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Re:Self-driving truck convoy completes its first major journ... by Matt3o12_ on Saturday April 09, 2016 @07:36AM (#11460860)
What if one car merges infront of one of the following trucks and slows down a bit? What do these trucks do at construction sites (we have quite A few of those on German autobahns)?

This technology looks hardly any better then Tesla's lane keeping assistant, the speed is set by the driver (it doesn't really matter if the speed is set by the driver in the very first vehicle IMO), and It only handles very simple roads

Re:Self-driving truck convoy completes its first major journ... by nmrm2 on Saturday April 09, 2016 @08:45AM (#11461013)
From the article:

> The trucks did not travel in platoon for the entire journey — only on motorways when traffic conditions were "normal" — and each vehicle, even those following the lead truck, had a human driver on hand.

Also, the convoy formed a network and explicitly communicated with the goal of not just driving autonomously but also recognizing cost savings:

> a Wi-Fi connection keeping their braking and acceleration (but not steering) in sync.

So quite a bit different from just lane keeping.

Re:Self-driving truck convoy completes its first major journ... by tablewatcher on Saturday April 09, 2016 @08:47AM (#11461018)
The lead trunk has indicators that the convoy is platooning, sure some people with interfere with it but for the most part when drivers start to recognise this on the road they are mostly going to stay out of the way.

>This technology looks hardly any better then Tesla's lane keeping assistant

So? It's the first step in removing a human driver. Are you assuming that this technology is not going to ever improve? The end game is a head office operator that controls a network of 50 trucks across a country remotely. It's just a matter of time until they get there.

Re:Self-driving truck convoy completes its first major journ... by visarga on Saturday April 09, 2016 @04:39PM (#11463204)
In the year 2020 a 12 year old girl could operate a fleet of 50 trucks through an open source NPM package (orders, planning, monitoring). You'd never suspect when you see her in person.
Re:Self-driving truck convoy completes its first major journ... by the_mitsuhiko on Saturday April 09, 2016 @11:30AM (#11461680)
> This technology looks hardly any better then Tesla's lane keeping assistant, the speed is set by the driver (it doesn't really matter if the speed is set by the driver in the very first vehicle IMO), and It only handles very simple roads.

It's not better or worse, it's different. The main difference is that the trucks in the convoy talk to each other and can thus drive more efficient manoeuvres than a Tesla can because of that. Also not sure how this is related to Tesla given that Tesla does not actually manufacture trucks.