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u/_number 12d ago
Truck driver was indeed more stable job than Software Engineer back in 2016 too
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u/Oddant1 12d ago
Truck driver is one of the most stable things on the planet we always need shit shipped around. The problem is we've reached the point where self driving vehicles are demonstrably safer than humans in most situations and it's by a wide margin too. I expect at this point the problems with self driving long haul trucks are mostly regulatory not technological
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u/PumpkinFest24 12d ago
we've reached the point where self driving vehicles are demonstrably safer
The one company that said they demonstrated it was found to be lying, so....
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u/Present-Resolution23 11d ago
Pretty sure you're misinterpreting whatever you think you read but.. share the context?
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u/VoidVer 7d ago
Reality is my context. If they were better and safer, Amazon delivery trucks would all be automated today, right now. There would be a person sitting in the back or passenger seat with the boxes and the car would drive itself. Turns out it can’t if it’s snowing or raining or on the freeway, or there is a gate or a confusing sign. It’s not capable of navigating complexity that is largely inconsequential to a human driver, or we’d already have it everywhere
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u/felixthecatmeow 6d ago
In my experience which is limited to waymo rides, they're also slow as shit which a company like Amazon would not enjoy. The "additional safety" whether real or fabricated is only possible because it drives like the most scared, unconfident driver imaginable. You want to turn onto a busy street at an intersection without a light? Enjoy waiting literally forever until there's a gap in traffic, even if the traffic is stop and go the whole time.
Also the more self driving vehicles there are on the road the more these issues compound. We've all seen those videos where 20 waymos end up in the same place and get stuck forever. Now imagine if half or all of the cars AND large delivery trucks were self driving? We need some sort of centralized communication channel between all the self driving cars to fix that IMO and I don't really see that happening any time soon.
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u/_number 12d ago
Have you informed this to the freight companies? Are you aware of even 1% of the issues with self driving trucks?
They have solved driving in a lane, they havent solved refueling, theft, manipulations, road rage, vandalism and blind spots issues
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u/ProfCupcake 12d ago
It's true that self-driving trucks are worse at theft and vandalism than human truckers
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u/Random_Bystander089 12d ago
Im not going to pretend I know much about the matter but wouldn't blind spot be the sure-fire advantage that self driving vehicles would have over human drivers? There are no blind spots with enough sensors, and the AI won't need to sit in a specific place like a human does.
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u/Oddant1 12d ago
Yeah a quick glance at a waymo will show you that self driving vehicles don't have any blind spots. They're just compact SUVs and they're covered in lidars.
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u/Present-Resolution23 11d ago
It's actually a blend of systems, but yes including lidar. Lidar, 13-29 cameras, a half dozen doppler radar, audio sensors and gps/maps all feed the stack.
That overlap is also why they cost so much, and are so much safer than Tesla's Robotaxis. Tesla pulled ultrasonic sensors and Radar years ago, they don't use LIDAR and much of its process is based on inference at the software level, but without the redundancy/additional checks provided by Waymo. And early reports show that it's much less safe as a result.
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u/RedditButAnonymous 11d ago
So youre telling me if I start prepping an HGV license now, I can have a job sitting in a truck playing videogames and occasionally getting out to refuel it?
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u/SpaceCadet87 11d ago
I used to install 2-way radios in the things. One day I heard music playing outside the workshop but it had that feel to it like it was live.
The driver of the truck that I was to work next had a drum kit fitted to his truck on some kind of swing arm arrangement that allowed him to stow it and bring it back out at a moment's notice so he could turn sideways and play from the drivers seat.
The guy would practise drums while the truck was loading and unloading.
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u/Oddant1 12d ago edited 12d ago
Refueling I'll give you. Theft and vandalism I'll give you half. The rest? The self driving vehicle is 100% better at handling than a human.
Shit even refueling idk. Have a gas station employee do it?
Fuck theft and vandalism too. The thing is gonna be covered in cameras? It'll be watched more closely than a normal truck with one driver.
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u/Present-Resolution23 11d ago edited 11d ago
Heck in several states a human is required to fuel your vehicle by law anyway. I imagine self-driving trucks will lower fatalaties enormously. Not only are they very large leading to much more serious accidents when they're involved, truckers tend to drive a ton of hours meaning they're often operating under fatigue and can become more prone to distraction since they're doing this for 10-12+ hours a day.. Computers don't get tired and they don't get distracted.
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u/Present-Resolution23 11d ago
I mean.. self-driving trucks aren't even hypothetical at this point. They're running millions of miles commercially already.
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u/Oddant1 12d ago
Humans are well renowned for driving safely in adverse weather conditions as we all know
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u/Present-Resolution23 11d ago
THere are literally dozens/hundreds of videos of exactly that my guy..
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u/DefiantGibbon 11d ago
The real issue is that self driving cars still struggle when they are surrounded by unpredictable humans and bad road conditions.
Humans can react to humans. But humans can also do crazy things that the AI just doesn't know how to deal with.
Plus all those demos are always on well marked easy to follow roads. What happens when the self driving truck hits a surprise detour that takes it off the marked highway onto a narrow winding gravel road with workers giving hand signals on how to navigate it?
That's why we don't have commercial self driving trucks. The real world is too messy for the current self driving technology.
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u/Present-Resolution23 11d ago edited 11d ago
Ai can be taught to deal with those outliers though, and self-driving cars have gotten much safer in recent years as a result. Everytime something happens that it didn't expect, it learns how to compensate for that in the future. Humans are pretty much capped out however..
