No human truck drivers in 10 years?

on the conspiracy side, are they still gonna try to put a chip in every1 by 2018 ?

 

Not a big deal..I got mine a couple months ago- the Early Bird Special.

Accordingly...I wonder if one could then drink and drive if running controls from home?

 

Oh well, we can all just go home now.

 

The truck industry has been in testing MUCH longer than the auto industry.

Early "live" test (road trains) were running as far back as 2003 that I am aware of, in the truck industry.

 

No way it will happen. DOT won't have anyone to ticket then. They will never allow that.

 

used to think the same way about construction. thats why im trying to get into trucking

 

seriously??? you believe this bs??? i've gotten my warning, i will say nothin further... hahahaha

 

What infrastructure? The car that google is testing is designed from the ground up to work within the existing infrastructure we have now. It requires nothing external in terms of infrastructure beyond a GPS signal. It uses it own internal sensors and processing power to sense and work with other traffic, pedestrians, bicyclists, trucks making deliveries, construction zones, the whole bit. I see no reason why adapting the technology to trucks should require anything different in terms of infrastructure.

But once it happens, and it WILL happen, drivers will still be required by law to monitor the system. For a while. But that will change eventually. And I don't think 10 years is a realistic time frame for trucks. It'll have to be cars first and we might see that in 10 years. Then trucks will follow at some point later. Could 10 years after cars hit the market but that's only a guess. Could less, say 5 or more like 20. No idea how long it will take after that for driverless trucks to be legal. But you can bet that once they're driving themselves and the safety record shows they're safer when the drivers let the computer do the driving, which will happen (the only accident the google car has had was when the engineer was driving), the trucking companies will realize that drivers are nothing but a needless business expense and will lobby hard to make it legal for no drivers. It will happen. But not anywhere close to 10 years.

Now once that happens, certain parts of the current infrastructure will have to change but those changes won't be hard. Instead of employing drivers, the industry will need fuelers who will service the drone trucks as they pull in. And the shippers will need properly trained people on hand to be responsible for 100% of loading and securement. Its going to happen. Its inevitable. The industry will still need people but not nearly in the numbers that it does now.

 

Umm... 95% of the planet uses the metric system. I don't think its going away.

 

jgremlin is right, it requires no new infrastructure. GM is looking at producing and testing automated cars starting in 2015, but most likely won't hit the market until 2020. Google only has 300,000 miles logged with their cars so it's quite a ways off when you look at the amount of testing, data and manufacturer set-up for it all. There have been some predictions with 75% automated cars by 2040.

There is another system that has been tested in China that uses camera sensing instead of GPS. It also needs no infrastructure.

We'll see what happens. It won't be anytime soon.