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A comment on Autonomous tech boom darling Embark goes belly-up, lays off hundreds. Parent comment

Re:Autonomous tech boom darling Embark goes belly-up, lays o... by iepathos on Monday March 06, 2023 @08:35PM (#35050368)
Curious why you think trucking would have a bigger societal impact? As to why Google et al. are aiming for passenger vehicles, there about 4 million semi trucks in the US and over 290 million passenger vehicles.
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Re:Autonomous tech boom darling Embark goes belly-up, lays o... by adam_arthur on Monday March 06, 2023 @08:38PM (#35050392)
And whats the economic value of 1 mile driven per truck vs passenger vehicle?

Cheaper truck transport also opens up more cost competitive manufacturing, factory placement. Which will be highly deflationary.

In a remote work world a large percentage of the workforce only has to travel for discretionary, not economic reasons.

Anyway, normalizing for cost-benefit, trucking clearly comes out ahead

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Re:Autonomous tech boom darling Embark goes belly-up, lays o... by renewiltord on Monday March 06, 2023 @09:18PM (#35050700)
For a venture, you want the value that you can capture to drive direction, not all the externalities and I think with trucking that's small.

It makes sense for the US Gov, just not for Google.

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