I work with two companies developing true autonomous trucks and the conclusions in this article are dated and not accurate in light of the bigger picture.
1) The model most are working toward is "hub to hub" not point to point. As in, A human driver drives the truck from the warehouse or port to a hub on the highway outside the city surface streets. Then they get out of the truck and pick up another one that needs to go back into the city. The truck then drives itself on the highway to another hub near its destination where another human driver completes the trip. This works in multiple ways - it allows human drivers to deal with the hard part of automation while also avoiding the terrible away from home lifestyle, and it allows you to have dedicated autonomous trucks for on-highway separate from your human-driven fleet (you can swap the trailers instead of using the same cab). You'll see these hubs start cropping up in a couple years.
2) On-highway autonomy is not that far away anymore. It's definitely not a "next year" thing, but mid-late decade is a near certainty based on the current state of the tech. That's a long time for people used to software, but not a long time compared to the lifecycle of a truck.
3) There seems to be an implicit assumption in this write-up that autonomous systems will remain horribly expensive, which isn't true. They're expensive today because each generation of development is effectively custom built in small quantities. Just like Starsky said their camera system would drop in price with scale, a "ready for production" generation of autonomous driving kit in a few years will likely be close to 1/3 the current kit cost, which has very large impacts on the total ROI calculation.
I don't want to make it sound like there aren't big challenges left to solve - there are - but there's also a reason so much investment money has flowed into this space. The ROI does make sense, just not on the original hype-cycle timeline that a lot of people reported.
Trucker with a CS degree here. I'm very skeptical of the feasibility of autonomous highway trucks that can drive outside very tightly defined parameters or ideal situations. That being said, it just occurred to me, how will these trucks react to or let alone detect tire blowouts or break failures/fires on the trailers?
Edit: I know from experience that getting a project to what we think is 95% there is relatively easy compared to the last 5% that make the product/project 100% viable. The real life testing will kill you if the edge cases don't. (I don't mean that literally, although...)
> The model most are working toward is "hub to hub" not point to point. As in, A human driver drives the truck from the warehouse or port to a hub on the highway outside the city surface streets. Then they get out of the truck and pick up another one that needs to go back into the city.
What's the competitive advantage of this setup over a train?
I think this point is key "Those margins would jump to 58% if that remote driver only needed to pay attention for the first and last miles." - if you're going for #1 you still have a human in the loop for the first and last mile. If I understand the original post correctly (and I may not be), going from human in the loop at beginning and end-of-trip to no human in the loop at all is where the ROI vanishes
"While this is a lower margin business than software’s traditional 90%, we expected to be able to get to a 50% margin in time.
It took me way too long to realize that VCs would rather a $1b business with a 90% margin than a $5b business with a 50% margin, even if capital requirements and growth were the same.
And growth would be the same. The biggest limiter of autonomous deployments isn’t sales, it’s safety."
In either case, returns are gated on fleet deployments, and the teleoperator approach seems more likely to deploy sooner at scale. Is it that VC's in this case were not investing in logistics, but in AI?
That's really sad, because it's a good idea, trucking has a massive labor crisis for all the reasons they detailed (only paid for hauling, not waiting, combined with the race to the bottom in transport pricing where independent truckers and trucking firms both are cutting their own throats to win contracts).
Hmm I wish people would stop saying AI is "just pattern matching". I think it's pretty clear that a) state of the art LLMs have gone well beyond basic pattern matching and b) there's no fundamental reason (that anyone knows of) to believe that humans aren't "just pattern matching".
I mean I don't think we'll have fully autonomous vehicles using AI for a very long time because it basically requires strong AI... But it also doesn't seem like research is especially stalled.
I work for a Mining company that has autonomous dumptrucks (among other things), and the autonomy has proven its ROI quite nicely. So much so that we are expanding its use and automating more things like light vehicles and drill rigs etc.
Its not cut and dry / black and white, there has been some loss in efficiency in some areas but that is a learning process and we're constantly reviewing and updating.
For us its about economy of scale, and given we control our mine sites 100% its a bit simpler than fwy's and hwy's etc.. we dont get inattentive drivers and drunk drivers and teenagers in blinged up ricerboxes.
The value its added has shown me that autonomy on the public roads is definitely going to be a thing and probably very soon.
I would expect insurance companies to be the biggest drivers... offering discounts to vehicles that are not driven by humans. follow by municipal councils, who will notice that the more autonomous vehicles there are, the fewer accidents there will be and the better traffic flow is thereby reducing the need for road expansions and traffic management upgrades.
This is a fantastic read. But don't agree with the conclusion. It's myopic.
Few problems I have with this,
- The cost saving of 600K/truck/year is low relative to the cost saving with lower autonomy. When improving efficiency in any operations system, the ROI keeps getting lower and lower with further improvements. Does not mean that the investment is not worth doing
- The efficiency principle of software relies on scale. There's no reason to build autonomous vehicles at all if you own a single truck but this makes sense when you have a large fleet. That's why software earns with scale. 600K/yr is a single truck saving. It becomes significant over the scale of trucks and the years.
