Most of the responses to your comment are a bit off here.

The challenge of autonomous trucks isn't that they're "more dangerous," it's a matter of physics and current LIDAR technology. The weight of the truck means there is a minimal safe stopping distance at a given speed. Frankly, the quality and distance of current LIDAR tech falls short of the distance required for safe stopping at the average highway speed for a truck.

Put another way, the autonomous driving stack has difficulty seeing far enough ahead of a truck to successfully stop in time to not cause an accident in highway environments. You'll need better fusion of perception stack (LIDAR + imaging + neural nets) or better LIDAR ranges to be able to deploy autonomous trucking sooner.

That doesn't sound plausible. Breaking distance goes up with the square of speed while it only increases linearly with weight. As an example, a truck going 55 can stop as fast as a car going 65. Ultimately it just means your self driving car has to drive a bit slower.

Agree with the lidar range issue, but in a perfect storm... there was also major hype to drive money into robotaxis, e.g. Uber flashing an order for $10 billion of Mercedes S-Class ( https://www.roadandtrack.com/car-culture/news/a28508/uber-or... ).

This year we've seen Luminar start to go public via SPAC, and their high-range Lidar has been mounted on most (all?) non-Waymo self-driving truck prototypes. There's even a public dataset with Luminar data now: https://github.com/TRI-ML/DDAD

Radars already go 100m+.To avoid a front collision pretty much all these systems use radar, not lidar. Next generation radars are already doing 300m+.

But angular resolution still is too low to disambiguate targets in the far field and neither frequencies nor maturity for imaging radar are here yet. Range alone does not solve the main radar problem.

Trucks already have slower speed limits. A truck going 50 can stop as fast as a car doing 75. Run them all night. No rest breaks.

Opportunity cost, perhaps? Trucks are an easy win if you've got launchable performance in cities, but still require a lot of human energy to get into production.

So early on, when the number of people that know the system is small, it seems better to work on the bigger, more general problem, and branch out to the sub problem later on when there's more people to work on it.

From another perspective, of you stop work on cities to finish a trucks launch, you're losing ground to competitors working on cities, which may be decisive in the research phase.

This is something I've wondered about too. If I were to guess, these might be potential roadblocks (no pun intended):

- Insurance, since you're transporting others stuff at highway speeds

- You still need a CDL driver right now (not cheap)

- Economics - the failure of Starsky Robotics might offer some clues here

- Interstate Regulations on Driverless testing (?)

Presumably the economic incentives are much greater for trucking than for consumers (as is typically the case). If we can accept that, then investors shouldn't be swayed by regulatory questions (regulations change easily when wealthy investors and corporations want them to change) nor by some marginal upfront insurance cost (the hypothesis is that driverless trucks will be much less fallible and thus insurance costs will go down quickly as driverless tech proves itself).

The interestion questions are "is the 'greater economic incentive for trucking' assumption correct in the first place" and if so, why were we still bothering with consumer automotive in the first place?

> (regulations change easily when wealthy investors and corporations want them to change)

Teamsters would say otherwise.

I don't think they would, and that there are other interest groups doesn't suggest that corporate interests aren't particularly powerful. IIRC, if the public unanimously supports a particular initiative, it has only a 30% chance of making it into law, and it's more than double that if corporations support it.

> IIRC, if the public unanimously supports a particular initiative, it has only a 30% chance of making it into law, and it's more than double that if corporations support it.

That's obviously not a set of statistics that is possible to directly observe; such a conclusion is only possible through a model dependent on extrapolation which assumes that a relationship holds outside the observable range. (And it's also somewhat incoherent, as both corporate decision-makers and legislators are subsets of the public.)

> That's obviously not a set of statistics that is possible to directly observe; such a conclusion is only possible through a model dependent on extrapolation which assumes that a relationship holds outside the observable range.

It sounds like you're airing a general grievance against sampling, but I'm sure that's not what you mean, so please elaborate?

> And it's also somewhat incoherent, as both corporate decision-makers and legislators are subsets of the public.

I don't see how that renders anything 'incoherent'. Are you interpreting "unanimous public support" to mean "literally every single citizen supports this policy, including corporate decision-makers and legislators"? Such pedantry aside, it's entirely possible for an overwhelming majority of the public to want a particular policy decision irrespective of whether "corporate decision-makers" or legislators find themselves in the majority or minority.

In whatever case, the statistic I'm thinking of is from former labor secretary Robert Reich's "Inequality for All" documentary. I don't care to skim it for exact phrasing or numbers. Similar information can be found here: https://represent.us/action/no-the-problem/.

> It sounds like you're airing a general grievance against sampling, but I'm sure that's not what you mean, so please elaborate?

You obviously aren't going to have any measure that actually has 100% popular support. So the only way you could get to “if it has unanimity among the public, it has only a 30% chance of passing” based on anything even approximating empirical science is to take some observations about success at various less than unanimous levels, and develop a model of the relationship between public support and chance of passage, and use that model to extrapolate beyond the high endpoint of support from the data. Without a strong theoretical rationale which you have good reason other than the observed relationship within the tested range to believe is the explanation for the tested phenomenon, it is always suspect to extrapolate an empirical relationship outside of the range in which it has been observed.

