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Comment by cbanek | Hacker News Reader

First off, congrats! I think self driving trucks have a lot of promise and would really change the American economy.

I'm curious as to the ways that the self driving problems in trucks might be different to the problems of self driving cars. For example, with heavy trucks, your braking distance must be a lot larger than a normal car. So things like following distance must be different. Also having to worry about skidding and the direction the trailer might move.

Also, I imagine that you have to be pretty careful about cars cutting you off. It seems to happen all the time on the road, and is more dangerous than people give it credit for.

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> I'm curious as to the ways that the self driving problems in trucks might be different to the problems of self driving cars. For example, with heavy trucks, your braking distance must be a lot larger than a normal car. So things like following distance must be different. Also having to worry about skidding and the direction the trailer might move.

Right on the money. If you slam on the brakes on a truck, you and your trailer can jack-knife, sending the trailer the wrong direction. It's a more complicated controls problem than in a car as well!

> Also, I imagine that you have to be pretty careful about cars cutting you off. It seems to happen all the time on the road, and is more dangerous than people give it credit for.

I've spent hundreds of hours in our truck over the last 3 years and my god drivers are absolutely terrible around trucks. You have an incredible view of the road from up on high in a semi, and the spatial awareness compared to a sedan is way better, so the crazy maneuvers happening around us seem a lot crazier. In California trucks can only go 55 mph, so we get a lot of folks (even in normal driving) trying to speed around us during merges on/off highways.

> In California trucks can only go 55 mph

lol :)

Well, legally...

Understood :) I had this idea myself but had no real way of pulling it off. I have believed for a long time that the real wins in autonomous vehicles would come from long haul trucking, but the last mile problem would really seal the deal. I'm excited to see you guys succeed :)

I'd recommend being careful about making flippant remarks on public forums lest some future litigious asshole try to make hay out of it.

But on point: on I-5, for one example, I've encountered semis doing 80+ MPH in loose groups and not at all unsafely.

It wouldn't take many semis doing only 55 to make life miserable for many of your colleagues and competitors, especially if they face driving-hour limits and logging constraints that you don't. Has that issue been hashed out internally?

Do you see the move towards autonomous driving being regulated to the point where they are required to adhere to posted limits.

Are you free to talk about liability concerns? Is there a consensus on how unmanned vehicle will affect the outcome of a suit arising from any accident. I assume these trucks have more than every angle covered to protect against false claims

> Do you see the move towards autonomous driving being regulated to the point where they are required to adhere to posted limits.

Yes. Starsky early on made a choice that we will operate in an explicitly legal manner, and avoid the grey areas of self-driving. That means a person behind the wheel on public roads in California, but we're all-clear in places like Florida to remove the person behind the vehicle.

> Are you free to talk about liability concerns? Is there a consensus on how unmanned vehicle will affect the outcome of a suit arising from any accident. I assume these trucks have more than every angle covered to protect against false claims

It's still an open question about how best to insure autonomous trucks. Getting a truck on the road, legally able to drive is surprisingly difficult. Watching Starsky struggle from the inside to get our first truck on the road hauling freight at the beginning was sort of a confidence builder in how the DoT and the regulatory organizations work. We are legally insured, both our normal trucks and autonomous trucks. And of course, we've got a ton of cameras in case of an accident.

In case anyone isn't reading the article, these aren't "autonomous self-driving" trucks. They're remotely controlled trucks. Though I think Starsky has some longer-term goals of making some highway portions autonomous.

(Starsky engineer here)

That's a blurry line.

We think of it like a spectrum running from hands-on-the-wheel, manual actuation of the brake/throttle/etc. to full autonomy. The middle parts are "supervision" where the human isn't manually pushing the pedals, but might, for instance, tell the truck to take an exit, or slow down, and the truck can do all the acceleration/braking, lane changes, etc on its own.

This pattern of "supervised autonomy", where you automate the low-level (and safety critical) parts, but leave the higher-level decision-making up to humans, has surprisingly broad applicability. That's part of why I'm excited to work here.

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