
Will automation put an end to the American trucker? - ranit
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/oct/10/american-trucker-automation-jobs
======
didgeoridoo
The approach that Starsky ([http://starsky.io/](http://starsky.io/)) is taking
seems to be a promising one. They employ truck drivers as remote pilots for
the "first and last mile", i.e. the local roads and loading dock work that
autonomous vehicles struggle with most. Other advantages include lower fuel
costs (driving slower because AVs aren't subject to operator-hour limits) and
probably also lower labor costs (you don't need to pay truckers as much if the
job is safe and nearby to home).

If the Starsky model ends up dominating, this _could_ all add up to a case
where the price of truck transportation drops so much that demand for truck
drivers actually increases, possibly even counterbalancing the pressure of
individual truckers being able to manage multiple vehicles at once. This would
be an example of the "Jevons Effect"
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox)

~~~
WalterBright
The long haul stuff should go on rails anyway. It's very wasteful to run it on
the interstates. The majority of the fatigue damage to the highways comes from
trucks, then there's all the rubber dust, fuel inefficiency, etc.

The trailers should just be picked up and dropped on flatcars, and trucks used
for intracity last mile stuff.

~~~
stefan8r
This is Stefan, from Starsky Robotics.

I hear this all the time, and honestly in many cases a truck is the
transportation of last resort. If you need 5 shipping containers of goods
going from A->B all arriving at Time X; it's probably going by train.

An issue with rail (as pointed out by others) is how to haul the freight from
the rail head (rail yard) to the end warehouses, and the extra time it takes
to have goods go on two trucks and one train instead of just one truck. The
other issue is that in the US it's really hard to hire and retain long haul
truck drivers (it turns out most people want to go home each night after a
hard day’s work).

Competition to hire drivers is fierce, and driver turnover can be
100%/yr...which means sometimes your drivers don't show up to pull your
freight. Rail is also generally cheaper so if you can put your goods on the
train you do.

As far as wear and tear on the highway: that's what weigh stations are for.
They not only assign usage taxes, they also make sure weight is evenly
distributed across the axles to limit damage to the road.

/SSA

~~~
tyingq
>As far as wear and tear on the highway: that's what weigh stations are for.

That doesn't create a system where trucks pay taxes roughly proportional to
the damage they do.

~~~
daniel-cussen
I remember reading the damage a vehicle does is roughly proportional to the
fourth power of its weight.

~~~
tyingq
There's a pretty good chart here, near the bottom:
[http://pedalfortcollins.com/greatest-demand-on-tax-
dollars/](http://pedalfortcollins.com/greatest-demand-on-tax-dollars/)

------
dchuk
The most likely thing (imo) that will happen will be highway trains...there
will be a real human driver in the front of the caravan, maybe just in a van
or car, and then 1-10 self driving heavy duty trucks behind them. They'll
draft off of each other and do 99% of the long haul route in an automated way.

Once each truck is near it's destination, it will peel off of the pack and
park itself near the highway, at which point a real driver will hop in and
finish the route.

I work in the telematics space, and work with extremely large fleets that
you'd all recognize on the highway every day. None of them are afraid of self
driving trucks disrupting them any time soon. However, these automated
caravans could be their first opportunity to restructure the flow of their
capacity across the country.

~~~
Terr_
Too bad that all the "speculative VC dollars" seem to be in trying to jump
directly to full-automation of multiple small passenger vehicles.

Now, I've never heard _any_ public figure say this out loud -- so maybe I'm
just barking up the wrong tree -- but I think the bandwagon is being pulled by
a very particular idea about a market they can try to corner.

Specifically, they're thinking of a future demographic bump in people who are
too age-impaired to safely and legally drive themselves. Folks who can't (or
won't) pay another human to drive, or move to a location with better public-
transit, but who still have enough affluence for a self-driving car.

IMO it explains the bubbly frenzied focus from multiple companies, despite the
significant degree of basic research still required.

~~~
TeMPOraL
Part of the allure of self-driving cars is drastic reduction of traffic
deaths. Long-haul drivers are not the one who kill themselves on the road the
most; regular people are.

I'm not saying this is the driving force behind focus of companies, but it's
an important consideration for many individuals in this space.

------
patrickg_zill
"Then what you have is a truckers’ lounge with 20 or 30 guys standing around
getting paid."

THAT's the error: those guys aren't getting paid anything to stand there. They
get paid by the mile. Making them wait is benefiting the warehouse, and
costing THEM.

