Posted on 11/25/2017 8:27:48 PM PST by 2ndDivisionVet
Link only due to copyright issues: https://www.wired.com/story/what-does-teslas-truck-mean-for-truckers/
I find this to be a fascinating phenomenon. I think the hidden, and perhaps even unconscious rationale, is to preserve momentum, so that drivers actually believe that they are "stopped" while they are rolling. I find that if I do actually stop, I will get to go through, although perhaps a cycle behind my "rightful" spot. It's all academic, as I'm a few hundred yards from my house on these occasions.
Doesn’t it follow that the Tesla car is just as much a fraud? It’s just that its smaller scale makes the “inconvenience” tolerable.
They don’t have to be perfect, just better than human drivers, which is a decidedly low bar from what I see everyday. Granted truck drivers are better than the average driver, but they still cause accidents. Humans aren’t perfect, guess we’ll never get the bugs worked out of us either.
Before they make a single truck, they have a couple of hundred thousand people waiting for their ‘s’ car and they haven’t delivered.... Electric and automated trucks.... That’s another shyster pipe dream waiting for an infusion of cold hard cash from foolish investors. Investors who will never see a red cent of return on their investments.
Remember the autonomous Killer Robot in Robocop that couldn’t figure out how to go down a set of stairs? LOL
Self-driving vehicles will obey the speed limits perfectly, even when those limits are set unrealistically low.
Think about the traffic backups when these perfectly driven vehicles begin to clog the roads where the traffic is routinely flowing along at 20 mph over the limit.
The new cry will be two fold:
1) brake ! brake ! brake!
2) Alahwahoo Whackbar ! You Haul, we stall!
It’s a good thing Musk makes batteries that can store energy on the grid.
Investors who will never see a red cent of return on their investments.
...
I remember when the same was said about Amazon, especially here on FR.
Why wouldn’t the limit be changed in that case?
I don’t suppose Musk would use some of these solar cells for these chargers.
Many truck drivers can go 30 years accident free.
Robot’s errors make truck driving unsafe.
As long as your kid is not killed. Robots make good drivers into bad. That’s the fact jack.
Robots are a strickly legal issue. If Justice big govt wants control, then drivers will be falsely blamed for bad robots. Airplanes still have two pilots after decades, because Robots are unreliable. Deal with it.
Speaking of charging stations ... just imagine how many there will have to be and how much power they will have to pump just to get these wonder trucks over the mountains in winter. (Who will put the mandatory chains on these driver-less vehicles?
And of course inquiring minds want to know were all this power is coming from - wind farms, bio, solar? Just how much acreage does California plant to put into power production just to get trucks over its mountains?
You raise a good issue about power requirements. If long haul electric vehicles become the norm, fueling stations will look something like this. Large short haul trucking firms might even need one at their facilities.
http://www.elp.com/articles/2017/05/ameren-unveils-advanced-distributed-energy-microgrid.html
Same for trucks?
Great comment. Why are they not using gasoline? They wouldn’t run into such problems.
What is your evidence for this claim that robot trucks are more unsafe than human drivers? As you state it as fact there must be a lot of studies demonstrating that fact and I must have missed it. From the data I have seen, fatal commercial truck accidents are caused by (truck) driver error about 30% of the time.
The reason for there being pilots in commercial aircraft is far more complex than “robots” being unreliable.
My biggest problem with automating driving (and flying) is that we have a poor record of securing computer systems.
Used to be we didn’t have gas stations that could fill a big truck in minutes. Solvable problems get solved, starting with where they’re most cost effective.
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