
Google veterans head off on their own to work on self-driving trucks - lemiant
http://www.theverge.com/2016/5/17/11686912/otto-self-driving-semi-truck-startup
======
cheriot
Sending a truck down an interstate for 20 hours has to be the lowest hanging
fruit for self driving vehicles. When was the last time an entire category of
jobs became obsolete fast enough that laid off employees blamed the
technology? When long haul truckers are out of work, how will municipal bus
driver unions react?

~~~
wmeredith
An actual long-haul trucker commented at length about this on a reddit thread.
I can't seem to find it. The TL;DR was that tyhe actual driving of the truck
was a no-brainer to automate away, but that despite being a large portion of
the job from a time perspective, it was a small portion of the job
functionally speaking. The majority of a long haul trucker's job is
interacting with legal authorities at weigh stations, dealing with loading
crews, performing required truck maintenance on the road, etc...

It was an interesting insight. I'm sure all of that could be automated away
eventually, but no where near as quickly as the actual driving. I agree with
other commenters in this thread that I see truck driving going the way of the
train engineer quite soon, but that having truly driverless trucks is a bit
further out.

~~~
calbear81
The train engineer analogy is a good one, you would imagine that a single
"truckgineer" so to speak could be responsible for managing a convoy of let's
say 10-15 trucks which would make it much more efficient. In regards to
fueling, would you make that more efficient by adding a larger fuel tank or
fuel car?

~~~
chefkoch
> In regards to fueling, would you make that more efficient by adding a larger
> fuel tank or fuel car.

Or have someone at the gas station fill up the trucks like it was decades ago.

~~~
awesomerobot
or you know, automate it

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chefkoch
>If you need to replace all of your trucks to get the technology on it, the
rate of penetration you'll be able to have is pretty low. Trucks last ten
years, a million miles.

Actually i would find a adoption rate like this very fast.

~~~
danvoell
Yea, seems extremely fast. They last 10 years now, with maintenance. But
assume you have a moderate repair come up and you start running the
calculations drive labor + maintanance vs. maintenance only and that 10 year
life will shrink to bring in new vehicles.

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B1FF_PSUVM
_" Many of Otto's founders have done well for themselves over the years, and
it shows: the company is entirely self-funded right now without any external
investment. (In the wake of the reported $1 billion Cruise Automation sale to
General Motors, I ask Ron if the plan is to get acquired, but he's insistent
that they're focused on bringing a product to market.) Even George Hotz's
scrappy upstart Comma.ai has recently taken on venture funding from Andreesen
Horowitz."_

My crystal ball tells me that they'll soon find this course of action unwise.

~~~
xiphias
I wanted to ask the same thing: did they quit because they didn't get enough
money/stocks at the companies that they were at, or were not working on
important enough stuff, or just wanted more risk for the sake of getting into
more risk? Or do they think that their business model is so much better than
Google's? (facilitating drivers to drive even longer without sleeping)

The salary of a truck driver is about $50000, I guess he costs at least $80000
for the employer. Buying a new self-driving truck for $200000 should pay for
itself in at most 3 years. Retrofitting may work, but it's quite short term
business.

~~~
luma
You're forgetting that one driver can only drive 70 hours a week (with rules
around breaks in the middle), while presumably the AI could run the truck much
closer to 24/7\. In this case, installing a $200k system would allow the
company to replace ~3 drivers with no interruptions in service.

~~~
icefox
More valuable than replacing three drivers is the fact that because the AI can
drive all of the time the total time to deliver goods goes down which means it
is more valuable and a higher price can be charged for the delivery.

------
TY
Reading this article, brought back memories of this 1986 film about trucks
going homicidal that Stephen King's directed himself:

[http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0091499/](http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0091499/)

Looked ridiculous back then, does not seem so any more.

Imagine a new class of malware that turns our vehicles into weapons for
criminal and terrorism purposes. Imagine this conversation in a sitcom about
near future:

 _Honey, did you update antivirus on the car? Some script kiddie just
destroyed our neighbours car - thankfully they weren 't in it..._

Yeah, I know it won't really work this way - OTA updates and etc, but try to
picture this from the layman perspective.

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ndr
The Simpsons predicted this:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xq7CnsZzEEM](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xq7CnsZzEEM)

