(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 ludicrous, but that's what happens when you suck up a century of propaganda from the fossil fuel and automotive industry).
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 - this requires a bunch of temporary storage space to transfer cargo and delays everything.
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 did not appreciate, but they did, is that these rails can bring an absolutely astonishing amount of noise into a town, and behind that a long trail of associated social ills. There is a gradual sifting of residents within a certain distance of these trains, based on who is either loud themselves and thus doesn't mind, or else must tolerate the amount of noise these things make.
Our town is old enough that some of the 'nicer' neighborhoods predate the introduction of the rails, so there isn't a strong confounding signal of 'bad' neighborhood correlation at work here. In at least one case there was a house we pushed past our agent's scheduling machinations to see for ourselves, and would likely have closed on had we not happened to visit at just the right time, when a multi-engined repositioning train (which we had no idea was a very common guest on what we thought was a mild mannered commuter rail line) came through. Though unseen and multiple blocks away, it still shook the floorboards as it passed.
Hm. I did a quick search on freight percentages, EU vs US and google gave me this snippet off the top hit. "46 percent of European freight goes by truck while only 11 percent goes by rail, while in the United States more than 40 percent goes by rail while just 30 percent goes on the highway."
Seems US is doing pretty well on prioritising freight rail transport, despite brainwashing, at least compared to europe.
Which is probably a good thing. Until that figure is a lot higher, passenger rail is just one more thing reducing the efficiencies of freight.
The reason is probably because, in the EU, passenger rail transport is prioritised over cargo. For example in Switzwerland rail cargo is mainly transported during the night because thats the only time the network isn't working at it's limit for the passenger trains.
In Canada, to my understanding, it's the other way round where passenger trains have been reduced because of the need for more cargo train trips. The USA might be similar.
That's 40% of "ton-miles" - trains disproportionately move heavy, cheap goods (i.e. aggregate, coal), which makes that number potentially misleading. The percentage of freight moved by rail by "value" is closer to 15% (trucking is ~65%).
So perhaps a priority could be to build more medium/high speed passenger rail, and get it off the freight lines?
Travelers and commuters win, cargo wins!
It is funny though, the US built it's current freight network in a comparatively low tech era, yet I doubt it could do it again in the current era due to funding and beauracracy.
No one (generally) bats an eye when voting at the city level for a $100mm road package.
But trains?
Freight should move mostly by train. We could build rail lines where there are already highways, just swap a vehicle lain for a train rail, all that 18 wheeler traffic can be reduced significantly.
Not that simple, at least in the U.S. Rail has far stricter requirements on turn radius and grade. As an example the highways around here have 6%+ grade segments (after tunneling!) and rail is rarely over 1%. I haven’t even mentioned the incorrect subgrade and the massive safety envelope (approx 20x20 feet) which is about 2 highway lanes wide and far too tall for the thousands of highway overpasses.
Rail truly is a unique infrastructure concern and needs to be designed and laid on its own.
For most heavy passenger rail like Amtrak and things like Caltrain in the Bay Area, it's because those trains use the same tracks as freight companies and the freight traffic takes priority.
We already have a great interstate transport network that reaches every address, and where this cargo already travels.
I don't know what building a second parallel railroad system to take over this task would cost, but I'd guess several Iraq Wars.
Making the trucks autonomous doubles their utilization, which means we need half as many trucks, and makes freight cheaper, which makes prices lower, benefitting everyone, especially the poorest.
Having a railroad without a highway (and a highway won't come along and serve itself) will mean that you won't get to any city on your own. Wait for the train, maybe the railroad authorities will deign to launch a passenger train once a week, of such quality that you won't want to ride it. Like in some places in the Russian Federation. Or buy an off-road vehicle and go camping instead of traveling.
What sources do you have to cite on development costs and regular maintenance? Autonomous trucking is an add-on to existing trucks which are already being built regularly. We already perform road maintenance and account for it in local, state, and federal budgets as it services more vehicle's and destinations than just "autonomous trucks."
Freight railroads are alive and well in the US. Incidentally, it's also the side of the railroad business that is mostly deregulated and privatised. The passenger business is nationalised, and frankly a basket case.
(it's not a basket case because it's nationalised, it's nationalised because it's a basket case - thank the automotive industry - and it's a national security asset)
Agreed but it can’t happen anymore. Rights to the now-unused tracks have reverted to property owners. Impossible to restore w/out massive eminent domain issues.
A rail line is single use, single destination. commuter and cargo cannot mix (one goes high speed and one goes super slow) if they do mix it shuts the entire segment of the track down until it’s off that track.
Roads are multi use , multi location. It seems unfair to compare the cost based on road maintenance vs track maintenance. I would expect something to account for the sheer difference in volume each does
Why not road trains ? One lead driver with few of autonomous trailers ?
In a ideal world more rail roads in places it makes sense to develop and maintain dedicated track infrastructure, cheaper running costs ( fuel, tires, wear and tear etc ) justify the upfront costs.
Road trains are both intermediate solution everywhere and also can operate in routes where trains are not economical enough, even if there was a will to do it.