> Similar information can be found here: > https://represent.us/action/no-the-problem/.

The study linked to support that is interesting, but since it models the effect of interest groups, including mass interest groups, separately from both public and elite individual preferences, and finds that both elite preferences and interest group alignment have significant independent impacts, but average citizen preferences don't have a strong separate effect, what it really indicates is that average citizens are effective in politics only to the extent that their preferences energize action through organized groups.

A different kind of regulation, but the FMCSA recently denied an autonomous trucking company's request to extend the amount of time their drivers could be on the road [1].

[1] https://www.truckinginfo.com/10126660/fmcsa-denies-request-f...

I think self-driving cars are a PR problem as much as they are a technology one, and that's definitely something waymo is working on - remember their cute little round bubble car?

Trucks are big, heavy, and human-driven ones already scare enough people on the road. If you launch with trucks first, you risk a backlash from people who are afraid of them. If you start with an autonomous taxi service people can sit in the cars themselves, feel safe, see that there's a "safety driver" present, and even if they aren't in the vehicle they still get to interact with them on the roads. you can make people comfortable with the idea before you launch the trucks. and everything that goes into the self-driving taxis is still valuable development work for the trucks. I wouldn't be surprised if self-driving trucks actually are the first real commercial launch target for waymo, and the taxi thing is just PR.

Trucks are subject to the PR of the almighty dollar. They don't have to make people feel warm and fuzzy. If there is a use case where a driver-less truck is slightly cheaper for equivalent results (or a lot cheaper for lesser results) they will get bought. The competition in OTR trucking is brutal like that. If the quarterly or annual operational cost comes out to be a tenth of a cent per mile lower than a dry van operated by a conventional steering wheel holder you can bet Swift, Schneider, Walmart, and anyone else with thousands of trucks will buy then for a portion of their fleets. They kind of have to to hedge their bets at that point.

>Trucks are subject to the PR of the almighty dollar. They don't have to make people feel warm and fuzzy

as long as the regulatory situation allows it, yes. but until they're seeking approval to have them actually allowed on the roads, making people feel warm and fuzzy is pretty important.

My thought too. Think between Amazon (or UPS/Fedex/Walmart) distribution centers/warehouses.

Still have a driver do the last mile, for deliveries to stores, homes, etc, but the between cities, long haul routes seem ripe for automation. (especially with all the laws on driver mandatory rest periods).

With 5G, considering last miles are almost always populated, you could even have remote drivers take over.

Road work is typically scheduled during the night in at least my region of the US (Northeast). If you think normal roads are confusing for auto-pilot, wait until they try to navigate hastily setup detours for temporary construction.

Because trucks are more dangerous than cars.

That makes them a bigger win to automate.

You save a lot of money on accidents too by automating.

Might be something as simple as the average engineer/maker/hacker has access to a car to play with but not a truck.

That basically what Tesla is doing, unlike Daimler they just don't have the Trucks yet. Once the truck is out it will drive itself on the highway.

The problem is just that you still need a driver anyway, so it really doesn't help that much for now.

Its the same problem Waymo has in general.

Not sure why this opinion is so prevalent. Tesla is in no way close or comparable to a L4 system. It is not even a brief thought for waymo

Just hype I’d guess. Tesla fans love to equate it’s self driving efforts with Waymo’s, when in reality they are years behind even with the new FSD update.

Neither has Waymo or Daimler ever demonstrated such a system with a truck on a highway. My point was about strategy.

And who will win general driving is yet open, and just assuming it Waymo is foolish. I think is funny how on HN people dismiss Tesla when there are actually tons of people who already do their commute on the highway almost without intervention literally all over the world.

They have trucks that will have this same feature and they have already talked about the idea of platooning.

Just downvoting me because you don't think Tesla approach is as good as Waymo/Daimler approach doesn't make what I said wrong.

> I think is funny how on HN people dismiss Tesla when there are actually tons of people who already do their commute on the highway almost without intervention literally all over the world.

That's just advanced driver assistance, nowhere near "full self driving". Granted, it's better than other cars, but it's still not self driving.

Also, "almost without intervention" has no meaning if you have to keep your hand at the wheel at all times ready to takeover.

Well, the driver would just drive the "first" and "last" mile right? So he could drive the truck to a lot next to the highway that has an on-ramp, let that truck go on its way, and he can jump into a truck that just drove itself off the highway onto that same lot...

Or I guess you mean they still need a driver because of compliance/legal issues?

Well for now you need it for logal reasons of course.

What you suggest is an interesting idea, a total change on how we think about truck logistics. Its certainty possible but I don't know if we will ever get there. By the time the legal things are sorted out, the trucks might just drive themselves all the way to the destination.