Posted on 04/27/2016 12:26:09 PM PDT by JOAT
Some things need a human in attendance.
Pish posh.
You will give up any nonsense about 'independence' or 'freedom' right now!
Dead heading....
For anybody. But the automated vehicle will be able to handle it better. With direct “communication” with the traction control and no delay in reactions it can’t help but be better. Add no ego trying to prove a point, and no ability to get fatigued driving in tough conditions and no road hypnosis. Humans have always been the weak link in transportation. Just ask JetBlue.
yeah, what’s next? Horseless carriages?
Which is driverless, the truck or the car?
Surrender your personal responsibility. NOW!
“In the early 70’s they wanted to build a transit system here in Pittsburgh called Skybus.”
Didn’t they let that thing hang over Corrigan Drive in South Park for years? I remember seeing that as a very young kid (it was long abandoned by then). I think they finally dismantled it in the early 80s.
Wasn’t it built for a county fair in the early 70s?
I don’t know if Skybus was the answer overall ... however, they failed miserably transitioning over to busses instead of building out the rail system. The rail from Library to downtown is great, but they should have worked to expand that to other points in the region.
Busses are terrible ... I remember when PAT went on strike in the early 1990s ... I had absolutely no problems getting into the city during rush hour since no busses were clogging up Route 51 :-). Once they settled, it was a miserable commute once again.
Pity the fool following the truck...
...and what is your opinion to the point that you could say the same about farming jobs?
Economies change, it’s always the reason for constant adaptation. If you assume you can have the same job from your 20’s until retirement you’ll probably find out you can’t...and you’ll be completely unprepared when it happens.
Before the automobile, these jobs didn’t exist. These vehicles ARE COMING, things WILL change.
Too late, the Millenials beat me to it.
Kinda like musical chairs, someone has to keep the lights on.
The pace of change is likely to be fairly sudden and dramatic, therefore traumatic with robotics. Farming jobs have slowly diminished over time, minimizing the upheaval and dislocation.
This constant push for greater and greater efficiency and profitability has been leaving people out of the equation for several decades now. There’s going to come a point when consumers are diminished due to lack of gainful employment.
Smoke from fires, heading directly into the sun with a pitted windshield, bug covered windshield, construction zones, detours, multi veh. wrecks in progress, Trucks blowing out tires just in front of you in the other lane, etc.
I’ll send my automated slave.
“Read up on how fast the infrastructure in this country is falling apart then reconsider that 20 to 30 years.”
We have more than enough cash for infrastructure ... its the way the liberals in the FedGov and their cronys in various states blow that cash to keep their voting base happy.
WAY BAD truck driving under good conditions....
Hackers and hijackers will have a blast with driverless trucks to play with.
The term ‘luddite’ gets thrown around a lot, whenever the subject of automated vehicles comes up. Its almost a mini version of Godwin’s Law.
But the term does not apply at all.
Here is where the assertion takes a wrong turn: the Luddites destroyed technology that had already been developed and demonstrated to work...better than human beings.
There is no such technology, when it comes to driverless cars. And there won’t be.
Does that make me a Luddite? Not at all. Just a person who knows a bit or two about how these systems work. I’ve gone into detail here before about the limitations...and of course been called a Luddite. But let’s take a different approach, and examine the premise of this story.
1. It lists the cost of coast to coast freight. As an earlier poster points out, there are TRAINs for that. I imagine the bulk of coast to coast deliveries are package shipping related...anybody who has to do this on a regular basis would quickly find a cheaper way (train). Anecdotally, I’ve known several long haul truckers, and they have never talked about coast to coast trucking.
2. The article asserts that $3,375 a day in costs is for labor. This is important, because if there is no sound economic reason to go driverless, nobody will pursue it. Is $3,375 correct? Well, a driver on the top end of the scale gets 40 cents a mile...lets add 50 percent for other costs related to pension and healthcare...60 cents a mile...with an 11 on and 8 off schedule, a driver could squeeze in 16 hours in a day...at a typically governed speed around 60 mph, that’s $576 paid to the the driver (and his pension etc). So where does the author get $3,375 from? Well, he probably is looking at what he might pay to send a truck coast to coast...which is very different than the company’s cost...which includes overhead and profit...which will necessarily still be there, even with a robotic truck. So they save $600 bucks - not thousands.
And, they still have to pay people to inspect the tire pressure, lights, etc. on a robotic truck, so the savings is actually less.
Now I happen to know what the charge out rate is for just one element of driverless vehicles - the LIDAR they use. Let me just say that the chargout for 16 hours of LIDAR exceeds 600 bucks. And there’s also computers to be charged to it...and an array of sensors, cellular network subscriptions, etc.
So....at this juncture, there isn’t even an economic advantage to driverless trucks. And, absent government intervention, it will not even be seriously attempted.
As an aside, I would expect, long before we saw widespread use of this on highways, we would see it used extensively in mining and farming, where a lot of the variables could be reduced (ie fixed location radio towers eliminate the need to be ‘on network’). That hasn’t happened full scale yet.
As another aside, I think use of computing power to better manage driver time and truck down time sitting at a rest stop would be a better use of technology to streamline trucking. The railroads do a very good job of this (ie switch off engineers at the right place and time) and the trucking industry could get much better.
Someone driving that slowly for no apparent reason in a middle lane should be cited for unsafe movement.
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