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
Sensors and compute will get rapidly cheaper over time, because they are on the cost curve of electronics. (And they are getting cheaper even if autonomous trucking has only small production numbers, just like batteries will continue to get better, even if nobody builds electric cars: the whole electronics industry is working on those technologies regardless.)
The cab can be a lot cheaper, if you don't have to keep a human comfortable and safe inside. Also keep in mind that an autonomous truck can drive 24 hours a day, and doesn't need to take regular breaks throughout the day nor sleep. (They will need maintenance, but probably not more than a manned truck.)
You are right that the costs are real. Things like first/last mile (or loading and unloading) would probably need a major reshake of the industry, if the truck doesn't bring its own labour, in the form of a driver, with it.
I think that’s a great idea. It will increase the cost of the fleet but if it solves the blocking issues it may be worth it. Might even help with logistics and loading and unloading.
Heck, maybe they don’t even need to be articulated. They could look like slightly larger Amazon or UPS delivery vans. No need to worry about jackknifing.
If it’s a fleet maybe battery packs can be swappable so when it arrives at a hub to load/unload it can pick up a charged battery pack.
The only issue is for cargo that can’t be split up.
> No guarantee of a timely response from remote operators or backend services.
> Therefore, all safety-critical decisions must be made by the onboard computer alone.
Why is the requirement that all safety-critical decisions must be made on board, versus the seemingly-simplifying assumption that only some or most decisions would have to be made on board, because a remote operator or backend service could be available a lot of the time? It doesn't seem unreasonable to me to have a single operator remotely monitoring multiple vehicles that are autonomous under ideal conditions (driving along a straight road in good weather) and then taking over when necessary. Let's say you would only use such a system for major routes with solid satellite visibility, not last-mile routes hauling heavy equipment on a dirt road in the boonies, or something like that. Maybe this wouldn't work, but it's not obviously ridiculous to me, so I wonder why he just starts out saying the truck most be fully autonomous with no human ever in the loop.
Yes, and that has to be safely possible. From my reading, the article has no problems with remote operators giving command. The truck just also needs the ability to both safely execute them and come to some safe state by itself if necessary commands don't arrive [in time].
The interesting question is how complicated those safe states are to realize. Just hitting the breaks on a freeway seems hardly acceptable. Generally, this being harder than for cars in cities is a core conclusion of the article.
Author here. At the mean time between failures needed to exceed human performance, the uptime of the network connection quickly becomes a limiting factor. It’s possible to pick only routes that have great cell coverage but this limits commercial viability.
Satellite internet is fast becoming good enough and cheap enough.
As an additional safeguard, you can make your trucks go into 'safety' mode when connection becomes spotty or when too many operators become too busy with other trucks.
'Safety mode' could mean slowing down the trucks or even stopping some of them. And in general, letting the autonomous systems err on the side of caution more often.
Remote does not mean just sitting in a room far away. It could be simply one truck with a lead driver and few automated ones following it closely. Road trains are an option. Even just two autonomous trailers to a lead truck will reduce the driver costs by 2/3rds.
Unlike autonomous cars where everyone needs to go wherever, inter city trucks have fixed well known routes with predicable volume of cargo that can be easily chained together.
Ya, I wonder the same thing. In an extreme case it seems like you could build dedicated repeaters/cell phone towers/something along specific stretches of highway, and then start testing along just that stretch with remote operators on call. I suspect remote operators are cheaper than devoted drivers, potentially making a profit from that transition alone, and also collect training data to develop full autonomy.
You need at least a minute to get into the context and have full situational awareness, to imagine what it would be like as a remote driver with less lead time than that, think about a scenario where you suddenly wake up with your hands on the wheel, with no idea where you are and no idea what's going on, except the situation is probably bad.
Cell networks are even longer lead time and more capital intensive than autonomous driving ;) even if we only consider the fcc + local permitting time, it already makes this option difficult.
This is the route May Mobility https://maymobility.com/ is taking with their AVs. I'm not sure where they're at now, but (I believe) they started by servicing old-age communities where the trips went to a few known destinations in low density areas.
If the AV ran into an issue, it could tele-help and have a human operator take over.
Completely makes sense that you could have a person monitoring multiple AV trucks and take over driving when needed.
Whoa hold on, table 1 of stopping distances is calculated for 2.5 second reaction time which is 10x longer than conventional human reaction time. Then the stopping distances are compared to radar/lidar/camera to argue that AVs can struggle to stop within detection range.
It's possible a computer might need 2.5s to make a decision to stop. But the current analysis isn't based on that.
This analysis seems really suspect to me. Any clarification would be appreciated.
Author here. the shorter reaction times you mentioned are collected under ideal conditions, like the person knows they are being tested and only needs to push a button or whatever. In driving, the reaction time is end to end, including perception, decision-making, and actuation (moving your foot, pressing pedal all the way, shifting, etc.)
Also recommend checking out the citation. It is an accepted value used in American highway design.
