Self-driving trucks in 5-10 years could displace 1.7 million truck drivers

[Fletch]

They may have to use dedicated lanes with embedded guidance/communications cables & wayside transponders for data update/exchange.

Constructing that nationwide would take decades

 

[Nap]

People will likely die. But it is like seatbelts. In rare circumstances people have been trapped in burning cars due to seatbelts but wearing seatbelt is still safer the vast majority of the time. It is about reducing risk, not eliminating it.

What is going to hold back the spread of self driving vehicles is human nature. It won’t matter if it is safer, people will have an emotional aversion to sharing the road with driverless vehicles. I have that aversion myself. It is an aversion that I don’t think current generations of drivers will be able to overcome. Future generations who haven’t developed that aversion, however, likely won’t have that emotional hang up.

Lol, I can't wait for the time I can hit a button to tell my car where to go on a long trip and take a nap

 

[Skeptic Bob]

Lol, I can't wait for the time I can hit a button to tell my car where to go on a long trip and take a nap

I would settle for my car taking over just long enough for me to take my jacket off or to grab something off the floor while moving.

 

[late]

Constructing that nationwide would take decades

Exactly, it's prob a generation away. And it's not just a matter of technology, even when it's safer, people are not going to want to give up control.

There are other issues, as well. Energy is going to get more expensive, a lot more expensive. Trains are considerably more energy efficient than trucks, I expect to see a major resurgence of freight moved by rail, with a lot of spurs reopened to take better advantage of that efficiency.

Lastly, there's the question of jobs. You can automate most anything, in principle. So we can expect the number of jobs to go into decline, and keep declining. Are we going to have millions of beggars on the side of the road?

Or do we want to finally become a civilisation.

 

[JacksinPA]

Constructing that nationwide would take decades

Granted. But there are alternatives, such as specially reflective road lines that could be scanned with the same kind of laser measuring devices I've seen contractors use. Trucks could he held in their lanes with exact tolerances measured in millimeters. Special lines could indicate fuel stop ahead & then activate braking, turn signals & pre-programmed entrance into fuel stop.

 

[JacksinPA]

I know. It's still wrong.

Why is that exactly other than just your opinion?

 

[enderpotato00]

Ever fly in an airplane?

They still have pilots in case anything goes wrong

 

[Fletch]

Granted. But there are alternatives, such as specially reflective road lines that could be scanned with the same kind of laser measuring devices I've seen contractors use.

That may take care of highway driving but most trucking is LTL that is often fairly local and uses congested roadways. Plus, when you arrive at your destination, the local receiver would have to have some way of communicating with the truck to tell it where to go and which dock to use. Not to mention that often times, the driver has to unload the goods himself. So lots of things have to change, thats not to say they wont, but I suspect it will be a long way in the future

 

[faithful_servant]

I don't mind self-driving trucks. We've had planes that can fly themselves for years.

I DO mind driverless trucks, with nobody in the cab. What's gonna happen next if something goes wrong that the computer didn't account for? If it loses the signal? If it overcorrects for a blown-out tire? I want a human in the cab who is ready to respond.

I think that if we're going to go to self-driving trucks, they need to have a road system all to themselves. One that only they can drive on and the trucks need to be designed to only drive on those specialized roads. The best way to handle them would be to have them moved em masse with a unified driver that can move all the truck together, making them more cost effective by virtue of the economy of scale.

:mrgreen:

 

[longview]

I think people are seeing this as a all or nothing question.
I could see something more like the pilot in a port.
A trunk driver, at the edge of the city, and takes control of the long haul automated truck
for the congested city portion of the trip.
The truck if going through the city the "pilot" is dropped off on the other side,
or takes the truck where it needs to go within the city.
The mind numbing long hauls are done by the machines, and the Human drivers get to
sleep at their homes every night.

 

[Winchester]

My guess is when it first happens on a large scale they will have their own dedicated lanes.

Or we can just start using trains more and leave the short haul stuff to trucks.

 

[Skeptic Bob]

Or we can just start using trains more and leave the short haul stuff to trucks.

There must be a reason we haven’t done that. I don’t know what it is, though.

 

[OlNate]

That may take care of highway driving but most trucking is LTL that is often fairly local and uses congested roadways. Plus, when you arrive at your destination, the local receiver would have to have some way of communicating with the truck to tell it where to go and which dock to use. Not to mention that often times, the driver has to unload the goods himself. So lots of things have to change, thats not to say they wont, but I suspect it will be a long way in the future

I don't think it's as far off as you think, Fletch. They already have automatic routing in warehouse settings for order picking and palletization. The technology has been around forever for forklift drivers to get wireless messages that tell them where they need to go to pick up product, routing them in the most efficient way possible to make the trip the shortest it can be...coupling existing techs with autonomous trucks is probably easier than you think - in fact, combing the two not only provides opportunities for autonomous trucks, but autonomous warehouses as well.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/steveb...e-warehouse-its-not-just-amazon/#1885b4c840b8

When you consider the amount of cost that would be involved in replacing the majority of human employees, the increased efficiencies of being able to ship without worrying about hours of service restrictions, hell, even the costs savings of having computerized "drivers" that don't get road rage and focus on driving with fuel consumption in mind, you can see there is a lot of investment capital available to get this thing working.