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fwiwm2c
This makes a lot of sense. Given how rule-based the trucking industry is (max
11hrs/day; 30min break after x amount of driving etc., strict speed limits,
complete in lane driving with little overtaking etc.), self driving trucks
could gain very strong adoption given they could follow the road rules in
place predictably and will not have any time based restrictions wrt driving
thus saving a lot of cost.

~~~
JoeDaDude
Agreed. HN highlighted this artice a few weeks ago. It does the numbers and
estimates a 400% increase in productivity by having trucks drive (themselves)
around the clock. [http://techcrunch.com/2016/04/25/the-driverless-truck-is-
com...](http://techcrunch.com/2016/04/25/the-driverless-truck-is-coming-and-
its-going-to-automate-millions-of-jobs/)

------
ju-st
Company name not to be confused with German e-commerce company Otto group
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Otto_GmbH](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Otto_GmbH)

------
karussell
Everyone who is wondering ... here is the website:
[http://ot.to](http://ot.to) and the original post:
[https://blog.ot.to/introducing-otto-the-startup-
rethinking-c...](https://blog.ot.to/introducing-otto-the-startup-rethinking-
commercial-trucking-cfdc502ef452#.j3gfbzfl9)

------
the-dude
Already being tested in North West Europe :
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kANWFKKT1AA](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kANWFKKT1AA)

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monk_e_boy
It'd be interesting if they could sell the customer a little 'truck' so when I
order something and that thing gets to a local warehouse my little truck could
drive off and collect it. It could collect from various places (depending on
how I prioritize my items) and then drive back home. I don't have a private
parking space and I'm rarely in my house when deliveries are being made, so a
mini 'collection truck' would hold my items in a secure way for me. I suppose
it could be tiny, maybe only a couple of meters long.

~~~
reustle
In theory, this sounds cool, but I feel like in practice it would be pretty
wasteful. Does a town of 500 people really need 500 trucks sitting around
doing nothing most of the time? Isn't one of the main promises of autonomous
vehicles that we can all share vehicles and we don't need to let them sit
parked for days on end?

Regarding the safe storage of your items, I think that can be solved with
something similar to what Amazon Lockers attempted.

~~~
uola
Some buildings have integrated lockers. In some countries you can order things
to your nearest convenience store. It a fairly solved problem.

------
parfamz
Otto, really bad name regarding googling

~~~
coredog64
It's the name of the autopilot in "Airplane!". I'm hoping they whimsically
include an inflatable entity to let people know the truck is under computer
control.

~~~
cjslep
What if Otto starts deflating?

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nabla9
>there's nothing on the books banning self-driving cars as long as a human is
in the vehicle (which Otto's product would always still require).

This company basically wants to increase efficiency of long haul truckers.
They can sleep in the wheel and move 24/7 without mandatory breaks.

Turning 11 hour drive into 23 hour drive would bring huge savings for the
company. If they make it happen, it sells like candy and after few years all
have one.

------
zipfle
OT, but can someone explain why this won't instantly be sued into oblivion by
the former employers? It seems like some of the Otto team will be using
knowledge they gained at their last job on what seems like a competing
product.

~~~
spacecowboy_lon
Depends CA is quite liberal in terms of non competes and I suspect they woudl
argue that self driving trucks is sufficiently different from self driving
cars.

~~~
exhilaration
This is one reason why California is great for tech workers, the unenforceable
non-competes. In much of the country you'd have to wait out a year before
working in the same industry as your current employer.

~~~
spacecowboy_lon
Agreed the USA having 52 separate sets of employment laws does not make sense
- really employment law should be done at federal level - think of the saving
in reduction in red tape.

Though I suspect HR and Lawyers might lobby against that as a job protection
scheme.

------
lgieron
Who goes to jail when the self-driving truck kills someone?

~~~
true_religion
Why must someone go to prison? If the vehicle is operating normally and
regulation allows it to operate without a driver in command, then there is no
crime.

~~~
lgieron
I agree that if the regulation allows it, then the self-driving car is a
device like any other. I wonder if startups such as Otto will actually wait
till such legislation passes in entire country, which is arguably going to
take at least a decade (and they declare they don't want to be acquired, but
sell to end customers).

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codecamper
refueling?

~~~
jon-wood
All the out of work truck drivers can become pump attendants waiting to fill
up their former vehicles as they pull in for more fuel.

~~~
stuxnet79
Funny comment, but it looks like you are fishing for downvotes here buddy.
Assuming these trucks are electric, they could set it up like the Tesla
recharging stations where you can recharge simply by driving over a mini-
trapdoor that houses a fully charged battery pack and a robotic arm which can
swap your expended pack for the new one.

~~~
jon-wood
What's the point in karma if not to blow it on bad jokes now and then? I'd
completely missed the electric trucks angle, but that could work well assuming
they can master hit swappable battery packs.

------
amelius
> Otto isn't alone in trying to automate big rigs. Daimler and Volvo Trucks
> have both demonstrated self-driving systems in recent months, but
> Levandowski doesn't sound worried about those efforts. "I think the trucking
> folks are doing a great job, and eventually they would probably solve the
> problem. But a company that is used to building trucks is not well
> structured to solve a technology problem," he says.

As opposed to what, an advertisement company?

~~~
wrsh07
As opposed to a company with top of the line machine learning systems.

~~~
vonmoltke
A company with top of the line machine learning systems designed to improve
advertising results is not better positioned to build an autonomous vehicle
than a company with top of the line non-autonomous vehicles.

~~~
amelius
Indeed. It has been said many times before: machine learning is all about the
data, not about the algorithms.

