Self-driving truck delivers butter from California to Pennsylvania in three days
santacruzsentinel.com
santacruzsentinel.com
The best plan is to prepare, like Yang and others are saying: https://www.yang2020.com/policies/trucking-czar/
So we can soften the blow.
The government should massively incentivize:
- solar farms
- wind turbines
- battery storage deployments
- residential solar w/ batteries and grid-down operation (most grid-tied virtual battery solar stops working completely in a power outage)
- achieve fusion power net output
- elderly and disabled caregivers
- offer an option to teach and mentor people the fundamentals of running a successful small business (expanding SBA/SCORE)
- give people a chance to showcase, see and try out different industries
- setup a factory incubator to allow bootstrapping and designing efficient, streamlined operations for quality products made in the US at globally-competitive prices.
Investing in people and infrastructure brings lots of indirect returns. Do everything possible to help people to succeed and have a future.
A paying job is better than no job. And there is such a thing as minimum wage. And no reason to assume it'll necessarily be a pay cut. EDIT: And according to another comment further down this thread, trucker jobs don't even pay all that well.
> move to a new state where the job is.
Because that's worse than being away from home/family for long periods of time? I don't understand this logic.
Why? Is there something you're missing that requires a lot more workers?
The assumption that people need to be fit into "jobs" is, well, a salaried employment fetish; or the moral assumption that if you don't work a job you don't deserve goods and services.
Now, it's true that there actually is a whole lot of work in setting up and distributing alternative energy devices and infrasturcture. But overall, a lot of human labor is becoming redundant with automation, and there aren't "more jobs than people". Getting people to artificially create businesses as an alternative to salaried employment is also no solution.
PS - "At globally-competitive prices" = "Make workers compete with sweatshop pseudo-slave-labor in other countries, thus ensuring their own poverty and overwork."
I suspect that most people would.
Obviously 1,000,000 is _too much_, but conversely whatever the current rate is, is probably too low.
It helps that I have the benefit of hindsight having only started my career in IT at 27, and done all sorts of other stuff before then, none of which had any long term prospects, nor did it pay $1MM/year.
What is basically happening is the trucking companies are living with a shortage of drivers, and waiting for self-driving to arrive.
While there is this big push to legalize drugs like marijuana it does not negate federal and state rules against its use legal or not and certain occupations.
The job pays like shit. You have to pay $2-5k for classes to get a CDL or get locked in with a company that trains you and you pay back at their variable rates of interest... oh and they "lose payments" often along with charging you high late fees.
They take anyone with a heartbeat. It's the ultimate form of equality. If you're dumb enough or desperate enough, they'll take you no matter your gender, race or self identifying whatever.
The job pays like crap, you're treated like crap and your body goes to shit real fast.
There are regulations, and most of them are pro-trucker, aimed to protect them from abuse by the company. Problem is, a majority of voters have this weird and incredibly stupid fantasy that trucker life equals a cowboy life. Thus, company lobbyists are able to easily manipulate the narrative to the media, public and Congress. Making sure truckers don't get a voice or have a leg to stand on. Most truckers aren't the brightest bulbs in the shed. I had to do it out of desperation from a spat of unemployment. I had a plan and a way out, unlike most of them. What really sucks, most truckers are really good people. They do the job in hopes of putting their families in a better situation. But because the companies run them down and they only get 3-5 days a month of home time, nothing works out as expected. A lot get divorced in their first year or so. Argue? Oh, what's that, there's no loads coming out of butt fuck nowhere Wyoming. Looks like you're stuck there for the week. Btw, you are paid based on miles driven when you have a load. Thus, in that situation, I didn't get a paycheck for the week.
And it's one of those jobs that people need to stay in their lane about. If you were never one, you actually don't know the shit they go through.
So no, it needs more regulation. The kind of regulations that puts a noose around the company's necks.
Quick look, they did change the rules since I quit in 2012. Looks like a 60/70 hour limit in a 7/8 day span.
Though, you're restart is a wonderful 34 hours time-off in... a loud truck stop in the middle of nowhere. Always.
Oh, but you are protected (and I believe the insurance companies help with this too) that if a driver says road conditions are too dangerous, the company can't force them to drive anymore. Doesn't stop them from punishing you afterwards with too little loads.
A good example in the labour market is doctors. While experience may vary, at least in the jurisdiction I live, it is illegal for a doctor to accept more money from me in order to prioritize my care. Instead, the law mandates that patients are prioritized first by need, second by order of contact (i.e. first come, first served). If the doctors are busy, there is no legal priced-based mechanism for me to incentivize directing their services to me, thus there can be a shortage.
I am doubtful that there could be a shortage in the trucking industry. I'm certain if I offered a 30% raise to just about any truck driver, they would jump ship to my operation in a heartbeat. I know of nothing external that would prevent me from doing that. Realistically, I might not be able to pay that much, but that simply means I was never in the market in the first place (as your comment about Tesla alludes to).
It is funny how the term shortage is used differently in the labour market when compared to other markets, like cars. I often wonder if it is because people once heard about doctor shortages, which can legitimately happen (depending on local laws), misinterpreted what was being said, and extended that misinterpretation to all types of labour.
