Are you free to talk about liability concerns? Is there a consensus on how unmanned vehicle will affect the outcome of a suit arising from any accident. I assume these trucks have more than every angle covered to protect against false claims
Yes. Starsky early on made a choice that we will operate in an explicitly legal manner, and avoid the grey areas of self-driving. That means a person behind the wheel on public roads in California, but we're all-clear in places like Florida to remove the person behind the vehicle.
> Are you free to talk about liability concerns? Is there a consensus on how unmanned vehicle will affect the outcome of a suit arising from any accident. I assume these trucks have more than every angle covered to protect against false claims
It's still an open question about how best to insure autonomous trucks. Getting a truck on the road, legally able to drive is surprisingly difficult. Watching Starsky struggle from the inside to get our first truck on the road hauling freight at the beginning was sort of a confidence builder in how the DoT and the regulatory organizations work. We are legally insured, both our normal trucks and autonomous trucks. And of course, we've got a ton of cameras in case of an accident.
lol :)
But on point: on I-5, for one example, I've encountered semis doing 80+ MPH in loose groups and not at all unsafely.
It wouldn't take many semis doing only 55 to make life miserable for many of your colleagues and competitors, especially if they face driving-hour limits and logging constraints that you don't. Has that issue been hashed out internally?
Right on the money. If you slam on the brakes on a truck, you and your trailer can jack-knife, sending the trailer the wrong direction. It's a more complicated controls problem than in a car as well!
> Also, I imagine that you have to be pretty careful about cars cutting you off. It seems to happen all the time on the road, and is more dangerous than people give it credit for.
I've spent hundreds of hours in our truck over the last 3 years and my god drivers are absolutely terrible around trucks. You have an incredible view of the road from up on high in a semi, and the spatial awareness compared to a sedan is way better, so the crazy maneuvers happening around us seem a lot crazier. In California trucks can only go 55 mph, so we get a lot of folks (even in normal driving) trying to speed around us during merges on/off highways.