Self Driving Trucks are Coming

Insurance rates are due to be raised up from $750,000 bucks for commercial vehicles. Trucking companies under the current rates will not be able to afford an insurance rate jump up to $5 million.

Commercial drivers have largely done this to themselves. Wrecking out their trucks, killing people, breaking speed laws, lane laws, texting laws, hours of service regulations etc. The Man has had enough. They've done everything in their power to keep trucking pay as cheap as possible but the money is just too tight. Many companies are seriously looking at self driving trucks as the solution to increase safety and increase production. We can thank the legions of drivers out there who broke all the laws and regs over the decades for pushing this agenda.

On the road to self-driving trucks, Starsky Robotics built a traditional trucking business

 

Imagine the insurance rate spike when one of these unoccupied robo-trucks malfunctions and kills someone...plus the civil lawsuit against the company who made it and who bought it...25-30 years, maybe. But I see the same collision avoidance, lane departure, and lane change warning systems today and they are just as flawed now as they were years ago. Unless ALL vehicles on the road (including 4 wheelers, motorcycles and bicycles) are automated, then the system as a whole is useless. Remember the automated shuttle bus in Vegas last year that crashed and hurt people...imagine a fleet of something like that weighing 80k lbs on the streets.

 

Dont buy the hype. Its not happening anytime soon... These techiea dont understand reality.. What is gonna happen when one of those robotic trucks the gps tells him to turn down some pos dirt road with a ricketty frickin bridge... At that point which is better to have ? A driver that follows gps or a robot?

 

Come on @scottied67, put the crack pipe down.

 

See, that's what irks me the most. Everyone seems to think that replacing us with robots is *the* way to go, but what nobody seems to realize is that a robot is only as stupid as its programmer is smart (and no, that's not a mixup). What the public needs to really stop and ask themselves is if they want machines programmed by desk jockeys with NO training whatsoever making all the same mistakes, or if they want trained humans that can adapt on the fly controlling these guided ballistic missiles we call trucks. I'd prefer the latter, and not just because I'm one of the folks that would get replaced by the machines

 

The worlds gonna end, the sky is falling etc. Meanwhile the forward park assist system on my GF's car was going nuts because a fly decided to commit sucide on the sensor. Self driving vehicles aren't in the cards for a very long time.

 

Has the statistics changed? In the past, something like 80% of all wrecks involving big trucks were caused by 4 wheelers.

Another flaw with your thinking about us evil truckers, is virtually no one insures for 750,000.
750,000 is the minimum amount of liability required by the feds, many if not most shippers require 2 mil, which is what I have and suspect most others do too, megas self insure and as far as I know , there is no limit. Most if not all refineries now require 5 mil, so companies are already insuring for the numbers you are talking about and have been for many years.
I also do not know the statistics, but would be willing to bet that percentage wise, there are not any more wrecks now,than there ever has been.

I am sure eventually there will be a few self driving trucks in use somewhere, they will still have a driver on board though, so big deal.
They have not made a self driving car work yet, trucks will be years away, and I suspect will have truck only roads for them to work at all, hmmm we can't even think about keeping up with the roads and bridges we have now.

 

I will worry once the liability issues are sorted out. Specifically, who is responsible when an automated vehicle kills someone? Owner or manufacturer. When the automated uber killed someone last year, the person in the seat was charged, not the owner (uber) or the manufacturer of the car.

The post that stated machines can only be as smart as the programmer is WRONG. A programmer is not directly involved. Most machine learning occurs in a black box fashion with cycles. An example first step is 100 similar AIs are run through a simulation. The best is kept, the rest are discarded, and is slightly mutated to created another 100. Rince and repeat. The underlying intelligence is not known. If you want some better examples of this, look at the youtube channel codebullet.

 

You can thank greedy tech companies and their lackeys in the government for pushing this agenda.

 

That'd be me, and I daresay I'm only half wrong. I had to leave my pursuit of a CS degree at an early enough stage that any programs myself and my classmates were working on would only be as smart as we were. But at the same time, you're right. AI is a product of machine learning, which makes it another beast entirely. However, as CodeBullet demonstrates, a programmer still needs to set up the parameters for determining which AI's survive into the next generation (which he at multiple points has stated that he had to readjust said parameters in his own projects), which means there's still room for human error. Personally, I'd really rather cut out the middle steps. Humans can adjust on the fly; AI's adjust over the course of thousands of generations