A human decision to stop is not binary 1/0. If I am approaching a hazard, first thing to do is raise alertness. Also, lift foot off accelerator pedal. Then, put foot on brake. Then, apply some pressure to brake. All this stuff happens on a gradient depending how quickly I need to react and stop.
So between which endpoints shall you measure "reaction time"? I'm already priming my reaction by actions which lead up to it. Obviously, an automated driving system doesn't need some of these steps, but it's still running through the same scenario and "thought processes" to reach a decision and course of action.
Once at lunchtime, I had two coworkers in my car. I was driving a manual-transmission Acura Integra in light rain, heavy traffic in downtown Palo Alto. I had a left turn signal and I proceeded through the intersection, when an oncoming car was coming straight at us and couldn't stop. I punched the accelerator and sped through the turn without incident. My coworkers both congratulated me on making the correct decision: to hesitate, or to hit the brakes, would've surely crashed us. But what was my reaction time? My foot already on the gas, I simply made a snap decision in the moment to follow through.
I had a guy do the exact opposite: he slammed on the brakes doing a left turn in front of me. I t-boned him. If he had had a passenger they would have been severely injured: he was driving a Kia, I was driving an Isuzu Trooper. My entire family was in the Trooper, and we were fine. The Trooper's radiator (and air conditioning) were broken, but we put in a new radiator and drove it another 150 thousand miles. That Trooper Would Not Die.
Sensors and their ranges aren't the right thing to point to. Off-the-shelf options are typically geared towards the ranges useful for passenger vehicles because that's where the volume is, but with money and time one can design something different. It's possible to achieve a sensible link budget for lidar or radar at much-longer ranges. The sensors will be bigger, they'll consume more power, and they'll cost more. But it's totally achievable.
There are a lot of differences between passenger vehicles and trucks. The physical dynamics of articulated vehicles, the mission profile, and social dynamics come to mind. How does a robotruck place cones or flares while it awaits rescue?
Personally, I expect autonomous trucking to be a force-multiplier for humans who were formerly drivers. Such trucks will have sleeper cabs and the human will be there to maintain the vehicle and handle the long tail of tasks (filling tires, cleaning, refueling, repairs, rigging, whatever). You'll get 24-hour operation out of a single human employee because they'll be able to sleep and do other things most of the time. Maybe they'll work a second job as a remote call-center operator.
Most high end sensors, especially lidars, are targeted at L4 applications. Otherwise the price cannot be justified. It’s a safe bet that sensor makers are including AV developers in their market research.
For lidar, the range is also limited by power limits + physics, which cannot be overcome by increasing money/power/device size. Some dependencies on semiconductor manufacturing tech or better signal processing might be possible to solve with more money.
LiDAR transmit power is practically only limited by eye safety. And retinas are fixed size while the aperture of your transceiver isn't. Get a big lens and you can transmit a lot of power and collect a lot of reflected photos.
Long-haul trucking is potentially easier but we already have a great system for delivering large amounts of cargo along fixed, guided pathways. The only problems that making it run on roads instead of rails solves is political - the US is allergic to owning and funding rails but will happily dump tens of billions into its government-owned roads every year.
Short-haul trucking (in-city delivery etc) is where the value is in having agile, self-driving vehicles moving cargo away from supply points… but it’s also the hardest to implement because there are so many dynamic elements in city driving. And largely these light delivery vehicles are already being electrified where it makes sense (UPS, USPS, etc). You are mostly talking about it any advantage coming from removing a human, not the act of rolling electric vehicles into it like taxis where it’s primarily disrupting internal combustion with electric.
Also, any system is eventually going to be utilized at its full capacity. The number of vehicles supervised per agent will increase until the average number of incidents at any one time meets the average number of agents, or beyond, until there is a regulation. Capitalism is a cost optimizer and no cost will ever go unsqueezed - much like the internet is designed to route around network damage, capitalism is designed to route around any such inefficiency as morals or safety standards until otherwise compelled by regulation.
> The only problems that making it run on roads instead of rails solves is political - [...]
You say it like this is a point against autonomous trucking?
Technical problems are solvable. Political and social problems are basically intractable in practice.
If autonomous driving can turn 'delivering large amounts of cargo along fixed, guided pathways' from a political into a technical problem, then this would be a jackpot.
> [...] capitalism is designed to route around any such inefficiency as morals or safety standards until otherwise compelled by regulation.
No? Plenty of eg cars exceed minimum safety standards. Some brands, like Volvo, are even explicitly sold on safety. Most companies explicitly talk up their morals and ethics, too. Look at almost any old advertisement for examples. Ethical brands are quite popular, and whenever one is found to be only pretending, there's usually a big scandal. So many of them actually practice what they preach.
Similarly, most people are paid more than regulated minimums. According to your theory, that shouldn't happen.
This is a video from our firefighters here in slovenia... Humans are shitty drivers, sure, but how the hell would a computer react to a chaos like this?
Pulling to the side when the traffic jam starts, not only when the firefighter walks up and knocks on the window.
Also, since it's a relatively time-insensitive situation (as in, tens of seconds to deal with it rather than seconds), once it identifies that it's an exceptional situation, it can have someone connect to the truck remotely.