~~~
SomeCallMeTim
Yeah. My wife has a friend who's a long-haul trucker. He gets profoundly
disrespected by the current system, including showing up at 8AM to an
appointment and being made wait all day, and sometimes into the next day, for
his truck to be unloaded/loaded and ready for him to take.

And he's paid nothing for that. There's no penalty at all for wasting the
trucker's time. I cite this as evidence that the truckers have _no_ effective
lobbying body, and therefore will in fact lose most of long-haul jobs over the
next 15 years.

~~~
themaninthedark
[http://www.getloaded.com/load-board-blog/post/Whats-the-
Best...](http://www.getloaded.com/load-board-blog/post/Whats-the-Best-Way-to-
Collect-Detention-Fees)

It looks like your wife's friend needs a better broker because all the
companies we deal with charge us.

Our shipper won't schedule a truck unless we know that the load is ready due
to how steep the fees can be.

When we shipped some equipment to a major trade show, they try to schedule it
so that the truckers have a minimum wait but the show will also pay the
detention fees back if they were the source of the delay.

~~~
csours
Just because you're getting charged, doesn't mean the trucker is getting paid.

~~~
SomeCallMeTim
Honestly, I would guess you've nailed it: The delivery company is collecting a
fee because they are only paid for per delivery, so making a driver (and
truck) wait doesn't otherwise make them money.

But there's no guarantee that the fees are passed on to the driver. Just in
case, I'll pass a question back through my wife to see if some truckers are
actually paid for waiting. They talk to each other; I bet they all know if
anyone is paid to wait.

------
DoodleBuggy
Depends, do truckers have a strong political lobby? If no, they'll be in
trouble. If yes, then they'll be guaranteed to exist for as long as they are
funding lobbyists and politicians.

~~~
michrassena
In the United States at least, it's going to be devastating. I don't see a
bunch of individual owner-operators banding together to protect their
livelihoods. As soon as it's cheaper to run automated trucks, they'll get
picked off one by one. Probably the best than can be hoped for is laws
mandating a person as co-operator in case of emergency. There's also some
version of the last mile problem, where people need to be present.

For fully automated trucking, I imagine no one has explored the security
implications yet. These vehicles seem far too easy to hijack, redirect, or
delay and steal the cargo. Take out the human factor and long-haul trucks are
autonomous warehouses roaming the countryside.

~~~
criddell
> I imagine no one has explored the security implications yet.

I bet they have. Especially insurers.

~~~
semi-extrinsic
Insurers, in stark contrast to VC funded startups, are very conservative. I'm
confident they'll rather not spend time and money now exploring something
that's not going to be reality for at least half a decade, maybe ever.

~~~
criddell
I agree, they are among the most conservative. But I think that's why they are
studying it. Insurance companies hate being surprised.

Self-driving vehicles will going to prevent a lot of collisions which will in
turn drive premiums way, way down. The need to insure unattended shipments is
one mitigating factor that I bet they are thinking about.

------
rezashirazian
Everyone talks about truck drivers becoming obsolete once self driving cars
take over the road.

What I would worry about are endless number of doctors and surgeons that spent
a life time mastering a skill and will just as easily be rendered obsolete by
the same technology.

Lawyers too.

~~~
petra
Don't worry about doctors. Political power wins out in the end, and they have
tons of it.

For example: for decades they've managed to resist entry of decision-support
systems(which were not perfect, but still, an improvement), even though their
own error rate is ~1/8.

~~~
ams6110
Pretty much the reason I don't go to the doctor unless I need stitches or am
experiencing intolerable pain.

~~~
kamaal
A couple of years back, after being tossed around by a dozen doctors for
simple infection. A few hours of internet research helped me solve my problem,
better than any doctor did.

Health care industry is a cartel that optimizes for profit.

------
darkhorn
"Will automation put end to the European hand writer?" Unfortuantly since
Gutenberg's book pressing automation Europe lives in misery.

------
greggarious
The modern airplane is fairly heavily automated, and probably could be piloted
from afar. But we choose to mandate a pilot on board.

I suspect a similar situation will play out for trucks.

I suspect that truckers, like pilots, may see wages stagnate and longer hours,
but the profession won't disappear anytime soon.

~~~
DoubleCribble
Mu impression is most commercial flights are largely run on autopilot. AFAIK,
pilots typically only get involved for takeoff, landing, flight path changes
and abnormal events. If last-mile piloting was a thing, I'm sure the airlines
would try to cut costs by getting rid of the crew for the auto-pilot segments.
It seems trivial for an automated truck to pull off the highway and wait for a
trucker to deliver a vehicle, yet impossible for an aircraft to hold at 30k
feet and wait for a pilot.

