Yes, and manual work for on/off-loading or even paper work is still not uncommon. I can imagine that self-driving on long highways will come as a first step to avoid longer stops (no sleep time required) or to avoid a second driver.

> Clearly, given the cut-throat nature of the business, there would necessarily need to be a revenue impact otherwise no one is going to use the proposition.

I was wondering why route optimization wasn't mentioned in the post. Lot's of innovation happened in the past years. (With "route optimization" I mean both, the route selection between two points and also optimization of the order of multiple stops.)

ICE trucks are really hard to operate. You are basically micro managing the gears, dealing with lot of fairly complex bit of equipment, etc. Electric trucks basically have no gears, heaps of torque and don't really require much more than just pointing them in the right direction. Apparently as easy as driving a normal car.

So, electrification strikes me as a core requirement for self driving. And of course electric trucks are also more environmentally friendly. Less brake dust (regenerative braking) and less emissions. And the batteries are recycled at the end of their life. So there's that.

The shift to electric trucks is already happening of course but its very capital intensive. Millions of trucks with a price tag of hundreds of thousands each means a lot of capital will have to be expended. Trillions basically. That alone will ensure it will take quite long to complete. A decade minimum before most new trucks are electric and then at least another decade before most ICE trucks have been retired. And the first generations won't be self driving. So these new trucks would be in service for a decade plus before being swapped out for self driving ones. So, if that takes another decade to happen, we're talking 30-40 years. Minimum. But with the first ones on the road as early as less than a decade from now. It's going to be a slow process.

Insurance is basically about risk. Insurance companies like to minimize risk and maximize profits. An electric truck that is less likely to break down regularly is less risky and would on paper require a lower insurance fee. And then a self driving truck is less likely to get into accidents or other liability related issues. Which again means lower fees. So, that helps.

Volvo (which is BTW one of the more optimistic companies) is still today excluding long-haul trucks from being fully electric, and they have just started production of short-haul and "regional" electric trucks.

And of course full self-driving is still beyond the horizon.

BTW, and only as a side note, traditional trucks already use engine braking or retarders extensively, so I don't think that regenerative braking will change much when it comes to the amount of brake dust.

Hybrids seem to me like a net win all around for at least some use cases. I'm not sure where the value proposition is breaking down (or if anyone's even put in the effort to figure out whether it actually is breaking down).

Surely there can be particular routes/scenarios where hybrids may offer an advantage, but it is not (at least to me) very clear which ones they are.

Using a hybrid, you get back a lot of the maintenance hassle and on top of that your fuel is again more expensive. It's basically most of the downsides of an ICE truck without most of the upsides of a full battery electric truck. So, the business case for hybrid trucks is just a lot more murky. I'm sure there will be some companies that will try this but the money is going to be in full battery electric.

> you get back a lot of the maintenance hassle and on top of that your fuel is again more expensive

The entire value proposition of hybrids is that they both reduce the amount of required maintenance on the ICE part (plus the brakes) and reduce the amount of fuel needed-- while maintaining all the flexibility of ICE vehicles. As a bonus, they require far fewer batteries than full electrics at a time when battery supply is clearly going to be constrained for the foreseeable future.

Fully electric trucks will have trouble anywhere with long stretches of cold weather. Operating outside of their ideal temperature zone will result in much lower efficiency, exacerbated by the weight of the batteries remaining the same regardless of charge level.

I think there are ideal niches for both approaches. Honestly, I also think most pure ICE drivetrains should be converted over to varying types of hybrids in the long run, because it almost always seems to be a net win to me... but I could be wrong. Would love to see more R&D put into it, in any case.

Is that a net win? It reduces maintenance on the brakes, it may reduce maintenance on the ICE, and it adds a whole bunch of new stuff to maintain. Does anyone have data on the net effect? Does anyone have data for trucks?

Nikola advertises a battery electric heavy truck with 330 miles of range. Nikola and Volvo seems to still be pretending that they are going to use hydrogen but at the same time they are selling a lot of battery electric at this point and not a whole lot of hydrogen trucks. Mostly ranges are creeping up to the point where drivers must stop to take a break anyway that is long enough to top the battery up. So, the range anxiety argument is simply not there. It's a pure cost driven thing. And it's not like hydrogen fueling is particularly fast or cheap.

Of course, a lot of companies are opting for shorter range trucks because they are much cheaper and because that suits their needs. Long haul electric trucks are more expensive. Because of the extra batteries. So, yes, the sweet spot of the market is short haul, for now. But there's nothing inherently hard about longer range trucks. It's just a cost and supply chain issue. As battery production scales and prices come down further, we'll see more companies dip their toes into long haul.

Self driving is a thing that multiple electric truck and van companies are talking about at this point as something that they want to do. It's still pretty far out but it's not that much harder than self driving cars. But as I said, the bigger challenge here is simply replacing fleets which is an inherently slow process. But of course that's exactly where the money is going to be for manufacturers.

Not entirely unlike existing multi-trailer (used on some roads in Australia), so called Road Trains, but limited to two trailers, the main one and the battery trailer:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Road_train

the truck would enter the highway, stop at a service station, add a "powerpack" battery trailer, drive until the next station, swap battery trailer as many times as needed, then leave it at the last service station before destination.