> Pulling to the side when the traffic jam starts, not only when the firefighter walks up and knocks on the window.
And get overtaken by other drivers :) Then a lot of honking and swerving would be needed to get back in the correct lane. Also they sometimes need to back up a bit, to let a 'late' driver to move infront of them, or behind them, move to the other side, interpret what honking means to whom, etc... or drive forwards a bit, or whatever the firefighter knocking on the window tells them, speech recognition is still not perfect and interpreting abstract orders is even worse.
> it can have someone connect to the truck remotely
This is covered in TFA, and noted that one cannot rely on wireless connectivity along all highways. Certainly not immediate responses, and doubly-so when the vehicle may be in a deadzone; either a natural one or one caused by overloading the local towers (such as one might find at a remote accident with lots of other motorists) will do.
I think there are some good points here but IMHO this is overly focused on flawless
100% of the time L5 autonomy. Many autonomous trucking companies can become economically viable without perfection because 1. They aren’t dealing with consumers directly 2. Can control or focus on specific well understood shipping lanes 3. Can provide more human in the loop assistance for tricky situations. In this way trucking is easier than ride sharing because there is a longer on ramp (no pun intended) for companies to improve tech while being viable businesses
I 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 higher than "safer than human drivers" -- like, we wouldn't allow someone to be an Uber or Lyft or truck driver if they were candid and said "I'm going to text on my phone, and be drunk driving and sleepy and distracted as often as the average motorist".
Also, I feel like there's a lot of talking past one another in these conversations because one person will say "Let's see an autonomous truck shipping hazmat to Pittsburgh in February with freeway lanes shut down" and another person might say "that's a rare instance" but I really don't feel like society will accept anything other than trucks / vehicles that are able to operate under all conditions, with greater safety than the safest human driver. We tolerate human failures but to use them as the benchmark for autonomous systems would be perceived as unethical, because autonomous systems are deliberately designed and any failures by them would be seen as an intentional oversights and errors, and no one at Waymo or Tesla or where ever is ever going to be charged with vehicular manslaughter for an autonomous vehicle error. We'd demand a way higher standard because these companies don't really have any skin in the game, except for financial penalties which we now understand is not a deterrent for anything. My observations are only moderately related but I'm anticipating the same well-trod talking points coming up and want to address them.
I agree achieving human safety equivalent is the minimum bar. Ex: We can all agree that if your system is below human safety, it is definitely unacceptable.
But issue is that human safety is kind of long tailed. Eg more than a third of all fatal crashes are DUI. I’m guessing if you take out high risk behaviours then the rate will be an order of magnitude lower. What we care about is not being better then an average driver (which basically is bad due to high risk individuals), but better than median driver.
The problem is that it is better than average human performance but it needs to be better than specific human performance for any human to be incentivized to switch.
For now what you could do is to demand that anybody that has a DUI or other such item on their record to mandatory only be allowed to be in vehicles that have self driving if the manufacturer is willing to assume liability. And if that doesn't happen then they might as well take a regular cab.
Yeah, I should clarify that my response is in anticipation of the comment sections I often see on hackernews about self driving cars, rather than arguments from the self driving car companies themselves. Waymo won't say "we're slightly better than people, let us on your roadways" but I feel like every time I see something about self driving on Hackernews there's a handful of commenters taking the hyper-utilitarian viewpoint of "they're better than people, we all need to let the robots do driving for us" which will never convince anyone outside these comment sections.
> 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 long as weather delays only last as long as a storm does.
That's different from rideshare where people do expect to be able to call a Waymo even if it's snowing lightly.
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.
>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.
Trucks? waiting? In "just in time" culture of storage management, where buffers are low and delays are nightmare?
There are way more trucks on the road than will fit in parking at rest areas, and simply parking on the shoulder is a hazard in itself, which is why trucks are required to set out warning triangles, etc. when they have to do it.
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.
First of all for vehicles with total mass of above 3500 kg you need extra license. And also separate one if you have a trailer. This is get it and keep it, until certain age. But good enough often.
And then in general commercial operations also need more licensing. Which needs to be renewed after certain time.
This is a great idea and the first I've heard of it. Set a maximum weight of 5,000 lbs for an ordinary license. Minivans will come in just under the line. Small SUVs like the CRV or RAV4 will be allowed, as will small trucks like the Ford Maverick. Indeed, most of those vehicles are under 4,000 lbs. Even some larger SUVs like the Honda Pilot or (just barely) the Toyota 4runner get under the bar. Even a low-specced F-150. But nothing bigger than that.
Truth is, I'd prefer the bar at 4,000 lbs, which would limit us to Camrys and CRVs, but 5,000 would really allow just about any reasonable vehicle.
And big heavy EVs with massive acceleration are just too powerful for somebody who's got a Starbucks in one hand, a cell phone in the other, their knee on the wheel, and shouting kids in the back seat. "Pedal misapplication" will go tragic really fast.
So it's OK to have more deaths so long as we can punish someone with no expectation that doing so will fix the problem? I suspect you are right, but I don't think it reflects well on us.
