. You panic and try to run but by the time you hear it, it’s too late. It catches up to you easily and drops a bomb on you. Or maybe it’s a smaller more targeted (and disposable) one that zips straight at your forehead and explodes on contact, destroying your brain.
People may say I’m a doomsayer but just look back at the history of labor in the US. They sent out privatized security to shoot anyone who didn’t cooperate. And that was when they still needed the workers! Just imagine what they’ll do when they no longer need anyone!
There's a lot of truth to that however the supply chain for everything today has never been longer or had more intermediaries. It's like a house of cards built ever higher and no one has budgeted anything for resilience. JIT, outsourcing, etc, everything is cheaper at the cost of resilience.
Oh yes I’ve thought of that, but I’m sure they have too. If AI advances to the point where everyone is out of work, then it will have also likely advanced to the point where it can aid in getting around the current supply chain fragilities.
That angle unfortunately just doesn’t give me much hope.
I agree. I'm a pretty die-hard free market proponent, but as we move away from labor scarcity via automation there's just no other choice than redistribution that allows a basic lifestyle for the unemployable. The transition will be tough though.
Who is going to willingly fund it?
Best case scenario another Ford comes along.
That's not how any of this works. Automation like FSD will lead to cheaper shipping costs via trucks leading to more Trucks on the road and more needing to load/unload and manage last mile logistics and driving routes that can't be automated resulting in
... more trucking jobs, more loading/unloading jobs, more FSD operations jobs, more truck repair jobs, more software engineering jobs
This reminds me of how ATMs created more banking jobs because people started to use the bank more along with ATMs. ATMs handled the simple transactions and tellers dealt with the more complex tasks.
We'll see. There will be a loss of little industries that depended on truckers though, like truck stops and inns.
I also hope that this results in more jobs that are fulfilling.
Have you been to a bank branch recently? There is almost no staff, and to get help you have to call an offshored call center.
My little credit union usually has 3-4 tellers and some additional staff that handle more complicated stuff.
Your little credit union lacks the capital to have automated systems handle more complicated stuff... for now.
Used to work at a bank that had a few local branches as a teller when I was a senior in HS. Had old, antiquated technology but had a "person on the phone whenever you needed help".
I'm going to guess that the bank that bought them out was quite a bit more advanced, and the banks that do the same will be buying out the less advanced ones.
And there's like hardly any branches anymore, used to be one in every major village/small town per bank, now there's double the people and a third the banks
Initially, then it reversed.
Sounds like the logic that was used to sell NAFTA/GATT and led to a generation of jobless workers and gutted cities across the country.
At the same time that tariffs slow down the entire trucking industry -- truckers are gonna definitely be hurting
Not to mention the drive to remove the 10s of thousands of truck drivers that recently immigrated... E.g.,
https://nypost.com/2025/04/29/us-news/trump-signs-order-requ...
https://truckdrivernews.com/new-arkansas-bill-could-make-non...
"Not to mention" doesn't make sense here. Everything else in this thread is talking about reducing the demand for trucking labor. Your post is talking about reducing the supply.
Doubtful. The trucking industry has been screaming for years that they can’t find enough people, almost every 18-wheeler I see on the highway has a “we’re hiring” ad on it, and so on. This is automation coming in to replace humans who are willfully exiting.
They are hiring, but the reason they can't find people isn't because there aren't people out there willing to do the job if it's fairly compensated. The problem is that trucking has lost a ton of upside over the last few decades, particularly after the Motor Carrier Act of 1980. Drivers are often paid per mile instead of per hour, which means long unpaid periods waiting for loads or stuck in traffic.
So as usual, "we can't find people" is code for "we tried to exploit the workers until they bled and for some reason we can't figure out, they went elsewhere."
Bingo. "No one wants to work [for a wage they can't live off of with pitiful benefits] anymore!"
Since COVID happened until this year I would have told you "we can't find people" too, but this year the applications have flooded in. So at least they'll come crawling back eventually.
