Stephen "Nostradamus" King!

[Razors Edge ★]

If you ever read his short story "Trucks" or saw the movie adapted from it "Maximum Overdrive", you might be afraid. VERY AFRAID!

Some day in the next few years, if you’re on the right stretch of highway in America’s Sunbelt, you are likely to have the disconcerting experience of pulling alongside a fully loaded semi truck, glancing at the cab, and seeing no one behind the wheel at all.

Unless you look closely, the truck you’re likely to see will look very much like a regular big rig. It will still have a steering wheel—twitching, as if moved by ghostly hands. It will also have those oversize rearview mirrors trucks have, only these will be even more exaggerated in scale, since they will double as mounts for sensors—including radar, lidar, and cameras—that help the truck see things even an experienced human driver might miss.

This truck won’t be as smart or adaptable as a human, but it will have superhuman senses, and won’t need to rest. What’s more, it won’t be susceptible to many of the pitfalls that have made autonomy in passenger vehicles largely a disappointment, with companies blowing past one self-imposed deadline after another. While the self-driving passenger-vehicle industry struggles to gain traction despite decades and tens of billions of dollars in investment, proponents of self-driving trucks say they could be here—and making money for their operators in commercial services—much sooner.

Some of the companies involved say they will have the first trucks without drivers in the cab on America’s highways by the end of next year. Those include Aurora, which has partnerships with FedEx and Werner Enterprises, and TuSimple, which has joined up with UPS and Ryder.

When it gains widespread traction, robot trucking will have big implications for how we move goods around America—and for the companies and people involved in that process. For starters, it could help alleviate a chronic shortage of drivers, who are retiring faster than they can be replaced, leading to what the American Trucking Associations claims is a historic shortage of 80,000 drivers.

Here’s the promise of robot trucks: While full self-driving in all conditions is still a pipe dream, engineers seem to be close to achieving it in limited circumstances, such as on highways on clear days. And highway driving, in good weather, happens to be exactly the context in which long-haul trucks operate for a substantial portion of the time.

One reason for that: Highways are what Aurora Chief Executive Chris Urmson calls self-similar.

“Another way to put that is that a bit of freeway in Texas looks very much like a bit of freeway in Phoenix or Minnesota,” says Mr. Urmson, a former faculty member at Carnegie Mellon University and Google executive who co-founded Aurora in 2017. The similarity is good for the artificial-intelligence technology that underpins self-driving, which can be great at handling things it has seen before, and terrible at adapting to situations that are novel. Anyone who has tried GM’s Super Cruise, Nissan’s ProPilot Assist, or Tesla’s Autopilot system has experienced this firsthand.

Highways also have the virtue of being relatively free of pedestrians, bicyclists, animals and children chasing after balls, and they tend to be well-marked and well-maintained.

Highways in Southwestern states, where the weather is generally good, are where autonomous trucking companies are currently testing their systems, carrying real loads for actual clients like FedEx and UPS, albeit with safety drivers behind the wheel in case the AI systems make a mistake—which they still do.

So, in good weather, a robot truck will see farther than a person can. It will never grow drowsy or inattentive. It will be able to operate 24 hours a day, stopping only for fuel and maintenance.

Now, there are also reasons to discount claims about commercial autonomous trucking happening in the next couple of years, or making a big difference anytime soon.

For one, the younger companies trying to pioneer the technology have to sustain the interest of investors until they start making money.

And that could be a while: Aurora, for example, has said that it will lose money until 2027. Shares in the company, which went public via SPAC in November 2021, are currently trading at about one-quarter of the $10 they sold for at their debut.

Aurora Chief Financial Officer Richard Tame said the company has enough cash and short-term investments to fund operations through the introduction of its first autonomous truck next year and into 2024. The company has said in public filings that it expects it will eventually need to raise additional capital.

Even if startups do get their trucks rolling on schedule, it could take a while to have a real impact. By the end of 2023, Aurora will be putting “on the order of dozens” of driver-free trucks on America’s highways, says Sterling Anderson, the company’s chief product officer.

TuSimple also aims to have a fully autonomous commercial-trucking service operating in the U.S. by the end of 2023, says CEO Xiaodi Hou. In the meantime, the company also plans to begin delivering freight for Union Pacific with fully autonomous trucks, says a company spokesman.

Compared with the total number of large trucks rolling in America today—nearly four million, half of them the type that haul freight long distance—the scant dozens of self-driving trucks projected to be on the road by the end of 2023 would be a drop in the ocean.