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 technological progress was such that the only calculator we could ever hope to produce would still have that kind of error 1 time in 1000, would it be unethical to prevent that from being sold? That's hard to say!
One of the heuristics built into us (because we're mortal beings living beings in a competitive, historically resource-poor environment) is that we trust the devil we know more than the devil we don't, and so unless there's a strongly compelling reason to trust autonomous driving devices a lot more than humans, there will be some inertia against using them, even if the calculations are that it will save X number of lives. I mean, inherent in that calculation is a level of uncertainty and people don't necessarily trust that number, because they don't have a reason to trust it, because they haven't really seen enough to trust it. Why take a company's word for it that it's safer when they have a financial incentive to do some creative stuff to get their marketing pitch? I would say that if you feel it doesn't reflect well on us, it's because it hasn't been thought about enough.
> we wouldn't allow someone to be an Uber or Lyft or truck driver if they were candid and said "I'm going to text on my phone, and be drunk driving and sleepy and distracted as often as the average motorist"
Half the taxi and Uber drivers in New York are perpetually on a phone call, and frequently interacting with their phones.
I'll take your word for it (not being an American and only having visited NYC once), but even then most of the rules of the road are… not perfectly enforced. I suspect if the rules were perfectly enforced, the only humans allowed to drive would be those who actually don't.
I suspect — no, I hope — that anyone who admits in advance that they intend to break the rules, won't get a license.
Really the bar for humans to legally operate a vehicle is whatever licensing process is in place in a given state. We don't make them pinky swear to not do anything dangerous or illegal.
If an autonomous system can get a CDL, it's probably gonna be more effective at continuously meeting that standard than a lot of the humans that do the same thing (but are distracted on a given day or have started using substances, or didn't sleep well or whatever).
> Really the bar for humans to legally operate a vehicle is whatever licensing process is in place in a given state. We don't make them pinky swear to not do anything dangerous or illegal.
That is not sufficient for self-driving vehicles. The license is the thing that shows "okay, this person seems safe" but then some of the things that keep them safe are the threat of accidentally killing themselves, or being arrested and put in jail for a crime they commit while driving, or the financial penalty of being sued for an injury / damage they cause, or the risk of having their license taken away for errors. If a human being applying for their license was invincible, incapable of being jailed, sued, or having their license taken away, you might expect that our CDL or other licensing processes would be more stringent.
Maybe, but our driving tests are designed around assessing humans. A system that fundamentally works quite differently likely has very different performance characteristics and failure modes and may need to be assessed differently to demonstrate that it will probably perform adequately in non-test conditions.
> We'd demand a way higher standard because these companies don't really have any skin in the game, except for financial penalties which we now understand is not a deterrent for anything.
I'll add that one of the penalties for accidents caused by human error is a prison term.
Until a Tesla/Uber/Waymo exec responsible for autonomous driving can serve a prison term for accidents caused by their service, the penalty for accidents caused by autonomous driving is orders of magnitude lighter than those applied to human drivers.
We should also demand that these companies are run by engineers, not MBA types. Otherwise, we'd end up with neglect of safety measures as seen at Boeing. And I'm not sure if any kind of external incentive could change that.
> like, we wouldn't allow someone to be an Uber or Lyft or truck driver if they were candid and said "I'm going to text on my phone, and be drunk driving and sleepy and distracted as often as the average motorist".
But we do allow it. Sure its illegal but we don't put in the effort to actually prevent it. Just because we don't like it and would want it to be better doesn't mean we aren't allowing it.
> We'd demand a way higher standard because these companies don't really have any skin in the game, except for financial penalties which we now understand is not a deterrent for anything.
As we have seen with the titan sub, not even death is a full deterrent. A lot of companies will still risk it for the biscuit and take the risk of getting jailed for their shot at leading the market (in fact, a lot of people risk actual jailtime for financial gain). Having strict regulation and not allowing subpar cars on the street really is the only way.
I agree, though I either don't see (or I see and misperceive) many examples of people mistaking the utilitarian result for the politically acceptable one.
The problem is that if you have safer than human systems but you don't deploy them it's basically killing people. If you had autonomous driving that was 90% as deadly as the average human driver, not deploying it would cause 4000 deaths every year in the US.
Many people are safer than average driver, since most deaths are associated with high risk driving (more than a third are dui alone). So forcing everyone to use autonomous vehicles essentially kills safe drivers.
since this is literally the trolley problem, the issue here is whether you want to take authorship of the deaths or not. I personally never move the lever in those puzzles.
That's only if you're able to deploy it in a way that the human drivers you replace have the same risk distribution as the human driver population as a whole. If your deployment instead skews away from replacing the high-risk human drivers, the 90% AV could make the overall situation worse.
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.
> 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 you're confusing things. Weather changes midway anyone's drive, and all drivers are required to drive safely and reliably even during sudden extreme meteorological events.
For a road to be closed, it takes an administrative action that reflects a decision that's largely arbitrary. Until a third party makes that decision, any driver is required to drive safely and reliability, regardless of the weather.