It's an incredibly dangerous job, both in terms of chronic health and acute risk.
You're citing a 45 year old law as the reason why, say 35 years in the future, it leads to notable shortages of people who want to be truck drivers?
Doesn't hold water for me. Do you have some specific idea about how this law only had this effect decades after it passed?
The Motor Carrier Act of 1980 deregulated the industry, which led to a sharp increase in competition among carriers. Over time, this pushed down freight rates and put pressure on companies to cut costs at the expense of drivers. Many drivers are now classified as independent contractors rather than employees, meaning no benefits or wage protections.
Obviously this also happened against the background of a broader trend towards deregulation that proceeded under Reagan, so it's not just that act.
I've been hearing about the truck driver shortage for > 30 years. Back then it may have been more local, though. Places like North Dakota have been short of drivers for at least 30 years.
Regardless of the pay, I just can't imagine people really being excited to drive all day alone. I hate driving and I do it as little as possible. People like to be around other people when they work too.
To each their own. I’m not a driver either but I could see how trucker life harkens back to the American mythos of the solitary pioneer calling their own shots and working hard as they see fit.
Modern trucking is nothing like that, and often they are independent contractors in name only, driving someone else’s truck and being evaluated against strict performance criteria.
Walmart and similar employers have no trouble finding drivers. Decent pay, benefits and schedules makes it easy.
UPS, too. I knew a couple OTRs who made 150k 2 decades ago. Not sure if they've kept up with inflation, but it was great money at the time.
Of course, they had people fighting for those jobs, and from what I heard, about the only way to get one was to know somebody on the inside.
Up your pay, give them benefits, and the people will come. This isn't hard to figure out.
Walmart is still hiring drivers, though.
With 14,000 drivers there's going to be continuous turnover.
Edit: Also, Wal-mart's standards are incredibly high -- several years of clean driving experience. Most commercial truck drivers do not meet those standards. Despite the high standards, they still readily fill their positions. If they were having troubles, they'd lower their standards.
There is also just turn over, from my understanding from a former co-worker who had a kid go into truck driving, that truck drivers very rarely stay at the same company long term. New drivers get their training paid for and have an obligation to fill (ex walmart pays for training and pays you while you do it, but you have a 2-3 year obligation to them). Once they do that, they move on to another company. I am assuming for better pay and benefits. And even then, swapping companies is pretty common. Then also a good number stack enough money to buy their own truck and contract. I had a neighbor growing up who owned his own semi and worked on contract.
That's the rule, but AFAICT Wal-Mart is the exception to the rule. They don't train anybody without years of loyalty to the company, I don't think they have obligations. It's the dream job for most truckers from what I hear, and once you get in you don't leave. Wal-Mart pays a solid 6 figures with great home time. You can make more than that with your own truck, but it's hard.
I'm sure it's like any job -- everything else can be great, but if you get stuck with a bad boss it can make you absolutely miserable and drive you out.
Tangent
Reminds me of this (automated systems still doing their thing after humans are gone)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GhRapsbwhqE
I like the tone of SOLSTICE 5 by P Chadeisson as well: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cntb3wcZdTw
It will be interesting to see how this plays out with any impacts from tariffs if we keep playing that game long term.
I guess I should say its morbid curiosity. If we do in fact have a lot of drivers out of work because international shipping is way down, I hope humans are hired before these trucks.
I lament the trucking industry because I think it is only a matter of time before it becomes largely autonomous.
How do you feel about the elevator operation industry?
comparing an elevator to a semi-truck and trailer as the same is disingenuous at best, and pointless at worst. as of now, i'm hard pressed to find a point to your question
OK I'll explain it to you. Automation changes the labor landscape as it has done since the industrial revolution. This is nothing new.
okay, but automating an elevator is something someone from python bootcamp could do. automating a semi-truck is not. so again, to compare the two is ludicrous. if you honestly feel like they are the same, you are someone I would semi-politely make my excuse to leave the conversation at a party. hey, look, there's someone over there that i haven't seen and would really like to talk to them rather than you. enjoy the party
It is directionally similar. We've progressed, so we're automating more.