I found the segment: https://www.limitstogrowth.org/articles/2019/11/06/pbs-front...
The more cargo management responsibilities a driver has the later they will get automated. These are also the most senior and well paid drivers. Truck drivers who will be replaced first are going to be the steering wheel holders that drag a dry van from loading dock to loading dock. These are also the most junior and poorly paid drivers.
As automation takes over we'll have fewer people taking entry level trucking jobs (because the jobs won't exist or the pay will be too low) and the industry will automate the harder jobs as the supply of experienced enough drivers slowly drives up and pushed the cost of a driver for those jobs high enough to be worth automating.
I'm sure some people will lose their jobs but I doubt we'll see millions of unemployed truckers and the value of a CDL tank.
These junior and poorly paid drivers are humans who need to eat first of all. If we automate their jobs away we need to come up with a way where that doesn't result in undue hardship.
That said I think you're underestimating how many poorly paid junior truck drivers there are. I don't think there'll be enough cargo management jobs to catch all truck drivers, not by a wide margin. Don't forget that currently the cargo management jobs are already being done by people. It's not like it's a new category of work that didn't exist before.
The amount of job available is going to shrink significantly if trucks get automated. No matter from which angle you look at it that means people are going to need to work less. Which in practice means that people are going to earn less. We need to figure out how to deal with that before it happens. Maybe it resolves itself and that's fine, but assuming it will is playing dangerous games with the food source of people you don't know.
That last 10% is going to be a lot of work.
In 2019 the idea of a vehicle around you simply stopping because its driver doesn't know how to handle a situation is extremely rare.
I suspect that by 2039 it will be far more commonplace, shrugged off as just a fact of life that electronic drivers fail on a regular basis and need to pull over and wait either for intervention or conditions to change.
It happened about as often as it happens to me with a cellphone when neither party is moving between towers and has decent coverage.
We expect cell drops because of a technology constraint, even in big cities. Likewise, I think the parent poster is right that we'll expect it more once it starts happening more.
That's a huge improvement over the last 10% being difficult!
If you need a safety driver 100% of the time, the net gain in efficiency is 0%.
Edit: There's no comment in the article about there being period with no safety driver.
It did talk about "level 4 autonomy" based on a single drive with no disengagements (they mentioned they'd made a lot of drives but didn't mention their disengagement rate overall), doesn't sound like "achieving level 4" autonomy either-either.
If this trial period helps us improve the technology and eventually remove the safety driver after 1, 2, or 10yrs, that is a huge gain. What is the rush? -- every technology takes time to perfect. Lets judge the technology once it has had time to mature.
For owner-operators who live out of their vehicle anyway and are more concerned about getting work than sleeping in a hotel somewhere this could dramatically increase the volume of work they can take on (at least until fully autonomous trucks become widely available and humans are completely deprecated as truck drivers).
From that perspective it would be more efficient, not 90% but there would be significant gains.
But the trucks being that safe is the big question. The article describes a single trip without disengagement. Much more that is clearly needed.
So if I get woken up every 10 miles, am I really meeting the rest requirements?
Edit: Okay, remote driver access might solve this.
I mean, it's possible that demand for self-driving trucks means reliable wireless connections get implemented everywhere they can drive.
Also, Starlink is coming.
I80 goes SF to NJ, but no single interstate will take you from SF to NYC proper.
"I-80 does not enter New York City. [...] I-80's designated end (as per signage and New Jersey Department of Transportation documents) is four miles (6.4 km) short of New York City in Teaneck, before the Degraw Avenue overpass."
These seems to imply short bursts of voluntarily shutting off auto-drive; I'd be curious to understand the rationale for when the two human copilots did so.
IMO this is where self driving should focus, not city driving. Truck drivers or anyone gets the vehicle on the interstate and you can sleep or whatever to the next exit for fuel or your destination then take over again.
So what if it drove itself down the freeway? This is literally the easiest thing that "self-driving" vehicles manage to do.
Did it fuel itself? Did it take exits and drive itself to the gas station? Where did the driver take over when it got near the delivery docks? Did the truck also get clearance and dock itself? Did the truck even pull itself out of the loading dock when it first embarked on it's trip? Those are the hard things to solve, and conveniently are omitted.
The delivery for Land O' Lakes is the first where Plus.ai has been able to disclose companies involved. Kerrigan said he was unable to confirm whether Plus.ai would run similar deliveries for Land O' Lakes. He said the trip allowed Plus.ai to collect data on driving conditions, including rain and snow, which is crucial to ensuring the technology is safe for mainstream use.
TuSimple, another autonomous trucking company, is planning to run fully autonomous commercial freight deliveries in 2021. The company's trucks also run at L4 autonomy, and completed pilots delivering cargo for UPS and the U.S. Postal Service in Arizona this year.
Amazon, Google and other major companies have explored using autonomous trucks to speed up delivery times, address the driver shortage, or potentially phase out drivers.[..]
1: https://www.fijiwater.com/faqs.html
"IS FIJI WATER FROM FIJI?
