Make no mistake: technologies like this -- which bring massive cost-savings to companies -- tend to arrive sooner than most people think. The incentives are just too big to ignore.

Mining companies in Australia are already using self-driving trucks to transport ore.

http://www.businessinsider.com/rio-tinto-using-self-driving-...

And self-driving cars are just around the corner in the USA. Trucks will follow maybe half a decade after that, at most.

You think cars come before trucks? Trucks seem easier to me. Driving 500 miles on a very standardized highway seems like an easier problem than negotiating city streets and picking up hard to identify passengers from a curb.

A lot of the time the passenger will be holding a beacon that communicates their position to the car.

It also seems to me that such things won't be a big deal. Some Google demo shows their system recognizing a bicyclist making a hand signal. It's the dynamic traffic stuff that will take longer to deal with.

I was thinking about one problem the autonomous systems will have to handle on my run yesterday; pedestrians can look at drivers and use eye contact to make sure the driver has noticed them. An autonomous system doesn't have eyes to look at. The first idea I came up with was a highly directional light source that the system could point at the system could point at the heads of pedestrians it had recognized. Not a laser, but a moderately bright light in a recess that limits the direct visibility of the source.

Truck driving in the city, negotiating alleys and backing into loading docks. Sure that might be awhile. But long haul Interstate driving? With all of the restrictions on driver hours? That is coming as fast as possible. 8 hours driving at an average speed of 50 mph gives you 400 miles per "day". 24 hours at 50 mph gives you 1200 miles per day. Everyone saves time and money.

I don't see what the two have to do with each other. Technical reasons aren't why we don't have self-driving trains, it's just that the economy of things becomes very different when your vehicle is about a kilometre or two long compared to maybe 25 metres.

(Yeah, yeah, I know about the kilometre long Australian semi-trailer trucks, but those aren't really practical in most situations...)

Aussie road trains are at most 55m

(They are still really imposing and impressive, especially at night. On the extremely flat, straight desert roads in the Outback, you can see them miles before they arrive, like a star on the horizon. When they finally get to where you are, they fly by with a hefty gust of wind. They have steel "roo bars" mounted on the front for efficiently generating roadkill. They are loud, brightly lit, and more than half a football field long.)

I think we could easily have self-driving trains if they were considered important. The cost savings (and safety improvement) of self-driving trains probably just isn't high enough for it to be treated with the same urgency as self-driving cars.