~~~
silvestrov
A huge difference is that when something goes wrong with a truck then the
autopilot can just apply the brakes and let the truck come to a halt and wait
for help.

That doesn't work with airplanes.

------
melling
“Trucking is a $700bn industry, in which a third of costs go to compensating
drivers”

That’s enough information to answer the question.

------
kylehotchkiss
It would be sort of cool if highways could then promote a "goods carrier
trucks can only run nightly" rule with this. Of course allowing essential
goods trucks to run in daylight

------
kibwen
_> while truckers are prohibited from driving more than 11 hours per day
without taking an eight-hour break, a driverless truck can drive for the
entire day. This effectively doubles the output of the trucking network at a
quarter of the cost._

Interestingly, doubling the throughput of the trucking network would also
halve the average lifetime of road surfaces. _" The federal government has
estimated that a 40-ton, 18-wheel truck causes the same damage as 9,600
midsize cars."_ [http://www.latimes.com/opinion/readersreact/la-
le-0215-sunda...](http://www.latimes.com/opinion/readersreact/la-
le-0215-sunday-cars-weight-20150215-story.html)

~~~
foolfoolz
sounds like a great opportunity for the automated road repair industry

------
observation
The automation of vehicles is taken to strongly imply robotic devices
elsewhere in society.

Apart from more sophisticated robot hoovers, lawn mowers I don't think that is
necessarily so.

Hoovers and mowers are safe because they are small, light, low to the ground
and constrained to floors and lawns.

Vehicles, fast, heavy, high, are in a controlled environment.

Other controlled enviroments like factories have already ventured into
robotics.

It seems to me that main advantages of automated movement would exist in
unstructured environments like streets, shops. The robots I've seen so far
have low center of gravity, are heavy so as to inhibit any danger.

What exactly does automated driving do for other unstructured environments?

It is far from clear to me that this is going to be a trifle soon after the
roads swarm with autos.

~~~
dsfyu404ed
We don't even have autonomous street sweepers (well defined environment, not
allowed to run over stuff) mining dump trucks (not as well defined
environment, few things it's not allowed to run over and most of them have
reflectors on them) or forklifts to unload trucks (well defined environment,
nothing to run into).

I'm not holding my breath for automated trucking.

~~~
avar
Automated mining trucks are already being used:
[https://www.technologyreview.com/s/603170/mining-24-hours-a-...](https://www.technologyreview.com/s/603170/mining-24-hours-
a-day-with-robots/)

------
malandrew
I haven't thought of this until now, but it's going to be interesting to see
the impact of self driving trucks on human migration. Today many people feel
trapped where they live because it's prohibitively expensive to move. Once
self-driving trucks are common, the cost of moving across the country should
plummet. Imagine being able to move everything in your apartment or home
across the country for a few hundred dollars.

~~~
kansface
I've moved across the country a few times now - I'm not sure the expense of
physically moving stuff was ever the largest.

~~~
ryandrake
They were for me, by far. What other expenses are there?

~~~
chii
The fact that you'd first have to secure employment at your destination city?

~~~
malandrew
The only move I've coordinated cost quite a lot. It involved moving a 4
bedroom house from the South to New England and cost about $4-5k with labor
and boxing and only unloading at the destination. The majority of the cost was
the labor after everything was boxed and loaded.

------
SubiculumCode
The freeway is where AI will be first. It is the most controlled driving
environment we have. It can be made even more controlled in a fairly
efficiently and cheaply. The local city and country roads have a plethora of
other issues. Pedestrians, driveways, trees, multitudes of entrances and
exits...its a nightmare really.

Give me AI on the freeway, and I'd probably be happy enough.

------
alacombe
Automation is one thing in fully mapped Mountain View with perfect weather.
It's a whole other job when supply lines go through rough terrain, like
Canadian western highways in winter... those chains won't get around those
tires by themselves, not to mention the risk of mechanical failures.

~~~
blt
Yes, but those surely make up a small proportion of all truck freight traffic.

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kirykl
Just the threat of automated long haul trucking should cause rail freight
rates to decrease, ultimately rates will drop dramatically. Last mile is the
final holdout for truckers.

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JustSomeNobody
Some will be employed driving the wreckers to go get the trucks that flake out
and drive off the road.

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Havoc
Obviously. Question is how soon.

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2by4
Suggest change title from tracker to trucker.

~~~
ranit
Thanks for noticing. Unfortunately, I cannot change the title anymore … or
don’t know how.

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fucktruckers
Having almost been seriously injured or killed by truckers more times than I'd
like, I fucking hope so.