Enjoy the party too. I'll go have a drink with recursive.
Is that what the public wants? I suspect that if the public was aware, the verdict would be clear.
In the recent HN on Waymo non drivers seem pretty happy with them being safer than human drivers. I imagine there could be similar benefits with autonomous trucks. Also in the UK they make the motorways very crowded. If some autonomous stuff could go overnight when the roads are empty that could help.
Presumably cheaper (long term) shipping costs leading to cheaper goods overall? Fewer sleepy truck drivers on the road? Yes, I think the public would want that.
Less 'bonehead Truckers' videos.
I'm assuming these are electric? Because even with a driver, longhaul electric trucks are not practical at scale right now, the energy infrastructure and capacity to support them is nowhere near there.
My point being (and please correct me), this is practical but 15-20 years away from widespread adaption, best case.
If you take a look at the pictures, it appears those are Peterbilt trucks (non-electric). You can see it more clearly on their own website.
Not electric, just driverless.
Such a stupid move. The first major accident (and there will be one, I see them every couple of weeks or so on I35) and they will be taken off the road for 10+ years while they are investigated or outlawed straight up by a reactionary Texas legislature
That depends on who is responsible for the wrecked vehicles. If they’re rich enough, nothing will happen to them, regardless and responsibility will magically shift to the poorer party.
hitchhikers, stowaways, and truck parts thieves will thank you.
Looks like there will be a vehicle (manned of course) following the trucks at this time (the same way oversized cargo/load moves today).
Unlike "the way oversized cargo/load moves today," the chase vehicle is just another Peterbilt truck pulling cargo, but with a safety driver. It's not a flag car or something like that.
That can't be the long term plan for self-driving trucks?
When these things can drive to Moose Fucker in the far north, across frozen lakes etc then we are in the future. For now: cute but could do better.
This is phrased like you're moving the goal post, and that's not really a good way to have a discussion about this.
I think this sucks, because my gut tells me it sucks, the same way AI in everything sucks -- it just sounds kinda weird. But, of course, when I think about it, it makes sense in a lot of places. The only way for me to have a valid counterpoint to that is if I move the goalpost. I implore you to not move that goalpost, even if it feels right.
here's an idea for freight transport efficiency: trains
It's good they're doing this first in a place that doesn't get long term snow accumulation on roads. But eventually there should be autonomous vehicle tests in places with non-cherry picked road conditions.
At least for trucking it's viable to cherry pick routes since so many endpoints can avoid dense urban areas, extreme rural areas, and residential zones.
Waymo has done winter testing in Buffalo.
So now one can hack a truck and steal its cargo? Neat.
That kind of thing could happen before autonomy. Our factory had someone turn up and say I'm the driver to pick up the truck over there, get given keys and make off with a truck load of stock.
Autonomous trucks will be fantastic. Truckers are compelled to work without sleep to finish routes with tight deadlines. It creates a lot of danger on the highway.
It feels like autonomous vehicles could become one of America's superpowers. We have so many miles of road and interstate highway. Autonomous vehicles could double down on that strength and flip the underinvestment in passenger rail on its head, making it much less of an issue.
>Truckers are compelled to work without sleep to finish routes with tight deadlines.
This is statement is somewhere between ignorant and an outright lie. There's a bunch of rules governing how many hours truckers can work. And those regulations are mostly followed. And when they're not it's typically some local outfit delivering fuel or groceries, not the long haul mega fleets
https://www.fmcsa.dot.gov/regulations/hours-service/summary-...
That's the problem. The human alertness cycle can't be forced to align with the ELT logged time schedule. Truckers used to drive longer when they felt awake and choose their own rest times as long as it averaged out.