One hundred percent of FIJI Water is from a single source in the pristine, tropical Fiji Islands, an archipelago of over 300 islands nestled in the South Pacific, more than 1600 miles from the nearest industrialized country."
I've seen it for sale in Europe, which is as far from Fiji as one can be.
They must have a very effective marketing team. It seems every US TV show has Fiji water in the fridge.
Almost! West Africa is a little further.
Excerpt about tearing society apart:
"I believe about 50 percent of jobs will be somewhat or extremely threatened by AI in the next 15 years or so,” says Kai-Fu Lee, who has written a book called AI Superpowers. He fears that the rise of AI will contribute to another alarming trend: the growing inequality in earnings. “AI will exacerbate that and I think it will tear the society apart,” Kai-Fu Lee warns, “because the rich will have just too much, and those who are have-nots will have perhaps very little way of digging themselves out of the hole."
It also mentions China's heavy investment in AI.
So I'm guessing most development work is happening in China, just like several other Chinese based self-driving companies.
Makes you wonder if the things they are claiming to have working, and the accomplishments, are actually true, or just smoke as they hope for a high flying payday by a cash flush competitor hoping to buy advancements.
I don't think the kind of truck they're aiming to automatise ever enter cities.
What kind of drones and what kind of goods are you talking about ? Let's say you want to transport 40T of potatoes over 2k miles, how would that work ?
Drones are good for the last few miles of the delivery (for small consumer goods), and even then there are tons of issues to fix before they'll be viable.
https://www.trucking.org/News_and_Information_Reports_Indust...
> 11.49 billion tons of freight (primary shipments only) transported by trucks in 2018, representing 71.4% of total domestic tonnage shipped.
This is not at all what we want. We need to build an automated electric high speed cargo rail system connecting the coasts and major ports. The system has to have the ability for individual container units to be routed independently.
Nothing would compare to moving cargo at 300 mph or more on an efficient rail system.
We need trucking to be local or short range and eliminate individual trucks for long range delivery.
And then there’s Hyperloop.
Picture caption:
> A safety driver was behind the wheel, but the truck drove _mostly_ autonomously.
Body text:
> A Silicon Valley startup has completed what appears to be the first commercial freight cross-country trip by an autonomous truck
> There were zero “disengagements,” or times the self-driving system had to be suspended because of a problem, Kerrigan said.
What is the "mostly" qualifier in the picture caption referring to?
I guess some US brands offer it too? Even though I know manual is popular in the US. It's kinda funny how the automatic is so popular for cars in the US but not for trucks while in Europe it is the opposite and trucks are automatic and uptil recently cars were manual mostly.
Yeah, probably more expensive than a manual but they save gas which will cost much more long term.
https://www.ttnews.com/articles/manual-transmissions-rapidly...
The big elephant in the room is of course the fact that no one can actually explain how you'd make trucks electric. Cabs aren't fitted with dual 300 litre diesel tanks for show - moving 40+ tonnes takes a lot of energy and a battery that would provide a similar range to what we have now would be gigantic, meaning both very heavy and very expensive.
Batteries are not cheap of course. But then the life time consumption of diesel for a Truck is not exactly cheap either and probably buys you a lot of battery and power to charge them. Assuming a million miles (which is what Tesla is shooting for with their drive trains) and a generous 6 miles to the gallon, we're talking about 0.5M fuel cost at 3$/gallon. Your mileage may vary a little of course but it's a nice round number. If you'd buy Tesla 3's at 50K each and stripped their batteries you'd end up with with 10 x 75kwh = 750kwh (and a lot of premium cars). So, lets just say that amount of money easily gets you into mwh territory which fully explains why Tesla can advertise a 500 mile range, which in a truck doing 50m/h is about ten hours of driving, which I'm sure legally requires taking some breaks in the US as well (i.e, plenty of opportunity for charging, just in case you'd bring up range anxiety as a thing).
As the whole point of a truck is to move heavy loads, adding a few tonnes of battery that you would need for this should not be a problem. Torque is superior with electric. I doubt moving 40+ tonnes is going to be much of a problem given that they routinely demonstrate the torque of EVs by having them pull e.g. freight trains, large jets, or whatever. Also, EVs can do regeneration downhill or when braking and they barely use any power when idling (unlike Diesel engines).
Not true Allison makes pretty standard 6 speed automatics with torque converters that can handle class 8 trucks, look at the 4500 series.
They aren't the most efficient for long haul steady state highway though, Allison introduced a sort of hybrid 10 speed with torque converter back in 2012 for highway use called the TC10.
Other makers of automatics are Detroit, Eaton and Volvo I believe they are all dry clutch designs.
The automatics can have better efficiency do to fast optimized shifting and are of course easier to train. I believe that majority of newer trucks (2015+) are built with automatics now.
I know it’s facetious, but I couldn’t help but think of the human batteries in The Matrix when I read that question.
Also, corporate giant agribusinesses with their pesticide residues and crop monocultures will likely lead us into illnesses and famines from "unexpected" crop failures by putting all their "eggs" into one clone crop "basket" and one region "basket."