231–240 of 363 posts
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.
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…
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"
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 posit…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 t…
> 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.
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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 th…
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.
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"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 tha…
> 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.
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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 i…
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.
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…
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!
It’s almost like this evolution did not happen before.
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 posit…
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…
> 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 plat…
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.