It will fail in the market because the technology does not exist and will not exist in the foreseeable future unless or until something like AGI is perfected.

Driving is not a closed domain problem. There will always be fat tail circumstances where statistical methods will break down.

Furthermore driving, freight haul and taxicabs are NOT natural monopolies. They are not areas where technology can give enduring market power that society will tolerate (except perhaps in the case of regulatory / institutional capture). Instead they are low margin, established, service- commodity businesses.

The point of trucking is to safely and efficiently get goods from A to B. Until machines / automation can do it cheaper than humans it will not be viable.

There is no shortage of cheap low skilled labor in the USA.

Why invest in hugely expensive automation in an open problem domain that you can not even perfectly model when you can just pay a driver $25 an hour to do it better?

There is so much more easily attainable low hanging hanging fruit.

Why not automate warehouses?

Trains? Waitstaff? Insurance agents? Real estate agents?

Triage nursing?

All these are probably more attainable.

The driverless delusion reeks of sophomoric understanding of the problem domain fueled by credulous media and group think.

Personally I wouldn't hire anybody for a thinking role who believes that driverless trucks or taxis are viable marketable product for the open road. It is a good heuristic to separate critical thinkers from bandwagon riders.

It is literally an easier technical problem to land a man on the moon than to design an autonomous road vehicle that can do better and be more cost effective than humans in all circumstances.

Hopefully we will stop talking about this foolishness in a couple years.

https://blog.piekniewski.info/2021/12/18/farcical-self-delus...

Some of it is. Walmart has already deployed some self-driving semis in Arkansas that go between a warehouse and a store. There are a significant number of routes like this, always taking the same path back and forth between two places in a relatively controlled environment.

> Why invest in hugely expensive automation in an open problem domain that you can not even perfectly model when you can just pay a driver $25 an hour to do it better?

Driving time is a big one. There are strict limits on how many hours drivers can be driving on a given day. That means you've got a huge, expensive machine sitting idle for most of the day. Self-driving can get you double the usage of an expensive asset.

> Why not automate warehouses?

This is happening already. https://www.wsj.com/story/amazon-takes-steps-toward-warehous...

> It is literally an easier technical problem to land a man on the moon than to design an autonomous road vehicle that can do better and be more cost effective than humans in all circumstance.

Nobody's saying it has to work in all circumstances. You can choose where to deploy self-driving vehicles. If you stick to the American Southwest, you still have an enormous opportunity, but you eliminate one of the big challenges for autonomous vehicles - snow and other difficult weather.

For example, fully autonomous trucks which only work on highway with special equipment on the side could already be worth it. Long haul drivers can’t drive without stopping, can make mistakes and it’s not a very pleasant job. If you could only use a driver for the last few miles, that’s a huge gain.

You are mistaking a failure of your imagination for an absence of possibilities.

It doesn’t have to solve all cases to be immensely useful. All it needs is to be able to recognize when it’s unable to safely have control with enough advance notice to delegate to a human. Remotely piloted aircraft have been a thing for a long time; seems like we could do the same with trucks, so that humans only need to do the driving a small % of the time. I also suspect that current AI will likely respond to emergency situations better than humans do on average, because they don’t get tired and have superior reaction time.

I'll alter one of my favorite jokes to explain.

I want to go out like my Tesla ai did, in a bit of confusion and reanimated from rom, not screaming no no no no like the people in the car.

Tho truly with a lot of these the people will go out in their sleep.

IMO, there are road conditions where this is possible. For black swan cases like random wind gusts, tire blowouts, boulders falling onto the highway etc. I think AI would be better on average *currently* (again, just clarifying what I already said).

The most likely beachhead will be desert lanes in places with low regulations where the middle mile is autonomous but things are handed off to a real driver for getting to the actual warehouse. That’s complicated/limited use cases/more expensive for the same product. Tough sell.

I work directly in heavy duty trucking tech. Our customers are the biggest fleets in the country. All of them are exploring the tech to not fall behind, but behind closed doors every trucking leader will admit we’re nowhere near operationalizing self driving. Not to mention it’s unclear if the biz model for autonomous trucks is to sell the tech (then who is liable when the robot kills someone?) or to sell trucking capacity, the latter squarely making the autonomy companies competitors of trucking carriers vs vendors. It’s messy as hell.

Self driving is the VR of logistics. “We’re a year away” for the next 25 years is where my bets are being placed.

2 - Unfortunately, the margins are too thin for owner operators to have a vested interest in climate. I do think that an interesting distribution strategy for cleaner trucks is to sell heavily into private fleets (e.g. walmart trucking) because there's an ESG angle that the companies can buy into. As for dedicated trucking carriers, it's going to be hard to convince them unless there's some realistic return on investment.

3 - This is interesting, I haven't looked into insurance too much personally and I know the barrier to entry there is extremely high. That being said, I think the liability aspect reduces the viability of offering low-cost insurance. Most trucks are essentially houses on wheels in terms of cost and a single accident can run in the millions.

I'd imagine that if you really wanted to build an insurance company for trucking, you'd need to focus exclusively on mega-fleets (25+ truck carriers) and somehow offer them better rates than legacy insurance companies. While owner operators pay a lot in terms of insurance, the market simply isn't big enough to build a cohesive risk engine and underprice existing insurance without taking on unaccounted risk.