The unit economics is wonderful to go through. Appreciate the research!
> The hardest 1% of the technical problem, automating the surface streets and interchanges, would end up being worth only about $600/truck/yr. Level 4 truck autonomy has less value than a daily coffee.
Note that savings is $600, not $600,000. For a $100K truck, that’s 0.6% per year. Not nothing, but they’re happy to let someone else do the Herculean effort to get to L4.
For each programmer on a team that could do it in a year for, say, $240K in comp, you’d need 400 truck-years ($40M worth of trucks for 1 year) to make it a break even proposition. How many programmer-years do you think it would take to build L4 autonomous trucks? How many programmer-years have FAANG alone (leave out auto manufacturers or taxi apps) spent over the last decade on autonomous driving?
Great article, but I think the conclusion is a bit off.
We also need more research into autonomous driving, to be able to drive trucks safely on highways. And automating that part you see as highly profitable.
So, if anything, the article shows how important more research into this topic is, especially if we would factor in the two disproved assumptions, you mention in the last section.
Second, I think it is a bit naive to think that truck manufacturers/tech companies will just sell trucks for a similar fix price to traditional trucking companies.
I think they will either
- lease them at an expensive rate (getting most of the additional margin, since they also deliver the value)
- offer them as a service, such that trucking companies only manage contracts (also expensive)
- found their own new companies or buy trucking companies to handle the contracts
One thing that seems off to me about autonomous trucking is the following:
Imagine a chain of autonomous trucks on a highway — isn't this basically a less energy efficient, less capacity version of a train that pushes a part of the costs onto public infrastructure?
Granted, trucks can also cover the last and the first mile(s) with much more flexibility, but a well designed system that allows you to quickly move containers from trains to trucks and vice versa could do just that as well.
Also: while this might not be as relevant within the US, on the rest of Earth truckers often also handle the customs at national borders and need to interact with certain laws. E.g. last week Bavaria, Germany banned trucks from taking non-highway routes to Austria. Not sure how an autonomous vehicle would honor this, or how police would be able to stop them. The mechanisms for doing all the things beyond just driving are just not there.
I used to own an OTR trucking company. The biggest issue for us other than finding drivers like the article mentions were the FMSCA regulations around the duration a driver is permitted to drive on a given day. We would be forced to stop a few miles short of a dropoff location because the driver ran out of driving time and was forced to enter the sleeping berth to rest. Companies like Amazon solve for this by driving in teams of two per truck so you can swap drivers, but finding even a single driver for us was a challenge. I'm curious what the current state of regulations say for autonomous trucks. If they are not capped on drive time then that alone would be a huge win for companies.
We are incredibly far away from autonomous trucks. I am not aware of a single truck that you can buy that offers assisted (as in you press a button) lane switching. There are lane keeping assistants and assistants which use cameras to check whether switching lanes is unsafe due to other vehicles on the road.
Waymo seems to be working on it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z09jND0G6HQ but the fact that this 20 second maneuver is warranting a video in their eyes should tell you how complicated it is.
It seems like AI truck driving, at least hub-to-hub, is already pretty well solved. Here's a test example (in Germany) that incorporates electric trucks which only need enough onboard energy to deliver "the last mile" : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_3P_S7pL7Yg
I believe the conclusion that ROI is poor is misleading:
Imagine a new truck company created by one or more tech giants.
A) Using state of the art tech.
B) Assuming mostly full autonomy.
C) Factor in the cost savings.
Conclusion is this company would very largely outperform traditional trucking companies in terms of profitability. And it would be extremely scalable.
If that holds then it follows that autonomy is simply the last component necessary to be able to disrupt the trucking industry as is.
The real question is to what degree autonomy is needed to be able to start doing this.
(p.s. not an endorsement, I'm personally not a fan of Uber due to their tendency to play the role of Bad-Actor against both their gig-economy workers and customers, even seeking out and leveraging political corruption.
Really low standards for ethical code of conduct.)
But I always consider at least 3 or maybe even more players. Each invest huge amount of money. Now there is oversupply. They must get at least some of this back. Thus they start to compete with prices. Eventually they end up with pretty slim profit margins.
The one thing I don't understand is: "Why don't we make all trucking semi-local?"
It would seem with modern automation that you could place relay stations at roughly 250 mile spacings so a driver can pick up a trailer near home, drive 4 hours out, drop off trailer, pick up new one, drive 4 hours back home, drop off trailer, and go home.
This seems like a much easier nut to crack than autonomous driving. Real estate in a lot of flyover country in America is really cheap. And it has other advantages like gasoline and service are at specified points. Basically, treat trailers like IP packets.