Waymo—which, as a unit of Google parent Alphabet, has less pressing concerns about funding—is less aggressive in its prediction for the arrival of robo-rigs. Its trucking-focused arm, Waymo Via, hasn’t set a date for its trucks to operate with no human in the cab, despite having already entered partnerships with trucking companies C.H. Robinson and J.B. Hunt, fleet-services operator Ryder, freight-brokerage company Uber Freight, and truck maker Daimler Truck.

Waymo has many reasons for that reticence, says Charlie Jatt, its head of commercialization for trucking. An important one is that there is no production-ready, commercially available truck with the redundant control systems that a self-driving system would require.

If power steering goes out in a human-controlled vehicle, a driver could still potentially muscle it to the side of the road. But with no human in the cab, an autonomous vehicle must have backup steering, braking and electrical systems, says Mr. Jatt. Getting all of these into trucks that can be made not just one at a time but by the tens of thousands is why Waymo has joined with Daimler Truck, he adds.

Indeed, everyone I interviewed for this piece, except for TuSimple, said that the potential for their systems to make mistakes is the reason they haven’t rolled them out yet—even those who claim to be close to doing so. (A recent report from the U.S. National Highway Traffic Safety Administration listed more than 100 accidents involving vehicles equipped with autonomous driving systems over the past year.)

Still, the potential financial benefits of robo-trucking technology are so enormous that shippers and trucking companies are likely to embrace it as soon as they feel it is ready.

“One thing that really surprised us was that the additional cost of the technology required by autonomous trucks is relatively small,” says Parth Vaishnav, an assistant professor at the University of Michigan and co-author of a recent study on the impacts self-driving trucks would have on truckers.

Adding even $20,000 of hardware, in the form of additional sensors and powerful computers, to a long-haul truck is quickly offset by the elimination of labor costs, which typically represent 15% to 20% of the cost of operating a truck. Another big economic impact is that by law a human driving a truck must stop and rest. That means every truck, which can cost between $100,000 and $200,000, is only being used about 30% to 40% of the time. Just running them 24 hours, stopping only for fuel and maintenance, increases their utilization by a factor of two or more.

“It’s economically so compelling that, even if other things about the truck modestly increase costs, it may turn out it will still be attractive,” adds Dr. Vaishnav.

[12string]

OK. cool, technology. yadda yadda yadda.

Did they ceramic coat the truck?  

[jsharr ★]

[jsharr ★]

1 minute ago, 12string said:

OK. cool, technology. yadda yadda yadda.

Did they ceramic coat the truck?  

3/4 of it...

[Kzoo]

TL/DR

 

[Wilbur ★]

We don't need long haul trucks.  We need long haul railways and short haul trucks.  Hub and spoke like an airline system. 

[jsharr ★]

13 minutes ago, Wilbur said:

We don't need long haul trucks.  We need long haul railways and short haul trucks.  Hub and spoke like an airline system. 

PULL UP!!!!!

[Razors Edge ★]

34 minutes ago, Wilbur said:

We don't need long haul trucks.  We need long haul railways and short haul trucks.  Hub and spoke like an airline system. 

One thing I rarely see is new freight railways being laid down.  I wonder how many new miles of that we build each year?

[Wilbur ★]

20 minutes ago, Razors Edge said:

One thing I rarely see is new freight railways being laid down.  I wonder how many new miles of that we build each year?

Not enough.  Electric rail would be an amazing way to move cargo though. 

[Razors Edge ★]

1 minute ago, Wilbur said:

Not enough.  Electric rail would be an amazing way to move cargo though. 

I'm not sure the current situation in places like Canada, but I know it's a fairly "whack-a-mole" problem here in the US right now.  If the trains are going 100%, the trucks can't keep up.  If the docks can't get stuff to trains, that has a different impact. And rail is cheaper, but more limited in delivery options (relying on the spoke model and trucks), and those spoke drivers might be lured to cross country truck driving instead. Or the trains get to the mid-point and find the freight yards all backed up or full or some other issues, and a cascade happens.  And then, a lot is planned out when a ship is about to leave a Chinese port - where it is headed, who gets it when they get there, and how many different switches it makes until delivery - so that a "pivot" is impossible (or very costly) once the ship is underway.  Rerouting to a different port requires a lot of downstream headaches, but sitting at the port unloaded also creates issues.  If someone decides to throw money at it by hiring trucks (or planes!) for some or much of the journey, all sorts of other issues arise.  Those folks in logistics are really earning their pay when things go right!