How is this different from regulations for airline pilots requiring minimum downtime between flights? Or any other industry that requires minimum turn times. I've worked for feature film shoots that had to alter shoot schedules because days went long and the minimum required turn time forced the next day's call time to be pushed. It's always fun switching from a day to night schedule, and these minimum turn times are a god send
Film industry is likely a union rule not a federal one.
Aviation the limits are much stricter than trucking.
film industry is most definitely a union rule, but that's not the point. that's my personal experience with a minimum turnaround, and it is something that makes a huge difference. applying that to what pilots/truckers experience was my way of being empathetic rather than just sympathetic. i've personally been there, done that. i've also been on those stupid jobs where you work late into the night, yet the pointy haired bosses still expect you to be at your desk at the regular time. that absolutely sucks, and will not allow that nonsense to happen to me again.
You're preaching to the choir here but there's less than zero chance you could ever get a regulatory agency to understand something like that.
> There's a bunch of rules governing how many hours truckers can work.
True!
> And those regulations are mostly followed.
Very false, at least as of 5 years ago.
I worked with trucker biometric data which for a large company which runs trucks all over North America.
The company itself keeps its hands clean: they required drivers to keep strict manual logs and have strict rules about compliance with regulation. But at every step of the way, the incentives are for drivers to lie in these logs. Particularly, per-mile pay incentivizes driving a lot of miles at times when there's less traffic on the road (night). If your truck isn't moving, you aren't getting paid, and drivers want to get back to their families and hobbies, so they minimize time spent sleeping in their truck in a random location. Additionally, missed deadlines can significantly impact your pay, and deadlines are set at levels which cut very close to regulation, so that any delays force drivers to break regulation to meet the deadline.
Biometric data shows flagrant violations of regulation, which we can't share with anyone (including the company), because it's medical data protected under HIPAA. The manual logs are corroborated by an electronic black box on each truck, but these logs aren't checked unless something goes wrong, at which point the company can use to show the trucker was in violation of their stated policies to reduce liability.
I've only seen data from one company (which I cannot name due to non-disclosure) but it's my understanding that most of the company's driver incentives are structured similarly to the reputable parts of the trucking industry. Other companies have mile quotas (or inversely, mile bonuses) which further incentivize lying in logs. There are extremely exploitative owner/operator outfits which force drivers to work desperately to pay off their trucks, likely resulting in worse violations.
So sure, on paper, the letter of the regulations are followed, but that's definitely not what's happening on the road.
> And when they're not it's typically some local outfit delivering fuel or groceries, not the long haul mega fleets
Even if there were true (which it isn't), a head on collision with a sleeping local fuel delivery driver is just as deadly as a head on collision with a long haul trucker. This is irrelevant.
The E-log requirement all but eliminates drivers cooking the books.
The book cooking happens when the company hires a sketchy firm out of eastern europe to provide the software who then cook the books on the back end. These carriers are a small minority (lest they become juicy targets for enforcement) and have high turnover.
So instead of improve their conditions we just fire them? Sure that won't have any negative repercussions...
That's even assuming this is actually remotely profitable compared to just using humans. Like a lot of this sort of automation it probably isn't, and it's true purpose is to be used as a threat against workers so they'll be even more "compelled to work without sleep to finish routes with tight deadlines"
> So instead of improve their conditions we just fire them?
Yes? We got rid of telephohe operators. We got rid of "computers" (people who compute). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer_(occupation) We effectively got rid of horse shoe makers, liveries, etc...
> Sure that won't have any negative repercussions...
Does it suck for the truck drivers. Yes. Does that mean we should give them busy work even though their job can be automated? No. We don't know what the reprocussions will be. We do know, from 100% of past experience, that automating something opened new opportunties that ultimately resulted in more jobs that before. Whether that will be true this time as well no one has any idea.
The usual example is textile creation vs fashion. The loom put people who hand weave cloth out of business. But the abundance of cheap cloth created 100x the jobs in cloth making and fashion. It's why you probably have more than 3 shirts in your house/apartment.
