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Comment by run4yourlives | Hacker News Reader

And this is the true market for robotic vehicles (at least at the outset).

Transport trucks spend hours on interstates between points going in relatively straight lines, at relatively low traffic times.

The trucking industry will be dead 5-10 years after robot trucks start appearing on the road.

EDIT: Sorry "trucking industry" should be in quotes, as yes, by this I mean the idea of people driving trucks, which is 90% of the "industry". The actual industry itself isn't going anywhere, agreed. My fault in the miscommunication.

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I'm pretty sure that long-haul truckers are well under half the truck driving profession. Pay attention to the number of semi-trucks delivering food and other products to schools / restaurants / convenience stores etc. Oh and those drivers have to unload the shipments as well. I don't think the truck industry will disappear, but there will be a shift in the mix of long-haul vs. short-haul truckers.

The "shift" as you put it will be very temporary though. It will quite quickly become common place for all commercial vehicles to be self directing once some vehicles are. (Think FedEx, UPS leading this charge)

That said, that "shift" is when it's going to be a really, really shitty time to be a truck driver, as the influx of people competing for fewer and fewer jobs is going to drive prices (wages) down into pits of dark despair.

With FedEx and UPS you still need someone to drop the package in the mailbox...

Sure, but now that person doesn't need a commercial drivers licence, or a licence at all.

IIRC, If you are under 26,001 Lbs GVW you don't legally need a CDL (unless Hazmat). Some carriers like UPS/FedEX may require a CDL anyway, but that is a company policy.

> Sure, but now that person doesn't need a commercial drivers licence, or a licence at all.

I'm pretty sure the laws stipulate that a licensed driver must be in the drivers seat.

This is a very important point. Not just that, but the "offload person" won't be a member of the teamster's union (seeing as how they aren't actually driving the truck) and will have a more reasonable wage.

As chollida1 points out, UPS/Fedex may not be allowed to lift the CLD requirement quite yet, but that will probably come in time.

I'm not really thinking FedEX or UPS, I'm thinking of the driver for Reinhart food services delivering food to my son's school. That is a Semi-truck backed into a very small parking lot and he has to hustle a dozen or more two wheel hand trucks full of food/supplies off the truck to the kitchen, before he goes on to another school/hospital/restaurant.

Not so much the industry as trucker as a profession. Trucks will be all over the place, just not driven by humans.

And then there's all the service stops which now offer food, etc for truckers. I expect few of them will successful transition to serve tourists exclusively.

The industry will be just fine. It's just the truck driver profession that will die.

The existing actors, however, might well be unable to drive that transition and they might consequently die and be replaced by other, new actors.

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