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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.

The term luddite very much applies when the people are spouting anti-technology hokum.

There actually already is such technology, and it’s getting better. Driverless vehicles have already logged millions of miles in America. It is available in consumer vehicles (Tesla).

If you spread lies about the tech trying to keep it from happening then yes you’re a luddite.

The article plays fast with the math. Gee there’s a surprise. Doesn’t mean the tech doesn’t already exist.

The problem with the train comparison is that trains don’t go door to door. They need trucks at both ends. Self driving truck can go door to door, thus beating the train.

They aren’t necessarily using LIDAR, or cellular networks. There’s many ways to solve the puzzles, and various companies are using various approaches.

Actually it IS being extensively used in mining and farming. We have many strip mining operations happening in America today with just a few employees mostly sitting in a control tower watching the automated vehicles dance.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automated_mining
And the farms aren’t far behind:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Driverless_tractor

Automated vehicles are not just the future. They are the present. We have more than enough computing power (your average smartphone has much more computing power than BigBlue had), it’s really just a matter of working the algorithm and data inputs.