Posted on 05/26/2014 3:15:22 PM PDT by Kaslin
In August of 2013 I wrote Message to 5.7 Million Truck Drivers "No Drivers Needed" Your Job is About to Vanish.
The key word in that sentence is "about". I did not mean immediately, but I did mean a lot sooner than truck drivers and the general public expect. Most protested. I received many emails saying this would not happen for decades.
Many truck drivers thought it would never happen. Most mentioned insurance issues. Yes, there are problems, but time has marched on even quicker than I thought.
TechCrunch reports California Will Start Granting Licenses For Driverless Cars In September.
Come September, the California Department of Motor Vehicles will begin granting licenses to select driverless cars and their human co-pilots, which will make it a bit less legally iffy as to whether or not they’re actually allowed to be on a public road.
The good news: The license will only cost $150 a pop, and that covers 10 vehicles and up to 20 test drivers.
The bad (but probably actually good) news: You probably can’t get one, so don’t go trying to make your own Googlecar just yet.
Stiff License Terms
Yes, the terms of the license are stiff including $5,000,000 insurance against personal injury, death, or property damage. And a test driver has to be able to take immediate control of the car at all times.
Nonetheless, the licensing is a big step forward. Totally driverless cars are but a single step away. All that needs to happen is for California to eliminate the requirement that someone has to be in the car at all times to take control.
A big issue is that radar can detect size and shape of objects, but it does not have human judgement regarding danger. For example, a balloon blowing across the road is a much different thing from a hunk of metal the same size sitting in the road.
Such difficulties will be overcome.
Incentives and Implications
The implications on the shipping business are staggering. A full-time truck driver might cost as much as $100,000 a year. The incentive to get rid of millions of full-time drivers is massive.
A July 2013 Truckers Report headline reads ATA: Self-Driving Trucks Are “Close To Inevitable”
However, the article itself dismissed the idea totally.
“People come up with these grandiose ideas,” says Bob Esler, a commercial trucker for almost 50 years. “How are you going to get the truck into a dock or fuel it?”
And then there’s loading and unloading. Pre-trip inspections. Signing for drop-offs and pickups. Making sure cargo is properly secured. Making sure the cargo that’s being loaded actually gets loaded. The list just keeps going on and on.
The Last Mile
Many of the objections in the above article have to do with the last mile. Let's assume someone has to load the truck. Let's also assume an actual skilled driver has to dock the truck and make the final delivery (arguably a bad assumption).
Yet, even if those assumptions are true, nothing stops a trucking company from having distribution facilities right off an interstate near major cities, where local drivers deliver the goods the last mile.
Why can't all but the last few miles be driverless even if a skilled driver is needed some step of the way for safety reasons?
Technology marches on at a breathtaking pace. We might actually see commercial driverless vehicles on the roads within a few years.
What happens if there is a loss of electricity?
You maintain a battery backup that only needs to power the computer for ten seconds or so, until the vehicle is safely stopped. This is trivial. All laptop computers come with such a battery :-)
How about a computer crash?
Often hardware that is required to be highly reliable has multiple backups. The Shuttle flew on three computers, and those computers' decisions passed through a voting module. If there was a difference in calculations, two computers overruled the third one. As the cost of computer hardware is already inconsequential, this is a non-issue. This is already done at every telecom, ISP, and bank. Crashes of their networks are extremely rare.
In the event of a computer failure, can vehicles be programmed to simply drive a straight line and slow down to a stop? What happens if they are on a curvy mountain highway?
As the computer will remain fully operational after the failure, it will do whatever is most appropriate to safely park the vehicle, including the special rules for parking on a slope. But as the final backup, if computer control disappears, two simple parts (resistors!) can gently drive the brakes to full and the accelerator to minimum, and then the engine stops with gearbox engaged.
Generally, there are many things that can fail in a vehicle; the computer should be able to decide what to do in each case - the failure of brakes, of the gearbox, of the engine, of a wheel, etc. However this does not appear to be complicated, as operational margins of all those devices are well known. For example, a vibration sensor at the left front wheel reads high, whereas other wheels are OK. This means that the left front wheel is flat, or otherwise defective. (If you have a pressure sensor, it helps.) Brakes will be checked on each application by several acceleration sensors (you can get them for a few dollars at SparkFun.) The engine response should follow the accelerator position; and so on.
Oh wait, you’re from Cali. No wonder. The least semi friendly state in the nation. Personally, I think trucks should boycott Cali. I do. I refuse to haul anything there.
And there are lots of us - the ones who actually have an IQ - who also refuse to go there. Your regulations make it very unprofitable to haul into California.
Trucking is a business. It’s about profit. That’s the part you don’t understand. Tractors cost upwards of $150,000 now. Trailers can be more than that for many types. Start adding computer systems to handle automation, along with the drive motors to replace the human and sensors to make sure it’s all safe, and you have nearly doubled the cost.
Trucking companies would rather pay a human. As a trucking company owner, I know I would.
Step away from the bong.
Then it's not a problem at all. I am only able to provide input from the side of computer control; your input from the side of an operator is appreciated!
