yeah, and when the safety driver isn’t aboard and some thing goes wrong? or the safety driver gets so lax since it’s auto driven and falls asleep, or distracted with phone games or such? people drivers are bad enough, I don’t think auto-driven will be any better.
That’s what they used to say about elevators.
Who fills the gas tank if there isn’t a safety driver on board? And if it has to take breaks, and there is a safety driver on board, what is the sense of having a self-driving truck to begin with?
My neighbor was a trucker. Went through all the training and ended up complaining when he got a somewhat self driving truck because it was like he went through that training for nothing. He ended up getting killed in a wreck. His rig slammed into another, an empty flat bed, so bad that it pushed the flat bed through it’s cab and the bed went most of the way through another rig’s box type trailer and knocked the cab of the front truck. Three rigs with the middle being a flat bed and the front truck’s cab getting knocked of by that flat bed. My neighbor never slowed down from that 65-70 mph he was going. Guy in the front truck lived.
I saw news video and pics of the crash and noticed my neighbor’s rig had red painted wheels but the self driver he used to bring home had brand new, shiny Alcoa aluminum wheels. My theory is that he got used to not having to pay much attention and then they stuck him in a non-self driving truck. It happened in the mid-afternoon but I suppose he could have fallen asleep. He did love using his big smart phone too so who knows.
If we’re going to go the self driving vehicle route, especially with big rigs, I want them to have their own lanes with a big barrier between them and regular drivers. Imagine if it was nothing but passenger vehicles or a school bus in front of my neighbor. Add to that, if the rig had no driver.
Maximum Overdrive