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Yokel |
So this is what is coming to trucking. Europe is ahead of the USA on this technology. Beware the man who only has one gun. He probably knows how to use it! - John Steinbeck | ||
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Learn it, know it, live it |
The company I work for just received 5 or 6 platooning tractors 3 months ago. They haven't moved since their delivery. The idea is to have 3 or 4 semi tractors and trailers in unison with the lead driver controlling them all, with a minimal following distance. They plan to try them out on runs from Dallas to Houston and back. If a driver decides to do one of those runs, they require those drivers to have special training. I was asked if I wanted to participate and I told 'nope, I want nothing to do with them'. This 'platooning' goes against several of the safe driving principles that have been embedded into my head for the last 33 years of driving for this company.. WHAT IS TRUCK PLATOONING? The company is all in. A 3 year old article.. Trucking's new era of sustainability Of course the union is against it. About time they did something for a change. Less drivers is less union dues, that is all that is about.  PLATOONING TECHNOLOGY THREATENS TEAMSTER JOBS I should be retired before this autonomous trucking gets in full force in the states. | |||
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Striker in waiting |
Meh. We should just use road trains. Loved seeing a long road train in Australia. -Rob I predict that there will be many suggestions and statements about the law made here, and some of them will be spectacularly wrong. - jhe888 A=A | |||
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| Member |
Not a truck driver but my father owned a few flat bed lumber hauling "big rigs", and they were hard as hell to drive (at least for me). That was in 1976. Now that Tesla opened the door (I know their auto pilot has problems) some really big companies are working on the truck issues: Tesla, Peterbuilt, Kenworth, Volvo, etc. I'm thinking within 10 years we're going to see robot trucks dropping their loads off on specially constructed freeway exits where human drivers can deliver into the metropolitan areas. This is coming from the dumb ass that thought cell phones would never fly. Way too expensive  | |||
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| Yokel |
1lowlife Is it the US Postal Service? I herd they were going to try that run. Beware the man who only has one gun. He probably knows how to use it! - John Steinbeck | |||
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| 7.62mm Crusader |
Yup. Across Arizona, Texas and New Mexico. | |||
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Not really from Vienna |
Shouldn’t take too long before somebody is killed by one of those things. | |||
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| Member |
I’ve ridden in the passenger and driver seat of a brand new Tesla and it’s a scary nerve wracking experience when it’s deicing itself. I can’t imagine a multi ton semi going completely driverless. Who gets sued when somebody gets hurt bad or killed? the maker/ software developer ? Or the trucking company that had no huma on board ? Bad idea. | |||
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| Member |
It's pretty easy to autonomously drive a truck thousands of miles down a highway. My feeling, at least at first, will have the vehicles be autonomous on the highway and then have "driver centers" where the truck pulls into one of these lots and a driver hops in and drives the remaining 50 miles into the heavy traffic portion. | |||
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| Member |
Since I do not fly much, lets start with passenger aircraft. We will know pretty soon if it works. You know those pilots have to be paid and can be cranky. | |||
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| Member |
Modern commercial airplanes are pretty close to being autonomous. The pilots pretty much monitor the systems in-flight; landing/take-off is pretty much the only human interface, even that, there's some autonomous activity that can be activated. No doubt the pilot unions are well aware of this and taking steps to slow-walk that change-over. The Tesla tractors have gotten a lot of attention in CA. Legislators are furiously working to make it a reality in their quest for a pseudo-Green Deal change of landscape. Trucking companies while understandably not pleased, with the more established haulers there is interest as the amount of torque available makes such technology appealing since going over the various passes here slows everything down and results in high maintenance/fuel costs. | |||
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| Lawyers, Guns and Money  |
https://www.zerohedge.com/news...ng-trucks-long-hauls "Some things are apparent. Where government moves in, community retreats, civil society disintegrates and our ability to control our own destiny atrophies. The result is: families under siege; war in the streets; unapologetic expropriation of property; the precipitous decline of the rule of law; the rapid rise of corruption; the loss of civility and the triumph of deceit. The result is a debased, debauched culture which finds moral depravity entertaining and virtue contemptible." -- Justice Janice Rogers Brown "The United States government is the largest criminal enterprise on earth." -rduckwor | |||
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Member |
The most dangerous weapon that the average person wields daily is a motor vehicle. Be it a car or a semi, I do not want to take the human out of the equation. I’m not opposed to an auto pilot like planes have but I would favor legislation that requires that a human be behind the wheel of any motor vehicle at all times that it is in motion. I truly hope that politicians will get ahead of this emerging issue and prohibit fully autonomous vehicles. I’m no Luddite, and I’m actually in favor of developing plane like auto pilot systems, however unless they are going to build roads that only autonomous vehicles can drive on, I will remain opposed to sharing the road with any vehicle that does not have a human behind the wheel. “It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.” | |||
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Member |
So in the future when a semi gets the bird for holding up somebody’s day 30 seconds, the driver will care even less? The future is looking up. Demand not that events should happen as you wish; but wish them to happen as they do happen, and you will go on well. -Epictetus | |||
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| 10mm is The Boom of Doom  |
