Robot trucks?? Are you kidding??

Im currently driving uber/lyft in San Francisco. A Company is paying me 4k to put cameras and sensors in my car for a year as I drive. When i went in for the install there were hundreds of automated vehicles with all sorts of equipment on them.

I have long shared your skepticism...hell, my GPS can't get me to a customer 10% of the time, so how is an automated vehicle going to work if a GPS has issues so often, right?

I don't know though...seeing a giant garage full of cars like that and all the folks working on them made me stop and think for a minute.

~interesting side note. They intend to subsidize rides when these automated cars go online. I.e. the car stops for food and coffee at starbucks on the way to drop a carload of workers at their job...all riders agree to spend X amount at starbucks=the ride is free. That creeps me out...too much steering of my life. Heh...steering.

 

The government can't even maintain the current road network, what makes people think we can suddenly maintain the extra infrastructure that will be needed for robo trucks to actually get the job done?

I think about as far as we will see is similar to tesla auto driving where it just maintains a lane on the road between whatever speed you set. The whole autonomous driving isn't different than any other, the customer has to want the product and pay for it. For cars, I see that as a long way off. For trucks, it might pencil out as a positive roi, you still need the customer to pay to ship on your autonomous truck. How many have to screw up before people want a stupid human at the wheel? Same reason we still have pilots and train engineers- we are not ready to purchase the service that isn't human controlled because as much as people would like to believe, this world is not perfect and does require at times a human to have a synapse...

 

The technology don't need to be ready if you have agressive marketing. Just look at Microsoft.

 

And even the most advanced self driving features, at least if to listen to Musk, was just ruled to be the cause of a fatal wreck by NTSB.
Then there is the face Uber is so far behind the curve right now, they literately need to scrap everything they have worked on, and start over with proof the the Google engineer they hired to do the job did not use Google tech to do it. (There is a lawsuit the Uber basically admit the engineer stole all of Google's property)
Then, like @gokiddogo said, the roads would need to be actually navigable.

 

A computer cannot, at least yet, look down into the cabin of a four wheeler and see the idiot texting while steering with his or her knee, and then with near 100% certainty predict what that driver will do next. When that day comes, we may have to be concerned, right now, I am not losing any sleep over any of this nonsense.

 

Ive never really read too much about this type of stuff. But here is my simple view. Living in a big city, I will take driving alongside a computer driven car over the mass of distracted drivers all day long. As far as letting computers handle 80,000 pounds moving down the road at 65mph .... welp i only hope those computers have their own highway system and that humans never have to drive alongside them.

 

They won't drive in big cities, they won't drive in a Winter storm, they won't drive where it is not reasonable for them to drive, they won't drive with time critical freight,not yet. They could drive any other time and anywhere else, loaded with freight that is not critical. I can see a convoy of self driving trailers with a cowboy overseeing it. But how would it be different and better from Australian truck trains or intermodal trains at all - I don't know. However, they will slowly become reality and soon as they are more profitable than those idiots abusing equipment, idling when there is no need to idle, throwing out the window their pee jugs, littering WalMart parking lots etc. their numbers will grow in large amount. I also doubt that they will be any more lethal than human driven trucks so often distracted by smartphones and what not.