What really bothered me at the end of the commerical was the fact that the person could be in home in time for dinner.
Unless we have some form of UBI, where is that person going to source the funds to pay for his dinner?
Uber self-driving trucks are now moving cargo for Uber Freight customers
121–130 of 278 posts
Re: Uber self-driving trucks are now moving cargo for Uber Freight customers
#122Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think that's misplaced, freight is the one area where NA in general and US in particular absolutely blows every other region out the water. Circa 2010 Rail was ~40% of US freight by ton-mile, whereas for the EU it was ~17%, and the US had 10x more tonne-kilometer freight rail than the EU (beyond China and Russia, with India a very distant third) (nb: China carried more tonnes total but shorter distances) Of course…
The data mostly looks like population data then, if US, India, and China are the leaders. What would it look like for ton-mile per capita (if that's actually a statistic)?
> The data mostly looks like population data then
The US has a smaller population than the EU (~300m to ~500m). So does Russia (150m). Australia has a significantly smaller population than the EU (15^H^H25m as golemiprague noted).
It's not population data it's mineral commodities.
> What would it look like for ton-mile per capita (if that's actually a statistic)?
The US would climb to ~15x the tonnes-kilometers per capita of the EU, and australia would shoot up to about the same ratio over the EU (owing to close tonne-kilometer but 1/20th the population). Russia would shoot up as well. Only China and India would get a lower rank overall, and not enough that the EU would come close to edging them for China at least (a bit under 3x the population, but a bit under 10x the tonner-kilometer of rail freight).
Re: Uber self-driving trucks are now moving cargo for Uber Freight customers
#123Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'd expect they'll make potholes much worse, with all trucks driving exactly over the same spot repeatedly, until they learn to avoid the pothole. Perhaps Waze-style reporting will fill the gap.
Don't you think they'd be able to take that into account with the software? Large trucks already put a huge amount of wear like that on highways (I've seen plenty of ruts from trucks in asphalt roads). Technology like this is an opportunity to actually improve the wear patterns.
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Re: Uber self-driving trucks are now moving cargo for Uber Freight customers
#124Earlier quoted context omitted.
Truckers generally get paid per mile, not per hour. They are also heavily regulated as to the number of hours they can drive (why you see so many husband/wife driving teams). One can easily foresee a future where a self-driving truck has a driver in it who is only driving 'regulated' hours for a small portion of a trip (say during high traffic, highway entry/exit, etc). The driver could spend the rest of his time sle…
rest of his time sleeping, reading, or coding Problematic in at least two ways, probably three.
Why? I'm speaking of a completely autonomous truck, not some level 2 adaptive cruise control. The 'driver' could be sitting on a couch or at a desk in his sleeper cab the whole time.
Re: Uber self-driving trucks are now moving cargo for Uber Freight customers
#125Does the self driving truck have any kind of security? Given that there is a "do no harm" program embedded into the driving "subroutines", is there anything that prevents thieves from essentially surrounding the truck and robbing it in the middle of nowhere? Edit: To clarify I mean - in a hypothetical situation where it is ever driverless, couldnt 10 of us surround it, while I walk in and commandeer it, disable GPS a…
I imagine these trucks would phone home immediately and warn an operator that they had unexpectedly stopped. And I'm sure they continually log their GPS location with a server somewhere. They likely have some level of video feed being logged as well.
You probably won't be able to steal the truck and get away with it any easier than you could a human-driven truck.
Re: Uber self-driving trucks are now moving cargo for Uber Freight customers
#126For those concerned with jobs to be eliminated, it might not be as big a problem as we think for the trucking industry. "Over the next 10 years, he said, we need to attract almost 900,000 new people to the industry. Demographics is a big part of the problem. ATA’s research arm, the American Transportation Research Institute, recently updated its demographic data on drivers and found some 57% of drivers are 45 or olde…
It's not a major point, but I'd be curious to know the average age that the over-45 drivers started driving. Did they drive from their 20s, or did they pick up truck driving as a 2nd or 3rd career?
> Did they drive from their 20s, or did they pick up truck driving as a 2nd or 3rd career?
Just one data-entry point (and it's from Eastern Europe, not the States): my brother picked up trucking in his mid-30s, that is 5-6 years ago. Until then he had been a farmer, but as the agricultural subsidies in my country can't rival with those given to French farmers (for example) there was no way for him to earn his living just by raising cows (even though he loved the farming work). Until this trucking job he had never been out of the country, in the meantime he has seen almost all of Europe up to Western Turkey. It's not a job for everybody, though: a month or so ago he was robbed of 240 liters of diesel fuel while he was in his sleep-pause somewhere in Bulgaria, he had just been waiting for 20 hours a short time before that at the Turkish-Bulgarian custom point, and he's usually gone 2 or even 3 weeks at a time.
Re: Uber self-driving trucks are now moving cargo for Uber Freight customers
#127Can't we get this technology nailed so well that hopping in a self-driving car for your day-to-day errands is something you do without a second thought, BEFORE we start sending out 30 ton missiles as beta tests?
The missiles involve more economic productivity.
Re: Uber self-driving trucks are now moving cargo for Uber Freight customers
#128Earlier quoted context omitted.
Coding is a very HN comment :) More realistically, he can do the trucking office work from the truck .
Truck drivers don't do office work, really. All of the documents like bill of lading, etc are taken care of by the office workers of the company the driver works with. They have to do paperwork like logging hours, doing a pre-trip inspection, etc. This is done during off-time while the driver isn't driving (for obvious reasons). Usually on the driver's seat with a clipboard on the steering wheel :D
they don't write code while they're driving right now either.
but if they suddenly started sitting in a truck doing nothing all day instead of driving, it's a lot more likely that some office duties would be shifted to the truckers rather than the truckers taking on totally unrelated projects.
Re: Uber self-driving trucks are now moving cargo for Uber Freight customers
#129The funny thing in this US-centric view is that we have such a cargo since a century where trains play the role of "self-driving cargo". In europe, the decline of cargo on tracks (trains) is also partially owed to subsidiation of automobile traffic and highway expansions. It is a pity, because from the raw numbers trains are much less expensive then tracks.
The main issue has actually been prioritization. In Europe the rails are fast and well-maintained, which is great for passenger operation but expensive for very heavy freight operations. Passenger operations are also prioritized very heavily at the expense of freight operations on the rail network.
In comparison, the US rail network is slow and low quality, which makes freight operations extremely attractive but is absolute garbage for passenger operations. US rail freight competes well in its market niche, where it is faster than oceanic shipping but much cheaper than air freight.
Re: Uber self-driving trucks are now moving cargo for Uber Freight customers
#130The video ad is so crazy -- we still need a human to lock/unlock the cargo?? and its good for the truckers because they can go home early to their family?? The first part can be trivially automated and the second is just stupid. Truckers get paid per hour of work, less work == less money. AI-self-driving has arrived but to make the transition look "humane" as in the AD is crazy. Almost insults the intelligence of the…
Having grown up in an area where becoming a trucker is a common enough career path, I can tell you that the hours of work thing (which is really miles per work, but they correlate) lands some truckers in some sketchy situations Many of my friends have told me they take those gas station "energy supplements" so they can stay up for 2-3 straight days to log more hours and make the trip. Thats probably not healthy for t…
>trucks could drive themselves with a passenger trucker to intervene in tricky situations
this scenario has been mentioned a couple times in this thread, but if the automation isn't good enough to handle 100% of the journey 100% of the time, then it's really not good enough to allow the trucker to simply be a passenger. If the operator might have to take control in tricky situations, they can't be sleeping the rest of the time.