I expect that when this technology matures, autonomous trucks will be vastly safer than manual ones. I would also expect that liability and insurance costs will quickly drive trucking companies to adopt the autonomous systems. Truckers' days are numbered. Which is a primary reason why recruiting young people into driving is such an up hill climb. The budget should be balanced, the Treasury should be refilled, public debt should be reduced, the arrogance of officialdom should be tempered and controlled, and the assistance to foreign lands should be curtailed lest Rome become bankrupt. People again must learn to work, instead of living on public assistance. ~ Cicero 55 BC The Dhimocrats love America like ticks love a hound. | |||
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| Member |
This idea is often repeated by those who know nothing about what a trucker does throughout the day, with driving being only a part of his job. Until the industry can figure out how to do everything else autonomously, and build out the infrastructure to do it, the driver is still needed. For example, who installs the chains on a lonely mountain pass where there is no chain control and nobody else is around, but the driver feels chains are necessary for safety? Auto chains? They aren’t even legal everywhere because they aren’t as effective. The idea that you can be profitable as a general carrier by using platooning trucks from terminal to terminal is basically already here. It’s called the railroad. The reason trucking kicks the railroad’s ass is because of service. Eliminate the driver and make trucking “train light,” and the trucking industry looses its main competitive edge. As for safety, 3/4 of all accidents involving trucks are caused by the automobiles around the truck. Automating the truck will do nothing to prevent that, and may actually make it worse. A computer has a harder time reacting to situations outside of normal parameters. The way to reduce accidents is to separate trucks and cars on roads. Make truck only lanes, like what has been proposed on I81 in Virginia. For the same reason we still have pilots in cockpits and engineers in locomotives, there will continue to be a need for a driver in a truck. There may be some benefit in automation, but not as total replacement, not for a long time. Trucking isn’t attracting a younger generation anymore because it isn’t fun anymore. It has been regulated to the point of taking all the joy out of the open road. I once asked my Dad why he didn’t enjoy driving trains, because as a kid I thought it was awesome. He said that driving trains was great, but the railroad sucked all of the fun out of it. Trucking is now that way, except it is the government that makes trucking a drag. Demand not that events should happen as you wish; but wish them to happen as they do happen, and you will go on well. -Epictetus | |||
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| Big Stack |
How many people are killed by trucks now, even though, or maybe because, they're human driven? The issue isn't whether there will be fatal accidents with antonymous trucks. There will be. The question is will there be more or less fatal accidents. I'm betting less, especially as time goes on, and the system get better. Autonomy has safety advantages over humans. Computers don't get tired, they don't get distracted, they don't use drugs or alcohol, etc.. They also can have, what would be for humans, eyes on the back of their head, and they should have faster reaction times. They may have their own issues, especially in the bug working out phase, but they get rid of a lot of issues also. And this is going to happen. There's a huge pot of gold for the trucking companies for getting humans out of the drivers seat. First, obviously, they don't have to pay drivers. Yes, the trucks will cost more, but not enough to offset the salary savings. Second, humans are hour limited by law. IIRC they can drive 10 hours and then must rest 8 (someone correct me if I'm wrong on this.) So either they need to have a second driver, or the truck sits for eight hours. The other alternative (probably more used by indies) is to fake the paperwork and keep driving. I don't know if this still happens, but i know it used to. Autonomy eliminates all of this. Computers don't get tired. The truck can run 24/7 until it needs fuel and/or maintenance.
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| Member |
^^Those are the hopes and promises. Tell me, who inspects the tie-downs every three hours on that D9 Cat on an autonomous truck? Who is responsible when a piece of lumber falls off? Who must wipe the snow off the lights? Who checks for Hazmat containment? Who does the daily pre/post trip inspections of all cargo and vehicle? Who looks for tire chunk out? Simply because a computer can keep it between the lines does not account for all this other stuff. As for safety, I’ve already addressed it. It’s another unicorn. Driver assist may make a truck safer, but autonomy by itself won’t. As for doing drugs and cheating logs, 10-4 good buddy. The 70’s were quite awhile ago.  It’s all random drug screens and eLogs now. Demand not that events should happen as you wish; but wish them to happen as they do happen, and you will go on well. -Epictetus | |||
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| 7.62mm Crusader |
I think the hours of service have not changed. 11 Hours driving and a total of 15 on duty per 24 hour period. I dont think the industry even needs the driverless trucks. Why even have the power units. If we are going to do away with all the driver jobs then lets just make the truck manufacturing industry go away. Howz about driverless trailers, period. Surely the container can be powered to haul the loads. Think of all those truck parts we would no longer need to make. Lay all them people off too. Get some cheap mexican labor to maintain the powered trailers. Then we can fill the powered containers with chinese made junk and people could just garden what they eat. Only the top tier who could afford their own powered containers could live high on the hog. Better yet, we can just ship large pill shaped containers through a tube transportation system beneath the earths surface so we'd never again have a truck to complain about on the roads. Their could be no speed limit down in the tube. You click on the chinese junk you wish to have and zoom, its at a covered port in your front lawn. Maybe I'm again, thinking too far ahead.. | |||
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| 10mm is The Boom of Doom |
The budget should be balanced, the Treasury should be refilled, public debt should be reduced, the arrogance of officialdom should be tempered and controlled, and the assistance to foreign lands should be curtailed lest Rome become bankrupt. People again must learn to work, instead of living on public assistance. ~ Cicero 55 BC The Dhimocrats love America like ticks love a hound. | |||
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