
Driverless electric truck starts deliveries on Swedish public road - Melchizedek
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-einride-autonomous-sweden/driverless-electric-truck-starts-deliveries-on-swedish-public-road-idUSKCN1SL0NC
======
melling
There’s a fortune to be made in the global freight industry.

[https://www.cnbc.com/2019/05/15/convoy-flexport-
automating-t...](https://www.cnbc.com/2019/05/15/convoy-flexport-automating-
the-shipping-industry.html)

There are tens of billions that can be carved out with automation. Electrics
near large urban areas will definitely help air quality.

~~~
pbhjpbhj
Tens of billions of wages no longer to be paid out to truckers. Amazon seem a
long way on with packers too.

That's a lot of wealth transfer that's no longer going to happen between
companies and poorer people; seems we'll accelerate wealth/income disparity.

~~~
jryle70
Or a half full view: tens of billions, possibly more, will be paid to the same
truckers in their new, more fulfilling and healthier occupation?

I don't know which scenario will play out. Neither do you. We'll have to see.
Better yet, strive to make my scenario the reality. Complain about automation
wouldn't help.

~~~
chpatrick
What I fear is that the new, more fulfilling occupations you describe will go
to the next generation of non-truckers, not those who lost their jobs.

If you spent your whole life driving trucks and it's what you're good at, can
you really transfer to a new occupation that's more fulfilling and well-paid
in older age, or will you just be left unemployed or stuck with a worse job?

I think more automation is absolutely the future but we need to find some way
to take care of the people who are left behind, and not just say "oh they'll
get some other job".

~~~
gdubya
some way to take care of the people left behind.... some kind of Income that
was Basic but Universal...

------
dmitriid
The gist:

> The T-Pod has permission to make short trips - between a warehouse and a
> terminal - on a public road in an industrial area in Jonkoping, central
> Sweden, at up to 5 km/hr, documents from the transport authority show. > >
> Einride would apply next year for more public route permits and was planning
> to expand in the United States.

So, not as sensational as the title would lead you believe.

~~~
sorenjan
Whoever claimed that Jönköping is in central Sweden needs some kind of
measuring device, it's quite clearly in the south. Even if the northern half
is comparatively sparsely populated it still counts as part of Sweden.

[https://www.openstreetmap.org/?mlat=57.783333&mlon=14.166667...](https://www.openstreetmap.org/?mlat=57.783333&mlon=14.166667&zoom=12#map=5/62.664/18.853)

~~~
dsfyu404ed
It's like when people say anything more than an hour north of NYC is
"upstate".

You kind of need to have a "there is no land beyond the beltway" world view to
wind up working for most media outlets anyway (not sure which is the chicken
and which is the egg) so this is "central Sweden" by that yard stick.

~~~
CPLX
> It's like when people say anything more than an hour north of NYC is
> "upstate".

That is a correct statement that essentially nobody would argue with.

The more aggressive and somewhat arguable view is that upstate is anything
north of about 125th street.

~~~
MagicPropmaker
I was born in Brooklyn and (seriously) everything north of The Bronx was
upstate.

~~~
CPLX
I mean realistically the only actual argument is if the upstate line is there,
or immediately north of Westchester County.

------
adav
I wonder what would cost the Transport firm more: the time impact due to the
low 5km/h speed or the costs of a human driver per truck?

At was speed does the automated system pay for itself if speed vs human is a
reasonable trade off to consider?

* Not considering the cost of doing the research and the cost of the self-driving truck.

~~~
Tade0
Truck drivers in the EU can't spend more than 90h driving during any given two
weeks, and they usually go 80-100km/h, so the break-even point in terms of
time alone here would be around 22-27km/h.

My take is that at 30km/h they would make a very compelling case - since
that's the minimum highway speed in some countries.

~~~
skohan
Having automated trucks clogging one lane at 30km/h would be disastrous for
PR, and I imagine it would have a very negative impact on traffic in general.
As far as I'm aware, the safest and most efficient scenario for highway
traffic is to have cars and trucks traveling at equal speeds.

~~~
emj
You get better throughput with less speed in dense environments, see
pedestrians and bicyclists. The problem with highways is that they are
optimized for speed and sparse environments.

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pojzon
That statement in my country is just false: "face a growing shortage of
drivers"

They just want to cut on costs.

~~~
donaltroddyn
As with all labour, they face a growing shortage of drivers at the rates they
want to pay.

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dagw
Here's the road (Skruvgatan) where the initial tests are being done:
[https://goo.gl/maps/mRj1qyMtYckVKzDz5](https://goo.gl/maps/mRj1qyMtYckVKzDz5)

~~~
dmix
These industrial parks look like the perfect semi enclosed environments to
start using these level “4” vehicles in production. Plenty of wide open lanes
and clear paths, not too heavy traffic and no random tourists gawking at them
or being put at risk.

------
elamje
I have been resistant to the idea of government/state support for people who
are losing jobs to automation, because I think people will adjust over the
long run and focus on more digital jobs. However, in the nearer term, there
does seem to be a bigger case to be made for some sort of support since
trucking a top occupation in the US, and #1 in most states.

