Will self-driving trucks be an issue for truckers

Companies need someone to blame for accidents do they will keep someone in the truck. As perfect of a drivers they may make them you can always be put in a catch 22 where an accident is unavoidable due to other drivers.

If they do go completely driverless you would think thieves would have more incentives to hijack the cargo by simulating traffic with a couple cars making it stop.

 

I have managed to tear apart a robot 18 wheeler many times on these forums. Designed by engineers who have no idea what trucking is about. A dab of snow in winter has the potential to cover up the sensors, ice them over and boom. One dead truck crying for human support a hundred impassible miles from anywhere, two thousand miles from the company HQ that bought it. HA.

Human drivers will be around long enough yet. They might be herded into drop lots exclusively and away from the customer, shipper etc. Robots can grab trailers a few blocks across town. But most cities are filled with impossible traffic situations.

And finally but not least, I don't want to be the company owner in bed while robots rack up tickets because they don't know how to CAT a load, make them axle and gross weight legal before going out onto the big road. They would be ticket generators and too costly a risk.

The only way to mitigate that is to build a cat scale quality at every dock at the shipper. Something that will never ever happen.

There are a thousand ways to screw up a robot tractor trailer. And the North East? HA. Boston I-93 blocked for hours during the height of rush due to a robot truck needing a reboot or a tow. It's not worth it.

Out west maybe. But the robots wont understand grades. If today's automatics cannot handle grades even with Space Satellite support telling it what is ahead on the road as well as a human driver can there isnt any point.

 

Not anytime soon. I don’t see it affecting trucking until at least 10-20 years from now. The time that driverless cars start getting sold to the public is when people should start worrying about it. Even if it were to happen sooner than expected, there is a way around it. You can just become an owner operator or a motor carrier company and own one of those equipments. Company drivers are the ones that could be affected by this whenever that happens.

 

I've been thinking about this recently and I don't see that happening until many years into the future like possibly decades.

At this point that technology can not recognize the difference between squirrels and pedestrians and the different hazards that only a human can recognize.

If a qualified person has to be on board with an automated truck, what's the point? Whenever it happens that that does come out, that technology is going to be outrageously expensive to purchase, as technology always is initially. So just picking random numbers, a trucking company could spend $150,000 on a truck and hire a driver, or they could spend $450,000 on an automated truck and hire a driver. It kind of defeats the point. Then it will take many years for the price to come down even if they can figure out the technology.

So initially, I would guess the megas would be first with that sort of thing. But that doesn't make up for all the owner operators and small companies that probably make up the bulk of trucking. It's hard to imagine a small Paving contractor or a very small local delivery company with three or four trucks going through all that expense even if the technology was possible.

Eventually things will change but for at the very least the next 10 years it will be as it is. And most probably you won't see that kind of thing maybe for 20 or 30 years and maybe more.

If the whole United States government is so safety oriented that someone can't take a drag of pot on the weekend and then go back to work in a few days, what kind of rigorous testing and documentation is an 80000 pound driverless vehicle going to have to go through?

And by the way, don't forget all the Toyota Camrys that had acceleration problems that had accidents and killed people and there have been other cars that have had computer glitches that have done the same.

Even the technology we have now is not perfected. So until that technology is a thousand times out of a thousand times one hundred percent safe, you're not going to see a driverless 80000 pound vehicle. Something of that size with a computer glitch would be a weapon of mass destruction.

So if you really want to drive, go get your license.









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I don't see it happening. There are so many safety issues that it makes it impractical. And all it would take is a hacker and you would have a real life Maximum overdrive.

 

You bring up good points, but driverless does not need to take over all the functions of a regular OTR driver—at least not yet. The current goal is probably something much more simple and practical. For example, driving through “freeways only” that have little to no traffic, such as I-80 from Omaha, NE to Salt Lake City, UT. The driverless truck does not need to enter the city at all. Big lots can be purchased outside the cities where the driverless truck can exit to this lot. It could be like a rest area, but in this case a drop yard for driverless trucks.

Laws can be passed to allow driverless trucks to remain on the left lane in areas of the freeway where there is commonly a bit of traffic activity (Cheyenne, Rock Springs, and Evanston in WY). Laws can also be passed to not allow driverless trucks to operate during winter months.

Long haul seems the easiest to have driverless trucks take over, at least on some parts of the country with little traffic activity. With the technology perfected, a good number of long haul routes can be done by driverless trucks and then human drivers can pick up the loads from these large drop yards for delivery.

 

If human drivers relay off robot trucks then mileage pay has to be abolished. You would take upwards of a 2600 mile haul and chop it into a smaller pie for everyone except the owner of the robot truck and hopefully the owner of the truck the human is in.

 

It's the same in the ag world tractors already drive themselves for years now but still need a operator who will check the oil tire pressure strap un strap hook up un hook trailers within the next 20 years I do see a good possibility that trucks will be able to steer themselves and be able to go with the flow of traffic but we are still a very long ways away from fully automated and dont think that its something to fear in your lifetime

 

I am very aware of the Ag tractors and their abilities. They really do not need a human to plow a field perfectly accounting even for small changes in land rise and fall by a foot or so. They are almost alive essentially. Put em into a field and turn em loose keeping a eye on them. Sometimes with the right tools they will count the harvest in sections of the field to know which is good, bad or middling even. It's amazing.

I hate to be difficult with robot trucks. Maybe it's because I'll die a trucker and can think of a number of things that will be a good thing to have a seasoned trucker to deal with.