“Pity the fool following the truck... “
Or the automated truck following it. Or the one behind it. Or the one behind it...
I think the following distances will be so necessarily large for safety purposes that manual drivers will take full advantage of them. These things are gonna be cut off left and right, braking and slowing, over and over, until they are doing 20 in the right lane, jacking up traffic even worse than it is now.
The trucks will be “talking” to each other over radio data links, so as soon as the front truck begins the braking process, every truck behind it will also do so virtually simultaneously, and perform exactly the same brake inputs. It’s only when the truck has to react to a vehicle that it isn’t linked to over its network does it have to use external sensors like cameras and laser rangefinding.