 

[Checkerboard Strangler]

Well, excuse me and my thick skull for even chiming in ... :roll:

I'm sorry Barnacle, but the fact is, none of these vehicles are actually fully autonomous...YET.
All of them, Tesla, Volvo, Caddy, even my wife's Chrysler Pacifica minivan, carry OMINOUS warnings and disclaimers about abuse or over-reliance on the semi-autonomous features.
Doesn't seem to matter, there's always a passel of numbskull owners who will buy one of these vehicles, yammer about how they can eat a ham sandwich and jerk off to Playboy while hurtling down the road at 65 mph and the moment that they do, they are in violation of the Terms of Use of those features.

My wife's Pacifica minivan has "Advanced Cruise Control" and it lets you know in no uncertain terms that "Braking power is LIMITED" and to "always be ready to apply the brakes and/or take control of the vehicle at any time".
I absolutely love the feature because I don't need to hover my foot over the pedals and do "gas-brake gas-brake gas-brake short stop short stop gas-brake gas-brake" in rush hour traffic. It is a wonderful stress reliever.
But I still keep my eyes on the road and my hands on the steering wheel!

Fully self driving vehicles WILL come someday soon, but right now, Americans need to educate themselves as to how these vehicles really do work.
If a vehicle ever really becomes FULLY AUTONOMOUS the way you will know is, the STEERING wheel will probably retract or fold up into the dashboard, and the vehicle system will give you the OPPOSITE warning, something that goes along the lines of:

"Are you sure you want to take MANUAL control of the vehicle? Manual control is unreliable and may be unsafe."



Yeah...something like THAT...without the attacking robots in the tunnel

 

[longview]

There must be a reason we haven’t done that. I don’t know what it is, though.

There is, money and flexibility.
I have also heard that the railroad has a lot of extra cost built in from the pension system, and legacy cost from being around
for almost 2 centuries.

 

[Lord Tammerlain]

There must be a reason we haven’t done that. I don’t know what it is, though.

Time


A truck can reach my work in western Canada in 4 days from just outside Houston, while a rail car could take anywhere from 3-6 weeks with no realistic set eta. Rail is best suited for bulk shipments that do not have a time requirement. Even then if the companies are not on rail they would need trucks to get them to a place to load in a rail car.

Cost is significantly cheaper by rail. For bulk liquids it costs about the same for one truck load (20 000 L) as it cost for one rail car with 72 000 L. This is based on info about 4 years ago mind you. With EDL's being required for truckers now the cost may have gone up for trucking

 

[Nap]

I would settle for my car taking over just long enough for me to take my jacket off or to grab something off the floor while moving.

Nissan's pro pilot system can do that.

 

[Lord Tammerlain]

Nissan's pro pilot system can do that.

Honda's Honda Sense can as well

It gives you about 5 seconds before it sends an alert for the driver to take back control. Of course on roads where the road markings can not be seen it does not work, so for 4 months of the year lane keeping assist will not work while the collision braking and adaptive cruise control will

 

[JacksinPA]

They still have pilots in case anything goes wrong

Like a flock geese getting sucked into the engines & having to ditch in the Hudson River? Or having a jet engine explode & kill a passenger? These sorts of things have happened in the recent past.

 

[Carjosse]

99% of the time. What's going to happen during that other 1%?

Who knows but it is still far less likly than if a human was driving. If you have to have a driver in the cab anyways there is not much point in self-driving trucks in the first place.

 

[Thx]

It's called redundancy.

And often redundancies only complicate things, drive up costs and only provide more things to go wrong...

How much more "reliable" are cars now that every system is computerized?

Thx

 

[Checkerboard Strangler]

They may have to use dedicated lanes with embedded guidance/communications cables & wayside transponders for data update/exchange.

Huh?? Embedded guidance and communications cables is a step backward into the ANALOG era.
We're WAY past that now.
There's no need to have buried cables strictly for vehicle control only, as if this is some giant roller coaster.
Ever hear of wireless? (LOL)

Not only is RF perfectly reliable, we're also able to use LED lighting as a means of transmitting data as well.
LED lighting can operate at frequencies well into the gigahertz range, therefore it is perfectly possible to transmit data using the LED lighting in a manner similar to radio frequency energy.
Even common LED streetlights can distribute data to back up the wireless data network.

The need for dedicated lanes is to reduce congestion and to allow for more precise train style control but that is a vehicle to vehicle or PEER TO PEER topology. That is, it is the trucks themselves which are the transponders when they are engaged in "land train" protocols.

 

[lefty louie]

And with robots moving up the supply chain, they will be off loading/unloading those truck without man power too.

 

[Visbek]

Keep in mind that in many cases, the trucks will not be completely autonomous. The most likely approach will be platooning. You'll have 1 or 2 human operators who are responsible for 5 or 6 autonomous trucks, which drive in a line fairly close together.

It won't kill the job of every single truck driver, but it will definitely reduce their ranks.

 

[HonestJoe]

Why is that exactly other than just your opinion?

It's the opinion of the people who wrote the article you linked as well. Their 5-10 years prediction is for the initial introduction of the technology (and I find that a little optimistic given all the practical and legal issues) and even then, they don't expect it to simply displace all 1.7 million drivers. It actually seems to be a relatively well researched and considered article, much deeper than the usual "Robots are taking our jobs!" tabloid trash.