On Trucking

IMHO (and this is just my relatively uninformed opinion), the key driving force here will be the shift to electric trucks. These are more expensive to buy but cheaper to operate. At least right now. And also easier to turn into self driving platforms.

ICE trucks are really hard to operate. You are basically micro managing the gears, dealing with lot of fairly complex bit of equipment, etc. Electric trucks basically have no gears, heaps of torque and don't really require much more than just pointing them in the right direction. Apparently as easy as driving a normal car.

So, electrification strikes me as a core requirement for self driving. And of course electric trucks are also more environmentally friendly. Less brake dust (regenerative braking) and less emissions. And the batteries are recycled at the end of their life. So there's that.

The shift to electric trucks is already happening of course but its very capital intensive. Millions of trucks with a price tag of hundreds of thousands each means a lot of capital will have to be expended. Trillions basically. That alone will ensure it will take quite long to complete. A decade minimum before most new trucks are electric and then at least another decade before most ICE trucks have been retired. And the first generations won't be self driving. So these new trucks would be in service for a decade plus before being swapped out for self driving ones. So, if that takes another decade to happen, we're talking 30-40 years. Minimum. But with the first ones on the road as early as less than a decade from now. It's going to be a slow process.

Insurance is basically about risk. Insurance companies like to minimize risk and maximize profits. An electric truck that is less likely to break down regularly is less risky and would on paper require a lower insurance fee. And then a self driving truck is less likely to get into accidents or other liability related issues. Which again means lower fees. So, that helps.

Probably because it's a cut throat business and truckers operating on razor thin margins are more likely to default on their loans when they get into trouble. The second hand value of the trucks is not enough to cover that risk. A two year old truck has a value of course, but it's nowhere near the new value of the truck.

its definitely been proposed [0]

[0] https://www.ttnews.com/articles/nacfe-issues-confidence-repo...

So does the antecedent of the pronoun, though. It's McPhee. He knew exactly what he was doing.

> Driving is not a closed domain problem. There will always be fat tail circumstances where statistical methods will break down.

Some of it is. Walmart has already deployed some self-driving semis in Arkansas that go between a warehouse and a store. There are a significant number of routes like this, always taking the same path back and forth between two places in a relatively controlled environment.

> Why invest in hugely expensive automation in an open problem domain that you can not even perfectly model when you can just pay a driver $25 an hour to do it better?

Driving time is a big one. There are strict limits on how many hours drivers can be driving on a given day. That means you've got a huge, expensive machine sitting idle for most of the day. Self-driving can get you double the usage of an expensive asset.

> Why not automate warehouses?

This is happening already. https://www.wsj.com/story/amazon-takes-steps-toward-warehous...

> It is literally an easier technical problem to land a man on the moon than to design an autonomous road vehicle that can do better and be more cost effective than humans in all circumstance.

Nobody's saying it has to work in all circumstances. You can choose where to deploy self-driving vehicles. If you stick to the American Southwest, you still have an enormous opportunity, but you eliminate one of the big challenges for autonomous vehicles - snow and other difficult weather.