No. Saved you a click.
"No one really thinks Level 5 autonomy (full autonomy in all situations with no remote assistance) will happen any time soon"
"No one really thinks Level 5 autonomy (full autonomy in all situations with no remote assistance) will happen any time soon"
Level 3 or 4 is more than enough to get most of the commercial benefits.
I never did this myself (except while learning how to drive). And I don't think I've heard about my friends doing this either. Turn around because the road was impassable? Sure. Pass the wheel to someone else? nope.
That means a lot (most?) human drivers are "level 5 autonomous".
Looking at the SAE standards document [0], I can think of a few people I know who only technically reach Level 3. Mostly older women, to be honest. They are only going to drive under certain well defined conditions and will put someone else in the hot seat the trip will be outside a limited comfort zone. They would need someone else to be able to step in at a moments notice to operate a vehicle truly safely. As an aside; the older men are more willing to be adventurous, but also more likely to kill themselves and/or run someone else over based on my experiences with accidents. And in an AI from an engineering perspective that probably bumps them more towards Level 2.
But a truck isn't going to be facing level 5 conditions in the vast majority of circumstances where it is generating economic value. It's probably going to be going in a straight line down a highway or parking in a loading bay.
EDIT And drug/alcohol affected road users probably deserve their own paragraph; but I'm not going to make time to type it up. Just because they might not ask doesn't mean they don't need someone else to drive for them.
[0] https://saemobilus.sae.org/standards/j3016_202609-taxonomy-d...
We've learned a lot of ways to predict, mitigate, and recover from human errors, and the equivalent ecosystem may not exist for nonhuman ones.
For autonomous trucking, you’re grossly underestimating 1) how dangerous these trucks are. A small rear end accident with a car does some damage, a small rear end from a tractor with 80k pounds of cargo kills people. 2) They are hard to drive, hard to navigate in cities, require inspections constantly for roadworthiness and safety. Sure having a tractor pull a load on a few hundred miles of straight empty highway in Texas is doable today, having that same truck get to a warehouse in the center of Dallas is a nightmare even for pro drivers. 3) Plus no one knows how to legislate or regulate these things. If a robot tractor kills someone, who is at fault? The vehicle maker? The autonomy software maker? The carrier? There are already nuclear verdict lawsuits for these types of situations with human truck drivers that can be tens to hundreds of millions of dollars I.e. shut down a carrier bad. You think a bunch of octogenarians in congress know what the hell to do with any of this stuff?
I say all of this while also fully agreeing that consumer autonomy seems to have been solved or is on its way to being solved, I’d bet in 5 years it will be weird to get an uber and there’s a person actually driving. Commercial heavy duty trucking is a whole different class of problems that goes well beyond “can the software do it”.
Source: I make software for trucking carriers and drivers
those drivers could spend their lives working locally (and sleepin at home), develop deep regional expertise, and be able to handle the hardest part of the job without the fatigue from a cross-country drive.
if we're on the former path, you're right. if we're on the later, there comes a point where continued work in automation isn't cost effective and we keep the humans around to handle all the hard 'edge cases' like urban driving to the final warehouse
> keeping just 50 trucks charged annually uses as much electricity as a decent sized town.
Is there a rough estimate of how many miles are mostly hub-to-hub and (can) by-pass urban zones?
> keeping just 50 trucks charged annually uses as much electricity as a decent sized town
My analysis is <150KW PV per tractor. So 7MW is very C&I scale. Scheduling can be tricky.
> having that same truck get to a warehouse in the center of Dallas is a nightmare even for pro drivers
This is the L5 fallacy. We will get commercial viability way before L5.
vid https://youtu.be/jTRHEtfdxOo?t=436
Now starting in the US apparently. The ones in the vid charge from solar during the day. Seems quite a good system.