In 10 - 20 years it seems concerning to think that 2 - 3 million people will
be out of traditional work with little or no education. Additionally, young
people will not have that occupation as an option. Any industry that large
(including traditional diesel truck manufacturers, truck stops, gas stations,
truck mechanics, etc.) will be drastically impacted, all in a relatively short
time span.

Should there be some help? Should the government be rapidly retraining truck
drivers for something else in the next few years?

~~~
cabaalis
The primary barrier to social safety nets is the cost, and the ideological
idea that government should not take more from its productive citizens to
cover that cost.

If the largest organizations are effectively optimizing humans out of the
costs, then wouldn't their profits correspondingly increase? And as the demand
rises for the safety net, along with corporate profits, it seems so would the
argument to take a portion of those profits to cover the nets. Maybe to the
point of breaking the ideological barrier.

So wouldn't the businesses most harmed be those who continue to employ humans,
as they'll have to pay the increased profit taxes as well as their employees?

------
dotancohen
I wonder why the truck has "Video recording in progress" in _English_ on the
front. Wouldn't Swedish make more sense?

~~~
jbarberu
¯\\_(ツ)_/¯ While not the official language, you can oftentimes assume people
will understand English in Sweden.

My observation in Florida is you find more people who don't speak English here
than in Sweden.

~~~
dotancohen
I'm sure that everyone in Sweden speaks English. But posting the message in
English gives the impression that the native (and therefore supposed
"default") language is not good enough for some purposes.

In my country we would post such a message in Hebrew, Arabic, and English. Is
there some aversion in Sweden to having the same message posted in multiple
languages?

Are the street signs posted in Swedish or English?

~~~
Kiro
English is preferred for technology. Most people set their operating systems,
phones etc to English.

~~~
ClassyJacket
Interesting, I have 3 Swedish friends in Australia and they had their phones
on Swedish IIRC.

~~~
Kiro
I guess I only have anecdotal evidence, skewed by the fact that my friends are
mostly techies but still.

~~~
wingerlang
I've got the opposite anecdote, my mostly non-techie family all use Swedish
language.

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black6
> Thewes said the rollout of 5G technology, vital for electrification, was
> lagging.

Why is a cellular network standard needed for electrification?

~~~
maxerickson
They apparently want to use it for when a human operator controls the vehicle
to get it out of a situation the autonomous system can't handle.

~~~
snarf21
This is what I expect for the first set of automated for freight. There will
be designated on/off ramps for automated trucks. Some human will drive them
there and park them. The trucks will drive across interstates and get off at
another designated on/off ramp and a human will drive them to the warehouse.
This removes a lot of the risks associated with automation and reduces the
biggest expense of having long haul driver teams.

~~~
michaelt
Not sure I buy the remote-controlled-by-humans idea personally.

I mean, to remotely drive a car at 30mph, you either need to emergency-stop
any time the control signal drops out (in which case you'll constantly get
rear-ended) or you need a control system so good it can keep going even
through signal drop-outs (in which case why do you have the remote control
anyway) or you need an immortal data connection that never suffers drop-outs
or so much as 100ms of latency (i.e. orders of magnitude better than what we
have today).

I mean, you could do "Human remotely controls the vehicle at walking pace"
easily enough, as you could stop all you liked without people hitting you. But
we'd need lots of changes to the roads to support a mass of vehicles going
that slowly.

~~~
seanmcdirmid
How does the air force manage with remote controlled drones piloted a half a
globe away? I guess flying is a bit different as it is much easier to automate
than driving, but still.

~~~
michaelt
The Big Sky Theory [1] means (unless you're in the Blue Angels) a plane can
almost always keep going straight forward for 20 seconds with no worries. No
risks of a child running out or a vehicle 2 seconds in front suddenly braking.

This doesn't apply to a vehicle driving a city street.

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_sky_theory](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_sky_theory)

~~~
marcosdumay
The current expected result of children running into a road in front of a
truck is for they to die.

Roads are a much more controlled environment than city streets.

~~~
emj
I would say that is something truckdrivers spend a lot of time avoiding, by
exprience and professionalism. The same can not be said about driverless tech
companies, everyone really want to be first, that makes children and other
soft targets losers.

~~~
seanmcdirmid
> I would say that is something truckdrivers spend a lot of time avoiding, by
> exprience and professionalism.

Then they are doing a bad job about it.

[https://www.iihs.org/topics/fatality-
statistics/detail/large...](https://www.iihs.org/topics/fatality-
statistics/detail/large-trucks#Trends)

> The same can not be said about driverless tech companies, everyone really
> want to be first, that makes children and other soft targets losers.

I would guess that it would be pretty hard to do worse than we are already
doing.

~~~
emj
There are technological solutions that help truck drivers to drive safely but
they are actively fought by truck producers. No one is a saint, but I promise
you that truck drivers spend alot of their time worrying about you and me.

My argument is a variant of "better the devil you know".

------
INTPenis
Wouldn't it make more sense to make the automated trucks more accessible in
case of the AI going on a rampage? I mean how do you even get into the cab?

If it was more normal looking you could at least smash the window. But they
even protected the tires.

