Hacker News Reader

Comment by dyauspitr | Hacker News Reader

It has happened with Waymo and recently Tesla (somewhat). From there to self driving trucks with the same capability doesn’t seem that far off. Especially if there’s money to be saved. Between the electric fuel and the driver pay I would think these things would be 80% cheaper than the alternative.

View on HN

Electric semi tractors are impractical in all but drayage use cases (port to warehouse short haul). Even then, they require specialized yards and hours to charge, and they are twice as expensive as diesel tractors. Refueling a diesel truck takes minutes. Plus the electrical grid impact to supporting the charging of these trucks, keeping just 50 trucks charged annually uses as much electricity as a decent sized town.

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

could we automate the predictable, tedious sections of long drives on interstates but let humans take over for the complex 'last mile' navigating through towns and to the final destination?

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.

You really think there’s more than five years between now and these things being able to do last mile? I don’t think we have the luxury of imagining in lifetimes anymore like we did 20 years ago, things are changing rapidly.

we're at a point in AI-driven automation where we've seen rapid progress on the 'easy' parts of many jobs, but we don't know whether this is an exponential trajectory (progress continues to accelerate and the singularity arrive) or a sigmoid/logistic trajectory (progress decelerates and and we have to spend more and more compute/time/money to eke out smaller relative gains).

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

Fully autonomous is a long ways off, but semi-automated can't get here fast enough. Drive a comma.ai equipped car over a long road trip or other advanced driving aid, and just feel how much less frazzled you are after driving for a few hours.

  > keeping just 50 trucks charged annually uses as much electricity as a decent sized town.

Doesn't fueling a diesel require the same amount of energy? What's worse, a diesel is expelling the byproducts of that energy use right where people live.

Fueling a diesel actually takes like six times the energy.

I think these fears are over blown just like they were in the lead up to having regular driverless cars in chaotic driving conditions for example in New York City. It all worked out and very quickly and the same will happen with these things.

> Source: I make software for trucking carriers and drivers

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.

There seems quite a practical electric truck system running in Australia. They use swappable batteries loaded onto the truck with a fork lift which wouldn't be a goer for cars but seems not a bad idea for heavy trucks.

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.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com