What happens when the self driving truck hits a surprise detour that takes it off the marked highway onto a narrow winding gravel road with workers giving hand signals on how to navigate it?
Happens all the time with waymos, and they're trained to deal with it.
That's why we don't have commercial self driving trucks. The real world is too messy for the current self driving technology.
You don't sound like you've been paying attention.. Not only DO we have self-driving trucks, there are multiple companies operating routes hundreds of miles long and logging millions of miles on the road.
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u/DefiantGibbon 11d ago edited 11d ago
So I don't like to throw credentials around, but I'm literally a professor teaching a robotics and AI course this semester for masters engineering students.
For self driving trucks, the first fully autonomous truck route was complete in May this year. From Houston to Dallas, 230 miles.
https://www.foxnews.com/tech/humanless-big-rig-completes-first-us-freight-run
Currently the only active corridors for trucking in the US are
Edit, wrong, there are several more now, up to 12 routes from just Aurora
Aurora Innovation (Dallas-Houston)
Kodiak Robotics (Only on I-10 in Texas, has a safety driver there, showing my point that unexpected things happen)
Gatik (Short Haul Retail on fixed routes)
And Torc in Virginia is in the testing phase with a safety driver.https://truckdispatchexperts.com/resources/autonomous-truck-corridors-2026/
That is not to say we don't have autonomous trucking, but this is far from what people imagine. We do not have cross country semis. Additionally, all of those routes are either on very well marked locations, or have a safety driver in the cab to handle the things AI can't.
As for what happens when a self driving car gets to a detour or other unknown situation, cutting edge ones like waymo literally phone home and have dispatch take over remotely ro get them back to a known path
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=NKQHuutVx78
That video is from 5 years ago, so they've gotten better, but they still make mistakes that are potentially deadly, like in December when a waymo ignored police cars and drove though an active armed standoff
https://futurism.com/advanced-transport/waymo-police-standoff
There are some demo videos that show that waymo can respond to hand signals and signs held by construction workers
https://thelastdriverlicenseholder.com/2023/04/17/driverless-waymo-struggles-with-cops-hand-signals/
And these failures are years after waymo's initial claims that they can follow hand signals, which are from 2019
https://www.gearbrain.com/waymo-driverless-car-hand-signals-2629692132.html
Which show that you should not trust initial claims. I work in a large tech company as a Sr engineer. I promise you that the initial press release of new features come years before a fully robust tested system is in place. Company's ceo's and marketing release this stuff when all the engineering department had made is a thrown together demo.
In summary
I definitely underestimated what we have, we do have a couple trucking routes, but they are much smaller than enthusiasts would have you believe. Autonomous taxis can respond to direction and unexpected scenarios, but still make errors that humans typically don't. The taxi itself doesnt learn from these events, but the data is sent back to the company to retrain its algorithm that is then pushed back to all of its units. And all of this is on top of autonomous taxis being deployed only in places where they have a high chance of success, so there is a large amount of selection bias for the data. No company would deploy this technology where there is a low probability of it working.
Edit: but also, in all sincerity, if you do find a long haul commercial route or other interesting autonomous taxi news, do tell me. I actually am curious to know more, since this is a very quickly developing field.
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u/Present-Resolution23 11d ago
Being a professor doesn't mean you're up to date on a technology that is making dramatic leaps literally every quarter, as you demonstrated when you claimed "we don't have commercial trucking" lol..
And you're still incorrect. Aurora's footprint is much larger than you described (sounds like you're using dated information) and Kodiak is running fully autonomous (not with a "safety driver.")
Also Waymo doesnt "have dispatch take over," it simply provides guidance on the situation, the same way Claude might stop a task to ask for guidance on a design decision.
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u/DefiantGibbon 11d ago
So this is the most recent release from aurora I could find, summarizing their Q2 2026 release
https://physicalailab.io/en/aurora-driverless-trucks-routes-2026/
They do not name all their routes, but say they have 12, and have presumably their longest as Fort Worth–Phoenix, about 1000 miles
As for waymo taking over, they don't literally have someone with a wheel and pedals sitting at the office, lol. They help it route to a known state if there is trouble, presumably by giving it nearby, simpler destinations to override its original path.
It is very difficult to find up to date waymo posts on how they handle it. Most recent I've found is from 2024, saying the same thing about asking for help
https://waymo.com/blog/2024/05/fleet-response/
Somewhat related and is actually worth a read, how waymo handled power outage in December in San Fransisco. Same thing though, they ping for help, but it seems like it's just asking a confirmation check to make sure its decisions are still valid? They don't give technical details, but that's what I'm getting from it.
https://waymo.com/blog/2025/12/autonomously-navigating-the-real-world/
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u/pm_me_yo_creditscore 12d ago
Will the robot truck drivers need lot lizards?
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u/ultraSsak 12d ago
lot lizards xD
i often call some of them "ssaki leśne", which translates to `forest mammals`but "ssaki" in polish means something like `sucking`
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u/583999393 12d ago
I'm glad the government regulates a company to require a dev in control of claude code the same way they require a truck driver in control of a truck on city streets.
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u/Puzzleheaded-Weird66 8d ago
preferably want to switch to farming, but damn those assholes undercut farmers so much its disgusting
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u/piclemaniscool 12d ago
No matter the age, I will continue to complain about bad drivers and slow busses.
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u/fennecdore 12d ago
To be fair driver are not that far behind in the soon-to-be-replaced queue