Readit News
(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 ludicrous, but that's what happens when you suck up a century of propaganda from the fossil fuel and automotive industry).
Here's another example - look at all the little rail branch lines servicing parts of 1944 Boston: https://ngmdb.usgs.gov/img4/ht_icons/overlay/MA/MA_Boston%20...
I don't know how you bring that back after decades of building for cars.
What I did not appreciate, but they did, is that these rails can bring an absolutely astonishing amount of noise into a town, and behind that a long trail of associated social ills. There is a gradual sifting of residents within a certain distance of these trains, based on who is either loud themselves and thus doesn't mind, or else must tolerate the amount of noise these things make.
Our town is old enough that some of the 'nicer' neighborhoods predate the introduction of the rails, so there isn't a strong confounding signal of 'bad' neighborhood correlation at work here. In at least one case there was a house we pushed past our agent's scheduling machinations to see for ourselves, and would likely have closed on had we not happened to visit at just the right time, when a multi-engined repositioning train (which we had no idea was a very common guest on what we thought was a mild mannered commuter rail line) came through. Though unseen and multiple blocks away, it still shook the floorboards as it passed.
Just require distribution centers or warehouses to require a rail connection to the state's rail infrastructure to be approved for construction.
If no rail connection exists, then the state will negotiate who pays for what to extend the network to it.
I imagine that rail line makes a big difference in being able to keep up with the logistics advantages of 6 big box stores within 30 minutes.
Seems US is doing pretty well on prioritising freight rail transport, despite brainwashing, at least compared to europe.
Which is probably a good thing. Until that figure is a lot higher, passenger rail is just one more thing reducing the efficiencies of freight.
In Canada, to my understanding, it's the other way round where passenger trains have been reduced because of the need for more cargo train trips. The USA might be similar.
https://www.bts.gov/newsroom/2017-north-american-freight-num...
https://www.aar.org/facts-figures#:~:text=Freight%20rail%20a....
Travelers and commuters win, cargo wins!
It is funny though, the US built it's current freight network in a comparatively low tech era, yet I doubt it could do it again in the current era due to funding and beauracracy.
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No one (generally) bats an eye when voting at the city level for a $100mm road package.
But trains?
Freight should move mostly by train. We could build rail lines where there are already highways, just swap a vehicle lain for a train rail, all that 18 wheeler traffic can be reduced significantly.
Safer highways. Less congestion.
Rail truly is a unique infrastructure concern and needs to be designed and laid on its own.
...or just kill everyone, problem solved :)
I don't know what building a second parallel railroad system to take over this task would cost, but I'd guess several Iraq Wars.
Making the trucks autonomous doubles their utilization, which means we need half as many trucks, and makes freight cheaper, which makes prices lower, benefitting everyone, especially the poorest.
> As a culture, we've been brainwashed...
This is never the start of a insightful argument!
A rail line is single use, single destination. commuter and cargo cannot mix (one goes high speed and one goes super slow) if they do mix it shuts the entire segment of the track down until it’s off that track.
Roads are multi use , multi location. It seems unfair to compare the cost based on road maintenance vs track maintenance. I would expect something to account for the sheer difference in volume each does
Road trains are both intermediate solution everywhere and also can operate in routes where trains are not economical enough, even if there was a will to do it.
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The billionaires are surely investing heavily on trains and farms.
Which goes to show that money doesn't have that much of an influence in politics, despite popular opinion to the contrary.
The cab can be a lot cheaper, if you don't have to keep a human comfortable and safe inside. Also keep in mind that an autonomous truck can drive 24 hours a day, and doesn't need to take regular breaks throughout the day nor sleep. (They will need maintenance, but probably not more than a manned truck.)
You are right that the costs are real. Things like first/last mile (or loading and unloading) would probably need a major reshake of the industry, if the truck doesn't bring its own labour, in the form of a driver, with it.
Amortized over the life of the truck they really aren't.
Heck, maybe they don’t even need to be articulated. They could look like slightly larger Amazon or UPS delivery vans. No need to worry about jackknifing.
If it’s a fleet maybe battery packs can be swappable so when it arrives at a hub to load/unload it can pick up a charged battery pack.
The only issue is for cargo that can’t be split up.
> Therefore, all safety-critical decisions must be made by the onboard computer alone.
Why is the requirement that all safety-critical decisions must be made on board, versus the seemingly-simplifying assumption that only some or most decisions would have to be made on board, because a remote operator or backend service could be available a lot of the time? It doesn't seem unreasonable to me to have a single operator remotely monitoring multiple vehicles that are autonomous under ideal conditions (driving along a straight road in good weather) and then taking over when necessary. Let's say you would only use such a system for major routes with solid satellite visibility, not last-mile routes hauling heavy equipment on a dirt road in the boonies, or something like that. Maybe this wouldn't work, but it's not obviously ridiculous to me, so I wonder why he just starts out saying the truck most be fully autonomous with no human ever in the loop.