On the other hand, the current administration is not interested in education or welfare though, or labor protections in general. Fired truckers don't have a whole lot of transferrable skills related to maintaining self driving vehicles, and they would all be competing for same openings anyway. You can't just get another job when you want it, and you need some way to take care of the bills until you can get hired.
Software and automation has a long history of putting people out of work. Many of the truckers are delivering loads for large companies who put mom and pop stores out of business. It's the circle of life.
Automation is expensive because the taxpayer subsidizes cheap labor. Get rid of the subsidy and automation will explode.
Why stop there?
We should bring back elevator operators. And station a traffic guard on every corner instead of traffic lights. Let’s bring back tool booth operators. And let’s delete Google calendar and bring back secretaries while we’re at it.
This sort of response misses the point. If the goal is to have jobs for everyone, then yes, bringing back all those things is actually the right move, and you're not going to convince the person who favors job creation otherwise. You seem to be under the impression that those jobs went away for a good reason, but you haven't bothered to articulate what that reason was.
I think the better point is that having jobs for everyone isn't the goal. Equitably distributing the results of our society's labor so everyone's needs are met is. If people are able to live in a house and put food on their table, they'll be less concerned with whether they have a job or not.
But that requires that you care enough about other people to not let people hoard unlimited resources, so I suspect most of HN will have some objections, and you'll never actually address what monkaiju is concerned about.
I don’t get it.
Say I’m building a company to ship self-driving trucks. I need hundreds of millions, maybe billions in capital.
I need to line up purchasers. My fixed costs are huge and marginal lower, so I need volume.
How, exactly, am I thinking about “threatening” existing drivers so they work longer hours and break more laws?
Play out the same thought experiment but from the truckers point of view.
Yes? I would feel economic uncertainty and worry, but I’m not so egocentric that I would think that someone is raising hundreds of millions of dolllars and building factories in an elaborate scheme to make me work longer hours.
That’s the claim that was scoffing at.
Are you entitled to get what you want to make DreamCo operate?
What are all the costs involved, and not just costs to you directly?
I wasn’t arguing for a social good, I’m ambivalent on that.
I thought I was pretty clearly questioning the claim that the motivation of DreamCo is somehow to threaten truckers so they work harder, as opposed to (wisely or not) trying to sell trucks.
If you’re not a union shop, it’s easy. Divide and conquer. Like most employees, truckers in general are stupid and greedy. They are in one of the easiest to organize jobs, but get brainwashed by the firehose of right wing radio.
First step is to isolate the smart ones, which are the people with hazmat endorsements. Treat them well and praise effusively to build resentment. Then take the routes that are cost effective for robots, and offer premium pay and bonuses to the people, but with goals that can’t be met without cutting corners. Encourage reporting of rule violators.
Your goal is to create a toxic and miserable environment that pays just enough. Make them kill each other for a dwindling number of slots. You keep the people agitated and fighting each other, and they won’t notice their toys getting taken away.
My brother is in this business. There’s overlapping jurisdictions that shady operators leverage hard to squeeze more out of people and equipment.
Chinatown busses are the perfect example, they’d run routes designed to avoid federal jurisdiction and adopt routes and schedules to avoid weigh stations and routine inspection. Busses were unsafe and drivers unlicensed in many cases. Most were owned by Chinese mafia organizations and killed people. When they weren’t doing that, they were huge human trafficking operations.
The federal motor carrier safety administration had a robust, science based program to improve safety and improve conditions in most scenarios. My understanding is that 80% of the staff was fired and resigned, so it’s a Wild West environment. The advice I was given was avoid the busy trucking corridors (I-81/85/95) at night.
> The federal motor carrier safety administration had a robust, science based program to improve safety and improve conditions in most scenarios. My understanding is that 80% of the staff was fired and resigned
When was that? And is there anything public we can read about these things?
Google motor carrier safety. University of Colorado is one of the bigger academic partners.
