141–150 of 435 posts
I feel like a truck convoy of 10 trucks with one or two humans in the first truck (or first and last) and getting alerts seems more doable.
Would require a virtual handshake between the two drivers, but heck why not esp. if you’re guaranteed that the truck behind you won’t try to pass you for an hour :-)
What problems am I overlooking that are not easily solvable?
Yes trucks slow down slower than cars but that's just physics. You've got the exact same problem with humans driving under say rainy or foggy conditions. If anything driverless helps dramatically on this front. If you can run trucks 24/7 without stopping then you can cut their speed say 33% or whatever and still come out on top. You can also adjust the cargo to reduce stopping distance - use autonomous truckers for t…
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The article calls out the challenge of stopping distance and sensing range. Drive Hwy80 over the Sierra Nevada mountains in winter, stopping, predictability, many other factors come up as well.
Yes, some routes are dangerous, but the trucks don't need to take those initially. There's a lot of scope for a phased ramp up. A lot of I80 is really straight, same with other highways. I70 from Denver to St. Louis is incredibly boring all the way through Kansas. I90 from Wisconsin through Minnesota and South Dakota is the same. Just dead straight easy roads. Down south I10 was pretty easy too. Just because there ar…
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That might be more a result of capitalist motivations i.e: funnel money to the share holders / owners and C-suite and away from workers. Which is much more direct than someone buying legos or a stove. We can either legislate that or they need an effective union.
"That might be more a result of capitalist motivations" People wanting to get more stuff faster is a universal motivation not limited (in theory or in practice) to capitalism. To the extent that anyone is exploited, that's just selfishness, again a universal motivation.
Great post with good details. I wonder whether a "truck only" roadway might be a reasonable simplifier here (yes building a 1000 miles of road for trucks only is billions of $ but there are perhaps segments between say ports and warehouses where that might make sense. And as someone who has been fooling around with robotics since the 80's the whole "sensors have to see far enough ahead to respond" is well known. The…
You must mean a railway then ? Edit: by the way, why don't we have autonomous freight trains?
I wonder why we don't lower the ambitions: chain five trucks together, so that for long stretches of highway (hundreds of miles) one driver can drive the "train of trucks" while the other truck drivers sleep. The trucks could be really close together so no cars can come between them. What problems am I overlooking that are not easily solvable?
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Also isnt waymo only operating in Pheonix and California where the weather is always nice? What happens when it snows ?
They don't operate in snow now, but everybody was like "This is great, but it doesn't work in the rain!" this time last year. I've now taken many flawless rides in outright downpours in SF. It might take a year or two, but I have no doubt snow will be something that is a non-issue in the near future.
We could also rework our roadways to include better sensing design and tech (passive or active!), but we are a ways out still from willingness to pay for that.