Yes, and that has to be safely possible. From my reading, the article has no problems with remote operators giving command. The truck just also needs the ability to both safely execute them and come to some safe state by itself if necessary commands don't arrive [in time].
The interesting question is how complicated those safe states are to realize. Just hitting the breaks on a freeway seems hardly acceptable. Generally, this being harder than for cars in cities is a core conclusion of the article.
As an additional safeguard, you can make your trucks go into 'safety' mode when connection becomes spotty or when too many operators become too busy with other trucks.
'Safety mode' could mean slowing down the trucks or even stopping some of them. And in general, letting the autonomous systems err on the side of caution more often.
Unlike autonomous cars where everyone needs to go wherever, inter city trucks have fixed well known routes with predicable volume of cargo that can be easily chained together.
If the AV ran into an issue, it could tele-help and have a human operator take over.
Completely makes sense that you could have a person monitoring multiple AV trucks and take over driving when needed.
This analysis seems really suspect to me. Any clarification would be appreciated.
Also recommend checking out the citation. It is an accepted value used in American highway design.
So between which endpoints shall you measure "reaction time"? I'm already priming my reaction by actions which lead up to it. Obviously, an automated driving system doesn't need some of these steps, but it's still running through the same scenario and "thought processes" to reach a decision and course of action.
Once at lunchtime, I had two coworkers in my car. I was driving a manual-transmission Acura Integra in light rain, heavy traffic in downtown Palo Alto. I had a left turn signal and I proceeded through the intersection, when an oncoming car was coming straight at us and couldn't stop. I punched the accelerator and sped through the turn without incident. My coworkers both congratulated me on making the correct decision: to hesitate, or to hit the brakes, would've surely crashed us. But what was my reaction time? My foot already on the gas, I simply made a snap decision in the moment to follow through.
There are a lot of differences between passenger vehicles and trucks. The physical dynamics of articulated vehicles, the mission profile, and social dynamics come to mind. How does a robotruck place cones or flares while it awaits rescue?
Personally, I expect autonomous trucking to be a force-multiplier for humans who were formerly drivers. Such trucks will have sleeper cabs and the human will be there to maintain the vehicle and handle the long tail of tasks (filling tires, cleaning, refueling, repairs, rigging, whatever). You'll get 24-hour operation out of a single human employee because they'll be able to sleep and do other things most of the time. Maybe they'll work a second job as a remote call-center operator.
For lidar, the range is also limited by power limits + physics, which cannot be overcome by increasing money/power/device size. Some dependencies on semiconductor manufacturing tech or better signal processing might be possible to solve with more money.
Short-haul trucking (in-city delivery etc) is where the value is in having agile, self-driving vehicles moving cargo away from supply points… but it’s also the hardest to implement because there are so many dynamic elements in city driving. And largely these light delivery vehicles are already being electrified where it makes sense (UPS, USPS, etc). You are mostly talking about it any advantage coming from removing a human, not the act of rolling electric vehicles into it like taxis where it’s primarily disrupting internal combustion with electric.
Also, any system is eventually going to be utilized at its full capacity. The number of vehicles supervised per agent will increase until the average number of incidents at any one time meets the average number of agents, or beyond, until there is a regulation. Capitalism is a cost optimizer and no cost will ever go unsqueezed - much like the internet is designed to route around network damage, capitalism is designed to route around any such inefficiency as morals or safety standards until otherwise compelled by regulation.
You say it like this is a point against autonomous trucking?
Technical problems are solvable. Political and social problems are basically intractable in practice.
If autonomous driving can turn 'delivering large amounts of cargo along fixed, guided pathways' from a political into a technical problem, then this would be a jackpot.
> [...] capitalism is designed to route around any such inefficiency as morals or safety standards until otherwise compelled by regulation.
No? Plenty of eg cars exceed minimum safety standards. Some brands, like Volvo, are even explicitly sold on safety. Most companies explicitly talk up their morals and ethics, too. Look at almost any old advertisement for examples. Ethical brands are quite popular, and whenever one is found to be only pretending, there's usually a big scandal. So many of them actually practice what they preach.
Similarly, most people are paid more than regulated minimums. According to your theory, that shouldn't happen.
This is a video from our firefighters here in slovenia... Humans are shitty drivers, sure, but how the hell would a computer react to a chaos like this?
Also, since it's a relatively time-insensitive situation (as in, tens of seconds to deal with it rather than seconds), once it identifies that it's an exceptional situation, it can have someone connect to the truck remotely.
And get overtaken by other drivers :) Then a lot of honking and swerving would be needed to get back in the correct lane. Also they sometimes need to back up a bit, to let a 'late' driver to move infront of them, or behind them, move to the other side, interpret what honking means to whom, etc... or drive forwards a bit, or whatever the firefighter knocking on the window tells them, speech recognition is still not perfect and interpreting abstract orders is even worse.
This is covered in TFA, and noted that one cannot rely on wireless connectivity along all highways. Certainly not immediate responses, and doubly-so when the vehicle may be in a deadzone; either a natural one or one caused by overloading the local towers (such as one might find at a remote accident with lots of other motorists) will do.
