I don't mean to be sarcastic here, but I hear developers (myself included) throw out "it would be much easier to..." or "this should only take an hour to automate..." all day long.

If it was an easy and profitable problem to solve it would have been solved by now. I agree that it would be very beneficial for everyone if trucks/truck routes were automated (except maybe the truck drivers getting laid off) but it's obviously a very hard and very risky problem to automate.