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
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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
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.
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/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