[kingu]

What is a train engineer? Realistically, there is no better test bed for autonomous driving than freight and passenger trains. It is a fixed track with limited points of interaction and scheduled stops. There really is no need of a driver for these vehicles, yet it is very rare to find actually driverless trains.

It is not a safety issue that keeps engineers behind the controls on trains - many of the worse train accidents are blamed on the engineers themselves and automated systems likely would have prevented those accidents from happening.

So if we can't even maintain driverless trains, why would driverless trucks be the ‘next step’?

Mind, Australia really lends itself to autonomous transport - road trains are common, long stretches of road with little general interaction. But that is a massively far cry from a big rig traveling down the urban highway.

But if you were going to bet on this technology, I'd put money into depots and not the technology itself. Especially in the United States, there are limited corridors which lend themselves to autonomous trucks, at least at the start. And buying land with the intention of developing transition depots to transfer autonomous loads to trucks with human drivers for final mile delivery would seem to be the much safer and ultimately more profitable bet.

[dfwgator]

What is a train engineer? Realistically, there is no better test bed for autonomous driving than freight and passenger trains. It is a fixed track with limited points of interaction and scheduled stops. There really is no need of a driver for these vehicles, yet it is very rare to find actually driverless trains.

This train had a "driver".