Making trucks autonomous is actually the most direct way to improve their conditions.
Isn’t it true that truck drivers are the most common profession in basically every state?
I think it’s “funny” how corporate leaders in basically every industry are enthusiastically barreling toward a world in which they have no employed customers to buy their products created by their automated robot workforce.
Nobody in politics is coming close to addressing the societal problems that are incoming in the near future.
It’s not corporate leaders. It’s owners. We’re moving to a feudal environment. The billionaires are pulling sovereign capital from the Saudis. They need to keep their treasure, that’s the priority.
Politics isn’t pretending to address anything. We’re breaking the system to extract as much rent from the populace as possible. Caesar type stuff. Destroying the income tax means you’ll pay taxes based on consumption. We’ll be poorer. The overlords will be great.
Agriculturists enthusiastically barreled toward a world with no employed farmers to buy their food, and the societal problems took care of themselves because having lots of cheap food is good.
You’re glossing over the great amount of physical violence and unrest that happened during the period of industrialization.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Union_violence_in_the_United_S...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haymarket_affair
All of that unrest eventually resulted in the new deal. We have had relative peace in the postwar period thanks to a lot of pain being resolved over a long period of time, but that lack of friction is not guaranteed to last forever.
I would argue that America’s backslide into the election of a reactionary, dare I say fascist government is all about declining prosperity.
To me, a vision of the future in which people do jobs robots could do, just to create jobs, is a dystopia. The future I want to see is one in which humans live lives of play and leisure while robots do all the labor, and the results of the robots doing labor are distributed equitably.
The problem is, there's no historical precedent for this, and we're still letting people who do almost no labor amass most of the results of other people's labor. If we follow the current trajectory, we'll have a society controlled by a few people who own the robots, and everybody else fighting over their table scraps.
The solution to this isn't rejecting automation to create artificial jobs: that's just fighting over table scraps by a different name. The solution is to stop rewarding generational wealth with more wealth, and distribute resources more equitably.
What kind of comment is that? You can open your own company and pay as much as you want and create whatever condition you want for the workers.
The lot lizard economy is about to be in shambles
> assuming this is actually remotely profitable
Why wouldn't it be?
> instead of improve their conditions
I wouldn't want to drive a truck. To be frank, I really don't want to answer Jira tickets and write plumbing code either. I sincerely hope that none of what most of us do today has to be a job in fifty years.
> Why wouldn't it be?
My debt is your asset, and vice versa. Tell me, what does the autonomous truck drink? Or eat?
The less you pay the driver the less money does driver have to buy whatever he is carrying.
That doesn't automatically mean that the economy drops. The truck driver gets the next-least-undesirable job.
That may pay almost the same, or it may not exist. It depends. It's never as simple as "we automated the job so the person is useless."
> The truck driver gets the next-least-undesirable job.
That the promise but is it the reality? Deaths of despair suggest it isn't.
Deindustrialization is an issue once you move supply chains overseas or to the robots, with it whole parts of country die. No truck drivers means less money spent on truck stops, motels (for sleep), and in their local economy (no pubs, bowling alley, etc.)
But the threat isn't just replacing drivers, it is replacing entire eco systems of jobs.
The future is here. Truckers are one of the largest employers in the country. We are moving fast towards a new era. We need to start thinking about how we adjust as a society
Phone operators have gone the way of the dodo as well. We should embrace these changes with a forward-looking attitude and look at how such systems create brand new roles in society.
Yes we need to start!
Tomorrow though, after my shift.
Just as there's about to be nothing to ship
None of those numbers are impressive. Longhaul only from Dallas to Houston. What's missing in the article is the huge number of issues that the system most certainly has.
We've been promised driverless technology for over 10 years now. If you can't do it with cars, then why does anyone think we would have it with delivery trucks?
Please use critical thinking for one second. I beg you HN. This is just another tech company scam that will get dumped as soon as they get the investor money.
It's already publicly traded. You can short the stock.