Sure it does. It is the easier problem, and it makes sense to assume the easier problem will be solved before the hard one.

Self driving cars that move about long stretches of interstate highways with little to no interactions with intersections, pedestrians or complicated traffic patterns is a far easier problem than driving in densely populated urban areas.

If you think about it, taxi cab drivers barely need any qualifications to drive a cab. Truckers need more, almost as if trucking is a more demanding type of driving. By that alone, I feel like it's fairly apparent which would be easier to replicate on silicon.

Trucking is a far more demanding job than driving a cab, but that is only true for humans. What makes trucking demanding is long, rigorous driving schedules that require high degree of driving stamina. As it turns out computers have very high stamina and are very good at doing long rigorous activities without suffering any fatigue. This is as opposed to driving a cab where the difficulty of the job is not so much in the rigor of the job but more in what humans do better than computers. Which is mainly dealing with other people, understanding patterns and learning from past experiences.

Additionally, they need to be able to drive at night in areas without much lighting, they need to drive for hours and hours on end, instead of just 5-45minutes, etc. Finally, they are 40+ feet long (instead of being around 15 feet long) and have much less maneuverability and a much longer stopping distance/time.

Sounds like a harder problem to me.

Freight consists of both long and short haul, with different needs and approaches. Your point applies to the "last mile" delivery phase, which may or may not be a significant part of the operation.

In fact, many big stores like Walmart, Costco, Aldi, and the like are placed pretty close to an interstate exit. I would guess that this allows significant reduction in costs, as the operators don't need to switch from their optimized long haul vehicles (big trailers, etc) to more maneuvarable, less efficient (per unit weight of goods) trucks for the last mile stage.

There is plenty of freight that is carried on highways over long distances with low traffic volumes, in a similar role to rail freight.

> Additionally, they need to be able to drive at night in areas without much lighting,

During winter at higher latitudes a lot of driving is at night. As for lighting, plenty of city streets are dark and have poor lighting at night.

> they need to drive for hours and hours on end, instead of just 5-45minutes, etc.

So? Fatigue is something that affects human drivers. There should be no serious differences for an autonomous vehicle driving 10 30 minute trips and one 5 hour one, modulo start and stop. In fact, if anything, longer duration trips tend to involve a greater fraction of highway usage that does not require significant brake usage, turning, etc.

> Finally, they are 40+ feet long (instead of being around 15 feet long) and have much less maneuverability and a much longer stopping distance/time.

I agree with this.

You could create a system, potentially using truck stops or in some way your own infrastructure, which is a docking point for autonomous vehicles. At these locations, human drivers pick up and drop off the otherwise autonomous vehicles, allowing humans to take the burden of the difficult portion of driving, while computers handle the boring part of driving. Of course, you would have to place similar stops every (80% of a tank of gas, measured in distance), as well for refueling. Naturally, this idea has a dozen holes at the moment and would need to be improved to be viable.

Driving in weather is harder, but that is still a problem for city cars, I'm not sure why you think it is more of a problem on the open road.

The map data might be more frequently updated, but it is also more complicated. Stop and go traffic (with lane changes!), turns, traffic lights, construction, busses, etc. all add to the complexity of city driving.

The first thing for freight isn't going to be completely autonomous, it is going to be a slightly smarter tesla style autopilot, i.e. a driver who is alerted by the computer when he needs to take over (weather, pulling into towns, etc).

I honestly have the opposite opinion that you do: freight (ignoring the last mile) is a much easier problem than inner city driving.

Furthermore, those trucks are expensive. Tacking on an extra $10,000 to a family sedan for sensors and electronics is huge. It's not so extreme when you're paying $100,000 for a base truck.

And finally, those fleet vehicles have regular inspections and maintenance. Everything works great when it's all shiny and new. It'll be interesting to see what happens to autopilots on cars that don't even get regular oil changes.

Well, part of those rules and regulations do things like specifically limit how much they can drive per day (11 hours is the limit, I believe). There's also super high turn over in the trucking industry and they've had driver shortages fairly regularly. A lot of these rules are about protecting the human driver from themselves (fatigue, misbehavior etc). When I think about the problem it seems that regular, predictable freight movement from port to warehouse would be a logical place to start because a) it's easier and b) the labor market for drivers is so severely distorted right now.

Edit: It's 11 hours but I'm remembering there's other restrictions too, like limits on consecutive blocks of 11-hour driving without rest. I'll look it up later.