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Self-Driving Big Rigs Become a Reality
drinkypoo writes: We've been discussing the importance of automating over-the-road trucking here on Slashdot whenever self-driving vehicles come up in conversation. Jalopnik reports that the Freightliner "Inspiration Truck" will be the first autonomous commercial truck to drive on American roads. It's been given the green light to start testing its self-driving technology on the roads of Nevada. A human will be present at the wheel at all times, and will take control whenever the truck is in more populated areas. "Given a big trucks' long stopping distances and limited maneuverability, driving one requires the ability to correctly predict what's going to happen far out ahead. That requires foresight and intuition that are difficult to program into computers."
I thought the Teamsters were more into the loading and unloading, and the drivers were often owner/operators.
Never heard of more than one person operating a truck at a time.
Wouldn't you prefer automated trucks?
Computers can see all directions at once, humans can't.
That is the main problem motorcycles have.
The US trucking industry has been in a crisis for at least 3 years.
The regulatory changes brought about in this administration (for example EPA/state regs that mandate new eco-friendly trucks far faster than normal replacement rates or new DOT rulings that took away around 20% of a driver's available hours per week, ie income) are only the icing on the cake. Simply: the old drivers are all quitting because of the hassles and continuing low pay, while few new drivers are joining the industry. Companies can't find drivers. I know 1Q14 3000+ trucking companies closed (most were Bill & Mary trucking, ie small individual owner-operators, but many were substantial firms) and that was the 7th quarter in a ROW that had happened. Intermodal investment is simply too slow to respond to the waves of need in the trucking freight market.
Enter the self-driving car.
*Certainly* the autodriver will not be able to "handle" a rig in the context of a terminal; there are just too bloody many variables to see that happening soon. But for the bulk of long-haul miles? I can certainly see a sort of 'local pilotage' system developing where trucks are driven by a human to a terminal on the outskirts of a metro area. From that point the human gets out and the autodriver takes it to a similar terminal at the destination city, where a local 'pilot' gets in and handles the truck from there.
The compelling commercial shortage of drivers and the financial rewards (no rest hours, no drug issues, perfect recordkeeping, & - I suspect - better overall safety results lowering insurance costs, etc) all will push the larger freight firms to aggressively pursue this.
-Styopa
What this does, more to the point, is put millions of people out of work, and ruin the Teamsters union as a side effect.
Time to take it down a notch. FTA:
A human will be present at the wheel at all times, and will take control whenever the truck is in more populated areas.
Hopefully this will put an end to one trucker passing another trucker because the first one is driving the speed limit and the other one wants to go 1 mile over the speed limit, thereby slowing down traffic for everyone else. I usually avoid my nearby interstate on weekdays because this situation happens all the time. I remember one time it took a trucker 20 minutes to pass 3 other trucks ahead of him. It was particularly annoying since the truck speed limit was 55 and the car speed limit was 70.
Taking guns away from the 99% gives the 1% 100% of the power.
The problem isn't the 99.99%, but the .01% where the right thing has to be done quickly. Take for example the small tunnel near me. It's a 4 lane, 2 in each direction. While being repaired it's down to a two lane, with cones all over telling you to move into the other direction lane to proceed. Cops all over directing traffic, really it's a pretty chaotic situation with no defined way to navigate it other than taking in what is going on and doing the right thing. No two cops direct traffic the same way, no two construction zones are set up the same way. Each one is a learn as you go, something humans excel at even if it's a 16 year old kid who just got their license. This is the Achilles heel of automated driving and we're quite a number of years away from sorting it all out.
I have personally encountered truck drivers weaving side to side, tailgating and making sudden lane changes (the worst one was also in heavy rain just as I was about to pass a truck) - and I don't even drive that much.
Having driven a large rig before I can assure you that usually the problem is NOT the big rig driver. It is the idiots in passenger vehicles who cut them off and do all kinds of stupid driving around big vehicles. You cannot really appreciate how little regard many people have for the risks they take until you've driven one of these.
Strip mining companies spend millions on giant trucks whose only function is to shuttle minerals on a private road, from the bottom of the mine to the unloading dock. Until the technology of driving robots has clearly proven itself in a setting like this, it should be kept off the public streets and highways.
This was never about self-driving cars. This was always about wiping out an entire employment sector and piping even more profit up to the top. And yes, that is a bad thing.
Well, it's certainly not a good thing for the truck drivers, but for society as a whole it's a net win. Keeping humans working on jobs a machine can do isn't the optimum choice and it's not something we should want. The only issue is that currently our society requires you to have money to access any resources and for most people that means working for a living, if the opportunities for work decline that causes a problem with the wealth distribution system. The answer is to fix the wealth distribution system not to keep people doing make work.
What "something" do you propose when all the jobs are gone?
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