We need smart roads. Not just smart cars. Until that happens, autonomous is impractical. You don’t want to build an autonomous system to match human error rate. That basically got us nowhere in the past seven years since Elon bs’d his way to selling vaporware.
Autonomous trucking is harder than autonomous rideshare
41–50 of 435 posts
Re: Autonomous trucking is harder than autonomous rideshare
#42> there are no driverless truck deployments
Is this really correct? What about gatik.ai, they certainly appear to have driverless trucks on the road do they not?
Re: Autonomous trucking is harder than autonomous rideshare
#43If he thinks driving cars in cities is the easiest problem, he does not have experience driving a car in a European city with lots of cyclists and pedestrians. Driving a car in inner Copenhagen is a stressful situation due to the insane number of cyclist you have to watch out for, see https://youtu.be/FaySp9i2zMA?t=113
Now imagine all those cyclists and pedestrians would also drive a car, would also be on the road at the same time. You think driving would be less stressfull then?
In my expeirence, it is far more common for cyclists to break traffic rules than it is for cars to do so. Even pedestrians are far more likely to cross on a red light than cars, for example.
The vast majority of humans have some respect for the fact that they are in charge of a ton or more of hulking metal when driving a car, and thus take on more responsibility. Drinking and driving is far less common than drinking and cycling too.
Re: Autonomous trucking is harder than autonomous rideshare
#44Earlier quoted context omitted.
Truck or cars are not strictly required to operate in all conditions in the current system: roads, entire freeways close when the conditions demand. Or demand that vehicles stop and put on chains. There is precedent.
I think that if you were reading my comment charitably you could infer that I meant "under all conditions where a car is legally allowed to operate." I don't think you actually believed that I was saying that a truck should have the capability to drive on the road when a roadway is not legal to drive on.
You are seeing a fight that isn't there.
There is precedent for either roads or vehicles for choosing not to handle some conditions. In a driving rain storm you will find rest areas stuffed full of trucks and cars that picked that time to nap. In San Francisco Waymo first served some hours and not others, some areas and not others - some of these choices apparently related to fog and wet pavement. In Oregon, you will find roads open, but white-out-ed. Etc, etc. Nobody forces human vehicles to keep moving and most of the ones with some sense make choices. Which are available also to automated vehicles. - Sure it should be expected of the vehicle to find a safer place to move itself than right in the middle of the lane, like I point out in another response here.
Re: Autonomous trucking is harder than autonomous rideshare
#45I think I would be more comfortable with triple trailers with parking assist and stability control than with fully autonomous trucking.
Growing up we had a neighbor who drove UPS trucks and was rated for double trailers, and that earned him extra money. I gotta assume triples make even more. Doubling the payload per driver mile by making it so any trucker can manage doubles and the old double drivers can manage triples seems doable.
The thing with doubles and triples though is that they are shorter trailers. And it’s probably less likely to pack a triple trailer to the gills than a single, so are they getting 70% as much payload per trailer? If so that puts triples around 2x the practical capacity of a single.
Re: Autonomous trucking is harder than autonomous rideshare
#46If he thinks driving cars in cities is the easiest problem, he does not have experience driving a car in a European city with lots of cyclists and pedestrians. Driving a car in inner Copenhagen is a stressful situation due to the insane number of cyclist you have to watch out for, see https://youtu.be/FaySp9i2zMA?t=113
The point I gleamed from the article was not that city driving was an easy problem, but rather that freeway driving has unique issues when it comes to reliability and safety. Simply stopping the car could be an acceptable minimal risk condition for a crowd of cyclists and pedestrians, but that's no longer the case in a freeway. On top of having to deal with sensing range + on-board offline decision making + truck stopping distances, having no safe fallback like "just brake" seems like a pretty difficult problem.
There's also the "interesting events + training" argument in the article, which I'd love to see points for or against.
Re: Autonomous trucking is harder than autonomous rideshare
#47> The trucks could also be commercially viable with only freeway driving capability, or freeways plus a short segment of surface streets needed to reach a transfer hub.
The question is... isn't the problem being approached from an entirely bad premise in the first place? Why would it even make sense to develop autonomous trucks for that part of any freight's journey? Laying train tracks might incur a large initial expense since the tracks, unlike highways, aren't there anyway, but a train is way more energy efficient as only the first locomotive has to deal with air resistance and steel-on-steel is less friction than tires.
Re: Autonomous trucking is harder than autonomous rideshare
#48Earlier quoted context omitted.
Now imagine all those cyclists and pedestrians would also drive a car, would also be on the road at the same time. You think driving would be less stressfull then?
In my expeirence, it is far more common for cyclists to break traffic rules than it is for cars to do so. Even pedestrians are far more likely to cross on a red light than cars, for example. The vast majority of humans have some respect for the fact that they are in charge of a ton or more of hulking metal when driving a car, and thus take on more responsibility. Drinking and driving is far less common than drinking…
> In my expeirence, it is far more common for cyclists to break traffic rules than it is for cars to do so
Or perhaps it's that you're biased and you selectively observe.
https://electrek.co/2024/01/11/cars-or-bikes-surprising-resu...
https://www.forbes.com/sites/carltonreid/2019/05/10/cyclists...
https://usa.streetsblog.org/2018/01/03/study-cyclists-dont-b...
https://road.cc/content/news/260509-cyclists-far-less-likely...
Re: Autonomous trucking is harder than autonomous rideshare
#49I often see logic along the lines of "if autonomous vehicles are safer than people, then let's deploy them" and that logic straight-up does not fly in the real world. In the real world, among the techno-pessimists, that is an outrageously low bar. Most accidents and deaths that happen because of human drivers occur because the driver was doing something illegal, which means the bar that we have for even humans is hig…
The bar for commercial driving should definitely be higher than for “civilian”.
But I think the bar for civilian is also woefully out of date now. Giant trucks should require a commercial license. Make it easier to get than a delivery truck license, but weed out the soccer moms and bring back the station wagon. If you’re a professional tree trimmer, general contractor, or a forester, renewing your license is on the clock and not a big deal.
Re: Autonomous trucking is harder than autonomous rideshare
#50I often see logic along the lines of "if autonomous vehicles are safer than people, then let's deploy them" and that logic straight-up does not fly in the real world. In the real world, among the techno-pessimists, that is an outrageously low bar. Most accidents and deaths that happen because of human drivers occur because the driver was doing something illegal, which means the bar that we have for even humans is hig…
> but I really don't feel like society will accept anything other than trucks / vehicles that are able to operate under all conditions Trucks are different because they're just for transportation of goods. As challenging weather arrives they can just wait at the nearest rest stop, pull over on the shoulder, etc. Your shipping will be delayed, but outside of that I don't think society will care. Totally acceptable as…
Society is literally willing to let truck drivers die to maintain shipping times. See the responses during the height of COVID-19, or even just the demands placed on every day operators cross-referenced with their average health and mortality rates. Our treatment of truck drivers is already subhuman, I don’t think we’re likely to extend a lot of understanding to the robots.