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Autonomous trucking is harder than autonomous rideshare

kevinchen.co

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Re: Autonomous trucking is harder than autonomous rideshare

#371

Post by Dylan16807 »

telotortium wrote: post #120
darkwater wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But an autonomous truck can just go slower, no? It never gets tired, so unless there is a logistic pressure, it would be reasonable to trade speed for safety.

No one will tolerate self-driving trucks that are limited to lower speed than human-driven trucks. Since human drivers have time limits by law, they need to be able to move relatively quickly. Human drivers attempting to move around super slow autonomous trucks is a guarantee for a lot more accidents, more than erasing whatever safety benefits self driving would get in the first place. Also, slow trucks would not be…

50mph or whatever speed you'd still see on the freeways is not that slow.

> Also, slow trucks would not be preferred by the logistics managers that arrange truck delivery in the first place. So self driving trucks would have to be a lot cheaper to be competitive.

Why would they "not be preferred" to such an extent? For short trips it might be an hour difference, is that such a big deal? As you approach a full shift of driving, a human driver spends up to 20% of that shift not driving, so the difference isn't as much as you'd expect. And as soon as you go past 11 hours at human driving speed, the self-driving truck gets there much sooner.

> I don't think labor is 90% of the cost of a truck delivery.

If we go by https://www.thetruckersreport.com/images/costoftrucking.jpg it's 26%, but also if you can vastly increase the mileage per year then an electric model goes from "maybe" to "massive savings".

Re: Autonomous trucking is harder than autonomous rideshare

#372

Post by echelon »

ChainOfFools wrote: post #277
AlexandrB wrote: post #260

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the problem few people talk about is the small, in-city rail lines that used to exist that don't anymore. 100 years ago the city I live in had dedicated rail lines going to every major factory in the city - there was little need for last-mile trucking. AFAIK there are no western cities that are organized like this anymore, so the best you can do is deliver goods to a rail station and truck it from there - thi…

I live in a city that has some of these going through it, and I can say that my opinions changed dramatically after moving here, with respect to this idea. Our real estate agent, in hindsight, had employed numerous subtle tactics to discourage us from taking serious interest in homes that were within a quarter mile or so of these lines, although I was completely oblivious to what they were doing at the time. What I d…

I live next to an intermodal train yard. Literally outside my windows [1].

I love the noise and the trains. You get used to the sounds, and it becomes comforting. Like a loud rain on a rooftop. I feel strange when it's quiet.

There are some homes by Georgia Tech that are literally feet from the tracks [2], and I think those are awesome. I also hope these trains don't derail frequently like the ones in Hulsey Yard do.

[1] https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=ZVX0KMTa8ZA

[2] https://www.redfin.com/GA/Atlanta/576-Marietta-St-NW-30313/h...

Re: Autonomous trucking is harder than autonomous rideshare

#373

Post by onion2k »

kevinchen wrote: post #271
aga98mtl wrote: post #221

The issue with braking distance and jackknifing could be resolved with smaller trucks. The 18 wheeler we know is optimal because it maximize the cubic volume driven by one person. If you don't need the human driver, two smaller trucks might be better than one.

The cab, sensors, and compute are also expensive, not to mention other variable costs like staff for remote assistance, maintenance, and first/last mile

The cab, sensors, and compute are also expensive

Amortized over the life of the truck they really aren't.

Re: Autonomous trucking is harder than autonomous rideshare

#374

Post by Edman274 »

kelnos wrote: post #164
Edman274 wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think a way to think about it is that we (at a societal level) wouldn't accept a desk calculator to be sold as a consumer product if it did correct arithmetic almost all of the time but then would spit out a close but wrong answer 1 time out of 1000, even if that would be significantly better than the average person doing arithmetic. Our expectation would be that it could (and should) perform flawlessly. If our tec…

I think intuitively the desk calculator analogy makes sense, but from a technology perspective it does not. A calculator has a limited number of operations and operating modes, and you can feasibly test all of them, quickly, easily, and in an automated fashion. An autonomous vehicle has an uncountable number of operating modes, and it is not feasible (perhaps not even possible ) to test it in all possible conditions…

I don't disagree that a calculator and a car are different things, but the important thing for the analogy is that the wider society expects the same thing of them. When John Q Public thinks about self-driving cars, he thinks to himself "How hard can it be? Drive the speed limit, stop at stop signs and traffic signals, go when lights turn green, stop at obstacles and stay between the lane dividing markers. If these vehicles can't do that then what good are they? Why risk letting those things on the road if I can't even trust them to do that?" Obviously you and I both know that the base things like "recognizing a stop sign" required decades of research to become reliable, but like, back in the 1960s before the problem had work started on it, even PhD holding computer scientists were thinking that object recognition was basically a done deal.

What I want to keep reminding the software developers with consequentialist ethics is that the entire rest of the world operates under a totally different mental framework than the techno-utopian one. In that mental model, a self driving car is an appliance and it will be judged by the standard of all appliances, which is that any catastrophic failures that happen during their normal operation are evidence of a defective, untrustworthy product. The problem they're trying to solve and its complexity has little bearing in that judgment. What incentive does anyone have to be generous and forgiving about potentially fatal errors when you're not taking the consequentialist viewpoint for granted? That's the thrust of my observation.

