What Do You Think of Autonomous Trucks?

Since Congress is just now working on changing the laws to allow driverless vehicles, and some states are currently working on it, you haven't seen any driverless trucks yet, because they aren't legally allowed!

Once the laws permit road testing programs to begin, you will start seeing them with babysitter drivers at first, and not long before they are trusted enough to work without the driver, and once a few brave early adopter companies invest in them, and they have a good accident record and good performance and return on investment figures, and the infrastructure and use cases get more developed, then more companies will begin investing in them once they become a commodity item.

The one to two years until we see them in use that is expect to see was the early adopters running test programs, not the major conversion by big companies. That will come later, but when depends on a lot of other factors, so no one needs to worry about their job for at least 3-5 years I would guess, and then it would be a slow growth at first.

Right now we are at the point where computers were when they were mainly lab novelties, and no bookkeeper was worried about their job, but then some big companies stared getting computers for specific jobs, and then within a very short period of time they went from scoffed at wastes of money, to one on every desk.

Except here, the technology for a "laptop" is already mostly finished, it just needs implementation and regulatory changes to bring it into reality.

 

And as far as the electric trucks go, they have limited range (I think I heard 250-300 miles per charge, but we will have to see what the specs are after the unveiling in a few days), so they are designed for the local and regional sector, but that is a large sector, all the logistics companies running from warehouses in the suburbs into grocery stores and such in the cities.
I know in the SF bay area, I see a lot of electric and liquid nitrogen powered reefers (Safeway has a bunch for instance), since a lot of those cities don't want reefers running in the city, and so pairing them with electric trucks would be a perfect fit.

 

Trucker revolution will happen if too many jobs are lost. Rubber tires are too easy to fux with.

 

You can't even get drivers to check their own tires.

 

I think that the intermediate power source well be hybrid engines. I think that they will be either diesel/electric or hydrogen fuel cells. The Army has been working on both with multiple truck manufactures for the past decade.

 

The same thing was said when cotton gins got popular, and when factory automation started being used, and when machines started replacing coal miners with picks and shovels, and when personnel computers replaced large rooms full of women with typewriters, and when large scale crop picking was turned over to machines, and all the other myriad ways that technology has replaced human workers in the last hundred years.

Yes, a few violent types will sabatoge trucks and get long prison sentences, and someone may go shoot up some factory or assault some figurehead of the technology, but most people will be more concerned about trying to find work when their jobs are being phased out, so whether they retrain to support the new technology, or move into other lines of work, life will go on, and the same process that has happened time and time again across all industries and vocations will happen to trucking, and in a few years it will just be part of history, like when the airplane put passenger ships out of business, and the shipping container caused the job loss of most longshoremen, and the truck put wagon masters out of business.

This is nothing new, just the first major impact of technology on the trucking industry since the invention of the truck. Everything else has been gradual evolution, this is a meteor strike that will change what we have gotten used to, but is still just the way technology changes industry.

 

There are already a lot of alternative engine trucks, cng, hydrogen, etc, and a few hybrid designs, so we have already passes that point, without much interest from the industry.
But if Tesla can make a fully electric truck that works well, so that the companies can skip all smog rules, and get lots of carbon credits or whatever, and only have one technology, one fuel, one system too work with, I can see it being very popular for the specific sector that it is designed for, the short haul city service trucks, and other shuttle applications between facilities, like between the off-site warehouse and a factory, etc.

Plus, having the visual and name appeal of Tesla, will be icing on the cake for a lot of companies, especially in urban areas.

It is will be interesting if they can charge at the Supercharger stations, maybe one plug on each side? Lol

 

Unless his truck is Tritium,Hydazine or Nuclear Fusion powered;it won't be anything new and will still have the same limits if it is going to be all electric.

 

Wow, hydrazine! That would go over REAL well... Lol
Even the rocket guys hate using the stuff it is so corrosive and explosive and unstable!

In any case, the beauty of the Tesla truck is that it is using existing technology, the same batteries as the cars, (might even just be multiple of the standard battery packs) and the same motors as the cars, just multiple, probably one per wheel end or something.
This reduces the cost and increases reliability, because the mass production is already happening for the expensive parts, and also makes it so that as Tesla makes new breakthroughs on motors and batteries, they can be directly incorporated into the trucks along with the cars.

And since we don't currently have any all electric trucks, it will be completely new lol

 

But fun and easy to make!