Focusing on specific routes applies to many many businesses too.
The ability to provide more human assistance in tricky situations doesn't apply to trains at all.
Your claim that they are "describing trains" is utter nonsense.
Also, I feel like there's a lot of talking past one another in these conversations because one person will say "Let's see an autonomous truck shipping hazmat to Pittsburgh in February with freeway lanes shut down" and another person might say "that's a rare instance" but I really don't feel like society will accept anything other than trucks / vehicles that are able to operate under all conditions, with greater safety than the safest human driver. We tolerate human failures but to use them as the benchmark for autonomous systems would be perceived as unethical, because autonomous systems are deliberately designed and any failures by them would be seen as an intentional oversights and errors, and no one at Waymo or Tesla or where ever is ever going to be charged with vehicular manslaughter for an autonomous vehicle error. We'd demand a way higher standard because these companies don't really have any skin in the game, except for financial penalties which we now understand is not a deterrent for anything. My observations are only moderately related but I'm anticipating the same well-trod talking points coming up and want to address them.
That’s not the argument being presented though. For example Waymo claims to exceed human performance by a large margin: https://waymo.com/blog/2023/12/waymo-significantly-outperfor...
(Again, one may disagree about the methodology or the conclusions of the study. Just want to point out it’s not the argument being presented.)
For now what you could do is to demand that anybody that has a DUI or other such item on their record to mandatory only be allowed to be in vehicles that have self driving if the manufacturer is willing to assume liability. And if that doesn't happen then they might as well take a regular cab.
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 long as weather delays only last as long as a storm does.
That's different from rideshare where people do expect to be able to call a Waymo even if it's snowing lightly.
Trucks? waiting? In "just in time" culture of storage management, where buffers are low and delays are nightmare?
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.
First of all for vehicles with total mass of above 3500 kg you need extra license. And also separate one if you have a trailer. This is get it and keep it, until certain age. But good enough often.
And then in general commercial operations also need more licensing. Which needs to be renewed after certain time.
Truth is, I'd prefer the bar at 4,000 lbs, which would limit us to Camrys and CRVs, but 5,000 would really allow just about any reasonable vehicle.
And big heavy EVs with massive acceleration are just too powerful for somebody who's got a Starbucks in one hand, a cell phone in the other, their knee on the wheel, and shouting kids in the back seat. "Pedal misapplication" will go tragic really fast.
5,000 lb limit.
Sincerely,
A Pedestrian
One of the heuristics built into us (because we're mortal beings living beings in a competitive, historically resource-poor environment) is that we trust the devil we know more than the devil we don't, and so unless there's a strongly compelling reason to trust autonomous driving devices a lot more than humans, there will be some inertia against using them, even if the calculations are that it will save X number of lives. I mean, inherent in that calculation is a level of uncertainty and people don't necessarily trust that number, because they don't have a reason to trust it, because they haven't really seen enough to trust it. Why take a company's word for it that it's safer when they have a financial incentive to do some creative stuff to get their marketing pitch? I would say that if you feel it doesn't reflect well on us, it's because it hasn't been thought about enough.
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Half the taxi and Uber drivers in New York are perpetually on a phone call, and frequently interacting with their phones.
I suspect — no, I hope — that anyone who admits in advance that they intend to break the rules, won't get a license.
If an autonomous system can get a CDL, it's probably gonna be more effective at continuously meeting that standard than a lot of the humans that do the same thing (but are distracted on a given day or have started using substances, or didn't sleep well or whatever).
That is not sufficient for self-driving vehicles. The license is the thing that shows "okay, this person seems safe" but then some of the things that keep them safe are the threat of accidentally killing themselves, or being arrested and put in jail for a crime they commit while driving, or the financial penalty of being sued for an injury / damage they cause, or the risk of having their license taken away for errors. If a human being applying for their license was invincible, incapable of being jailed, sued, or having their license taken away, you might expect that our CDL or other licensing processes would be more stringent.
I'll add that one of the penalties for accidents caused by human error is a prison term.
Until a Tesla/Uber/Waymo exec responsible for autonomous driving can serve a prison term for accidents caused by their service, the penalty for accidents caused by autonomous driving is orders of magnitude lighter than those applied to human drivers.
Really? How does anyone get that. I've only seen murder with a car worth 90 days in jail and loss of the car.
But we do allow it. Sure its illegal but we don't put in the effort to actually prevent it. Just because we don't like it and would want it to be better doesn't mean we aren't allowing it.
As we have seen with the titan sub, not even death is a full deterrent. A lot of companies will still risk it for the biscuit and take the risk of getting jailed for their shot at leading the market (in fact, a lot of people risk actual jailtime for financial gain). Having strict regulation and not allowing subpar cars on the street really is the only way.
I think you're confusing things. Weather changes midway anyone's drive, and all drivers are required to drive safely and reliably even during sudden extreme meteorological events.
For a road to be closed, it takes an administrative action that reflects a decision that's largely arbitrary. Until a third party makes that decision, any driver is required to drive safely and reliability, regardless of the weather.
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