That "learning" problem has solved for a long time. Programming it used to be an intro exercise for AI and neural networks students.
On the other hand, they will be developed and manufactured by Government Motors .... a company with a concept of trust that your life will depend upon.
That was human error. DST is easy to handle programmatically, the computer you’re sitting at does it twice a year, so does your phone probably. Depending on what kind of features are in your car it very well might ALREADY be successfully dealing with DST. I’ve “proposed” a system that used stuff we’re putting in cars RIGHT NOW. The only big addition is adding light reading to the cameras, which will be absolutely necessary for any form of self driving anyway.
And I’ll reiterate we’ve already got a lot more in cars RIGHT NOW. Lane control is already there, speed control been there for decades and getting better every generation. Collision avoidance already there. These are ALL self driving features that have been introduced. Look at the guy upthread talking about is 2014 jeep that can handle itself on the freeway, yes indeed they have been introducing these features.
Yes, but do they only speak Spanish and brake for Latinos?
The truckers from south of the border are so much more remarkably adept in the Norteamericano business model.
Seriously - you should spend a day in the passenger seat of a semi in your area one day. Preferably with an owner. If you’re ever up here in Washington please let me know. I ‘d love to talk to you for a day about this, and show it to you from the other side.
I understand the ability to program it. The sensors would be prohibitively expensive. The infrastructure requirements are more than anyone wants to pay for as well.
If the idea is safety, there are lots of things that the Fed DOT and FMCSA do to make safety worse.
We don’t need more govt regulations and oversight. The old ways of rugged individuality and self reliance don’t need to be replaced by software. Just because we have the ability to do things doesn’t always mean we should.
If you ever get up here, let me know, please.
Put them on automated tracks, kind of like rails....
Our airplanes are mostly autopilot now too, but there are still pilots.
There are still going to be humans being the wheel.
Conservatives by nature dislike change. Leftists hate trucks and automobiles though, are always trying to force communal trains, so conservatives will come around. Personally I can’t wait to buy a robot car.
I saw a truck driver backup a 18 wheeler and basically bend that truck in two and slide the truck between two others quicker then I could have paralleled parked my car.
If I resided in an area with interminable gridlock and a daily commute of over an hour one way that chiefly involved sitting in backed up traffic, I might want a self-driving car. I don’t. So, I don’t.
If I’m in a car, I greatly prefer to drive it. I enjoy a good car, the feel of the engine, the steering, the suspension and controls. Why would I want to abdicate that to a computer, if I’m still able to enjoy it?
I had a downtown office for 13 years and could parallel park a full size pickup or van in about five seconds, if the dolts who didn’t know how to parallel park hadn’t pulled right up on my bumper despite the turn signal indicating that I was going to back into the space.
if they require gps to navigate when that system fails’onboard or the gps system goes down due to failure or they can’t get a signal where they are...
a car needs one single rooftop device. semis by their size and height differences would need several more.
You could get a cargo mini-van, outfit it with a comfortable bed, computer desk, bigscreen. Program it for an 8 hour trip and hit the rack.
Ska-rew the TSA.
Today is a holiday...chances are theane switch is dicferent on holidays and weekends, than it is during the week.
I am reminded of when my place of work first got automatic locks. The building locks itself at 5:15 pm and opens back ul at 7:45 in the morning...and is locked all weekend. Guess what happened the first long weekend? We inadvertantly left the building open all day on Monday. So the car’s system would have to know the timing of all dual direction freeway lanes, including weekends, holidays, special events (there’s a stadium in St.Louis), and rely on continuous human input to get this right. Again this is just one small example of tbe thousands of problems to overcome.
And once more, none of the accident avoidance type systems you are listing have anything to do with driverless cars....don’t believe me name one that allows the driver to close his eyes, even for as little as ten seconds.
People still enjoy horses too. In time car insurance will be less on a robot car. People will be able to live farther in the countryside and sleep on their way to work or chat and surf the web, which they increasingly do illegally now. They can enjoy a cold beer on the ride home. Possibly the biggest benefit is being hassled less by the jackboot armed highway robbers, which has become the ugly public face of big gov.
In a semi, you don’t just drive the nose like a car. We are more concerned about the back of the trailer, as it does not directly follow the tractor. The longer the trailer, the larger the offset between the two. That’s why we make such wide turns. Especially right turns, as it is against the law to run over curbs.
A tractor trailer would require one unit on the cab and two on the trailer. Plus a way to connect them reliably - and also be compatible with every other trailer in the company.
Plus sensors for wheel spin in adverse conditions, automated connections for air and hydraulic lines, motors to raise and lower the landing gear on the trailer, sensors to ensure all of it was connected/disconnected properly, etc.
Imagine a computer deciding when it was ok to drive into on oncoming traffic in order to clear a trailer in a turn. Empty trailers have little or no traction when braking - emergency stop? Not.
The number of fatalities would make all the automation folks wish for the old days. And the costs of goods delivered would skyrocket. Because everything gets there by truck. Everything.
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