[Rattlecan ★]

21 hours ago, Wilbur said:

We don't need long haul trucks.  We need long haul railways and short haul trucks.  Hub and spoke like an airline system. 

There are a number of reasons why that has not worked out so far. sure, there are things the railways excel at, like non time sensitive bulk commodities, but they have fallen down on the job enough times over the decades when trucks were willing and able to step into the breach.

In Canada at least, long haul trucking got a boost with the 1966 rail strike, and another one in 1973.  73 was the first year for me doing long haul, I had just worked regional prior to that. 

 My job that summer was hauling livestock from the prairies to Toronto and Montreal. The railways did some livestock hauling prior to that, but that strike forever ended their involvement.

 Even between labour disruptions, the rail unions, much like unions everywhere, had an anti productivity mindset. They just couldn't seem to grasp the idea that other modes were willing and able to scoop the work, while they did their best to constipate operations wherever they could in the name of job security. Believe me, I was involved in intermodal transport long enough to see first hand what went on at the rail yards.

Cross country intermodal transport is still a factor, and large trucking companies are some of the railways largest customers. Driver shortages and fuel costs may drive growth in this area.

[Bikeguy]

20 hours ago, Razors Edge said:

So, in good weather, a robot truck will see farther than a person can. It will never grow drowsy or inattentive. It will be able to operate 24 hours a day, stopping only for fuel and maintenance.

   So.... how does an autonomous  truck stop and add fuel to its fuel tanks?   Does it have a credit card, or large wallet and gets a discount for paying cash? 

[Rattlecan ★]

[maddmaxx ★]

 

[Rattlecan ★]

54 minutes ago, Bikeguy said:

   So.... how does an autonomous  truck stop and add fuel to its fuel tanks?   Does it have a credit card, or large wallet and gets a discount for paying cash? 

Will the autonomous truck know when the reefer it is pulling is needing fuel? Will it know how to pulp the load of produce a couple of times a day to ensure the temperature is being properly maintained. Will it know enough to slow down to a crawl over that extremely bumpy railway crossing to avoid crushing the strawberries on the bottom tier?

 So many tasks handled by a human that AI may not be up to yet.

[Bikeguy]

59 minutes ago, Rattlecan said:

So many tasks handled by a human that AI may not be up to yet.

Just wait for when it snows just enough to cover all the lane markings on a road.      The trucks will stop and be confused about... 'Where is the road?'   Traffic would be blocked and even us mere mortals who need to actually 'drive' a car/truck are stranded because of the AI isn't smart enough to continue to drive and the AI truck is blocking the lane.

 

[maddmaxx ★]

9 minutes ago, Bikeguy said:

Just wait for when it snows just enough to cover all the lane markings on a road.      The trucks will stop and be confused about... 'Where is the road?'   Traffic would be blocked and even us mere mortals who need to actually 'drive' a car/truck are stranded because of the AI isn't smart enough to continue to drive and the AI truck is blocking the lane.

 

They'll be ok.  By then there will be a super precision GPS system called Skynet.

[Bikeguy]

4 minutes ago, maddmaxx said:

They'll be ok.  By then there will be a super precision GPS system called Skynet.

Yeah 'they' are getting closer to our end..    The Google engineer who sees company's AI as 'sentient' thinks a chatbot has a soul

[Rattlecan ★]

2 hours ago, Rattlecan said:

Will the autonomous truck know when the reefer it is pulling is needing fuel? Will it know how to pulp the load of produce a couple of times a day to ensure the temperature is being properly maintained. Will it know enough to slow down to a crawl over that extremely bumpy railway crossing to avoid crushing the strawberries on the bottom tier?

 So many tasks handled by a human that AI may not be up to yet.

I didn't even scratch the surface with these comments. There are so many aspects of a driver's job that anyone who sees them merely as steering wheel holders has no idea about. 

 From constantly monitoring the condition of every part of the rig at every stop to keeping a constant check on cargo securement and on and on it goes. Maybe these things can be done by AI, but the complexity is much greater than just guiding a vehicle safely down the road.

[Longjohn ★]

On 6/24/2022 at 2:22 PM, Razors Edge said:

So, in good weather, a robot truck will see farther than a person can. It will never grow drowsy or inattentive. It will be able to operate 24 hours a day, stopping only for fuel and maintenance.

They would have to have C3PO type robots to handle fueling and kicking the tires.