Re: Autonomous trucking is harder than autonomous rideshare

#375

Post by PeterStuer »

ChainOfFools wrote: post #277
AlexandrB wrote: post #260

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the problem few people talk about is the small, in-city rail lines that used to exist that don't anymore. 100 years ago the city I live in had dedicated rail lines going to every major factory in the city - there was little need for last-mile trucking. AFAIK there are no western cities that are organized like this anymore, so the best you can do is deliver goods to a rail station and truck it from there - thi…

I live in a city that has some of these going through it, and I can say that my opinions changed dramatically after moving here, with respect to this idea. Our real estate agent, in hindsight, had employed numerous subtle tactics to discourage us from taking serious interest in homes that were within a quarter mile or so of these lines, although I was completely oblivious to what they were doing at the time. What I d…

I've always found rail noises subjectively much less stressing than car noise.

A well maintained line and fleet would also not have that much screeching.

Re: Autonomous trucking is harder than autonomous rideshare

#376

Post by mikrotikker »

throwaway2037 wrote: post #305
hedora wrote: post #281

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I grew up half a block from a freight train line, and you could hear it, but it wasn’t really an issue. Trains have gotten a lot louder in the US recently due to lack of rail maintenance. (Concretely, the transbay BART tube is screeches was above osha safety limits inside the car these days, but was quiet when new. The problem is that you need to grind rails to have a rounded top or they screech (and wear out train w…

> The problem is that you need to grind rails to have a rounded top or they screech (and wear out train wheels), but BART doesn’t bother. I just Googled for > Plenty of hits indicating that, yes, BART does grind tracks and wheels. > was quiet when new Do you mean in 1974 it was quiet? I tried to Google for any evidence of this and I can find nothing.

I got a friend who did the first grind ever in NZ a few years back, they borrowed the grinder locos from Aussie. Every train driver he talked to commented how amazingly better the rails were after grinding.

Re: Autonomous trucking is harder than autonomous rideshare

#377

Post by mikrotikker »

Varriount wrote: post #279
ChainOfFools wrote: post #277

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I live in a city that has some of these going through it, and I can say that my opinions changed dramatically after moving here, with respect to this idea. Our real estate agent, in hindsight, had employed numerous subtle tactics to discourage us from taking serious interest in homes that were within a quarter mile or so of these lines, although I was completely oblivious to what they were doing at the time. What I d…

What kinds of noise do the trains produce? Do you think there are any ways to lessen it, and/or have any been implemented? (I'm thinking something like sound barriers).

I live about 150m from a line that goes over a bridge. Twice a day 4pm and 4am. It is not often the night train wakes me, often I wait to hear the click clacks before thinking it might be an earthquake.

The day train usually slows since coming the other way it is approaching a pedestrian crossing. I kinda love it because when it speeds up again you can hear it's giant turbo spooling... Sounds so good.

The rumbling also sounds kinda cool, sometimes it'll shake the house, I thought about setting up an accelerometer on and Arduino to swee what output I'd see.

Often however I think I hear the train but it's just the sea. Or I can hardly hear the train for the noise of the sea.

Re: Autonomous trucking is harder than autonomous rideshare

#378

Post by 8f2ab37a-ed6c »

beedeebeedee wrote: post #247

Build more railroads. (I used to work for an autonomous truck company, and when you factor in the cost of roads in addition to the development of the trucks, it makes absolutely no sense to do autonomous trucking when you could do trains. As a culture, we've been brainwashed not to fund trains. We collectively spend billions and billions on roads but would not dare spend money to build more tracks. It is shocking and…

Been trying to do that in CA for the last 30 years with nothing to show for it. It seems like it's faster to invent AGI and let it drive the trucks.

Re: Autonomous trucking is harder than autonomous rideshare

#379

Post by whiplash451 »

onion2k wrote: post #373
kevinchen wrote: post #271

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The cab, sensors, and compute are also expensive, not to mention other variable costs like staff for remote assistance, maintenance, and first/last mile

The cab, sensors, and compute are also expensive Amortized over the life of the truck they really aren't.

Not sure what the true lifetime of these sensors is in the real world of trucking.

Re: Autonomous trucking is harder than autonomous rideshare

#380

Post by lelanthran »

ChainOfFools wrote: post #366
lelanthran wrote: post #360

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm probably missing something, but why would an electric train need a battery? What would the battery be used for?

The trains that make the most noise are diesel-electric, not electric; electric cross country freight trains aren't really a thing here. I don't DE engines have a battery in the conventional sense, although arguably their fuel tender full of diesel is a sort of battery. But in order for a train to be fully electric you would need to have a fully electrified infrastructure for freight rail, which we do not have and wo…

> But in order for a train to be fully electric you would need to have a fully electrified infrastructure for freight rail, which we do not have and would be far-fetched as a solution compared to equipping such trains with a local battery tender when they come into town, in order to move them through the town (somewhat) quietly. after which they can switch back to diesel-electric power for the long cross country runs.

Okay, I understand now.

An alternative proposition to installing batteries in DE engines is modifying them to be able to switch between electric lines (infrastructure) and the diesel engine.

This means that towns can lay down the infrastructure, so that the diesel is switched off when the engine is going through a town, and then switches on again when the infrastructure is no longer there.

The added benefit to this would be then that rolling out infrastructure gradually is not a problem: keep adding infrastructure over long distances and after a few decades the diesel engine won't be needed anymore.

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