If the truck still requires a human for some tasks (intra-city, fuelling, etc.) but can be rated to legally drive itself for most of the trip, then the human could sleep / eat / etc. during those times they're not required. This would presumably let them avoid minimum stationary rest times etc. since they could get a full rest of sleep while the truck drives itself (on sufficiently long journeys).

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.

Well, if you had trucks that were safe enough to sleep in while they auto-drove, the companies would certainly want to go one better and have them drive empty. They could create dedicated fueling and loading areas if need-be.

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

"most of the trip"

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

I was thinking more like "the truck can legally drive itself until the next fuel stop in about 14 hours time, so I'm going to get some sleep".

If it's one safety driver monitoring 4 vehicles it's still a win.

But that isn't what the article talked about either (A European company did do a run like that a while though).

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.

How is one driver going to take over for 4 vehicles? Each truck needs a safety driver.

If having less work that needs to be done is a negative then there's a problem with our system of economics, not with having less work that needs to be done.

Truck driving is not and has never been a middle-class occupation.

False. Truck driving is one of the few steady jobs that remain middle class https://www.bls.gov/ooh/transportation-and-material-moving/m...

You think $44K is a middle-class income?

Thats perception. Most o/o's are firmly upper middle. It's the hired drivers that get shafted, but even they do alright.

More automation is a win for the middle class and every other class. If a society chooses to violently deprive the middle class of economic resources, that's the fault of the police, not the automated economy.

The police might enforce the legal code of a system the funnels economic gains to fewer and fewer people, but they don’t come up with the ideas on which that system is based.

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

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.

we still won't allow trains to operate without onboard supervision and they should much easier to automate

It doesnt help that the FRA is pretty awful and stuck in the 1880s.

I'm sure someone's working on telepresence which kicks in when the AI's getting confused.

Earn credits for Stadia - solve these realtime truck simulator captcha!

I would imagine that the current google captcha system has so much traffic, you could use it to power real time driving with static pictures. Set 20 people to tell you if there is a stop sign. 50 more to decide if that object in the road is dangerous or not. All you need is a decent number of responses coming back that agree.

This is halarious and terrifying. I can envisage groups of trolls who get together to captcha-troll lorries into buldings or worse for lulz and the terribly written legislation shoved in place to mitigate it before nation-states get in on the fun.

90% less human mistakes.

No.