If you need a safety driver 100% of the time, the net gain in efficiency is 0%.

Edit: There's no comment in the article about there being period with no safety driver.

For owner-operators who live out of their vehicle anyway and are more concerned about getting work than sleeping in a hotel somewhere this could dramatically increase the volume of work they can take on (at least until fully autonomous trucks become widely available and humans are completely deprecated as truck drivers).

From that perspective it would be more efficient, not 90% but there would be significant gains.

But the trucks being that safe is the big question. The article describes a single trip without disengagement. Much more that is clearly needed.

So if I get woken up every 10 miles, am I really meeting the rest requirements?

It did talk about "level 4 autonomy" based on a single drive with no disengagements (they mentioned they'd made a lot of drives but didn't mention their disengagement rate overall), doesn't sound like "achieving level 4" autonomy either-either.

If this trial period helps us improve the technology and eventually remove the safety driver after 1, 2, or 10yrs, that is a huge gain. What is the rush? -- every technology takes time to perfect. Lets judge the technology once it has had time to mature.

Edit: Okay, remote driver access might solve this.

I mean, it's possible that demand for self-driving trucks means reliable wireless connections get implemented everywhere they can drive.

Also, Starlink is coming.

I80 goes SF to NJ, but no single interstate will take you from SF to NYC proper.

"I-80 does not enter New York City. [...] I-80's designated end (as per signage and New Jersey Department of Transportation documents) is four miles (6.4 km) short of New York City in Teaneck, before the Degraw Avenue overpass."

So what if it drove itself down the freeway? This is literally the easiest thing that "self-driving" vehicles manage to do.

Did it fuel itself? Did it take exits and drive itself to the gas station? Where did the driver take over when it got near the delivery docks? Did the truck also get clearance and dock itself? Did the truck even pull itself out of the loading dock when it first embarked on it's trip? Those are the hard things to solve, and conveniently are omitted.

IMO this is where self driving should focus, not city driving. Truck drivers or anyone gets the vehicle on the interstate and you can sleep or whatever to the next exit for fuel or your destination then take over again.

These seems to imply short bursts of voluntarily shutting off auto-drive; I'd be curious to understand the rationale for when the two human copilots did so.

In 2019 the idea of a vehicle around you simply stopping because its driver doesn't know how to handle a situation is extremely rare.

I suspect that by 2039 it will be far more commonplace, shrugged off as just a fact of life that electronic drivers fail on a regular basis and need to pull over and wait either for intervention or conditions to change.

It happened about as often as it happens to me with a cellphone when neither party is moving between towers and has decent coverage.

We expect cell drops because of a technology constraint, even in big cities. Likewise, I think the parent poster is right that we'll expect it more once it starts happening more.

That's a huge improvement over the last 10% being difficult!