What am I missing? (I suspect some sort of CapEx/OpEx accounting tomfoolery that means everybody wants everybody else to take the risk of actually owning things.)
Great and detailed article. I agree with the comment from balaselvam though. On the way towards full autonomy (whenever that might be achieved) you will get there incrementally (like Tesla is trying to do, their constant delays/promises notwithstanding). At some point highway driving will be ok, but even for highway driving it is absolutely imperative to have a very good understanding of how to drive, the level of autonomy needs to be quite advanced. Otherwise you can quickly end up in a situation where unforeseen traffic guidance, debris, loss of communication will result in a situation where the truck does not react well enough.
I doubt it is really possible to design a system for 'just' highway driving of such high quality that no intervention is required within the reaction time of a remote operator without actually trying to fully solve it. This could be limited to highways of course, but a loss of connection in city regions would then automatically mean the truck would have to stop where it is (in the middle of the road with hazards on)
I do like the remote operator scenario for start and end quite a lot though as it would ease the incremental inclusion of autonomy into the truck economy and offer higher safety with machines this big.
Sounds like trucking companies should build a network of well located cheap rooming houses for overnight stays for truckers and scrap overnight cabs. They could even put them next to fuel stops and open the eateries to the public. They could be called truck stops.
With all the hoopla that went into self-driving cars, why do we still not have self-driving trains? Operating on a fixed track reduces the problem space quite a bit, no? So if the technology can't get there for trains, then it will never get there for cars.
The problem is automatizing the existing infrastructure, 'cause it requires great effort (so, money and inconveniences).
I don't think however that the lessons there are applicable to cars as well, and while I think we could and should invest a lot on train systems, the final goal for cars should be reducing them, not replacing them with autonomous systems.
Railway is a different problem space than road vehicles. Trains run on fixed tracks, has long braking distance, are much heavier, and accidents can be much more devastating. While self-driving cars may use cameras, lidar and radar for detection and brake on sight, trains need to know exactly how far they are allowed to go and what speed restrictions are ahead in order to brake in time.
Traditional lineside signals and signs do give enough information to drive a train by a computer, but the rail industry has already chosen decades ago to integrate signalling and automation with the infrastructure, which is a completely different approach than today's self-driving cars. As a result, heavy rail and metro trains will not be "self-driving" in the same way as self-driving cars.
Now, if you say trams that run on streets, then possibly. Trams are often driven by sight and has stronger braking so it is possible to apply the same principles from self-driving cars. In fact, Siemens has been developing and testing one such tram. [1] Though I think the problem space is very similar to self-driving cars. There is no steering, but it still has to handle pedestrians and other road traffic.
They exist, many new lines or expansions are highly automated. Retrofits are hard for two sets of reasons:
Political: union strikes (meaning if you want to automate a line you may have to accept it being closed for the duration) and public outcry over a reduction in jobs.
Cost: You often only get the benefit of the simpler domain if you can implement the whole system from scratch, if you have to deal with the existing signalling, engines, (and human-driven trains) that's a complex problem, with massive capital outlay.
The problem of automating trains is easier, but train labor requirements are already very low compared to truck requirements, so there isn't much of a win there. A typical freight train has a 2-person crew carrying 200+ TEU containers.
I wonder how latency is handled. I wonder how close nearby you'd still want the remote driver since someone across the world would have at least hundreds of milliseconds in delay communicating back and forth
Also, what happens in periods of disconnectivity? It seems like you'd still need some autonomous capability then, although it might be lessened to only needing to pull over?
> The truck then drives itself on the highway to another hub near its destination where another human driver completes the trip. This works in multiple ways - it allows human drivers to deal with the hard part of automation while also avoiding the terrible away from home lifestyle, and it allows you to have dedicated autonomous trucks for on-highway separate from your human-driven fleet (you can swap the trailers instead of using the same cab). You'll see these hubs start cropping up in a couple years.
That makes sense, but just sounds like a worse version of freight trains to me.
I so hoped this would be about HPs purchase of Autonomy:
Autonomy was acquired by Hewlett-Packard (HP) in October 2011. The deal valued Autonomy at $11.7 billion (£7.4 billion). Within a year, HP had written off $8.8 billion of Autonomy's value. HP claimed this resulted from "serious accounting improprieties" and "outright misrepresentations" by the previous management.
Well written and very detailed. However, it's only focused on the effects of autonomy on currently operating manned fleets. The real question is what a new business will look like surrounding autonomous trucks. Autonomous vehicles aren't built to convert businesses - they're built for safety, convenience, and for businesses we haven't seen yet.
> Mining giant Rio Tinto is running pits at its Yandicoogina and Nammuldi mine sites, with workers controlling the driverless trucks largely from an operations centre in Perth, 1,200 kilometres away.
> Josh Bennett manages the mining operations at Yandicoogina mine north west of Newman and is closely involved with running 22 driverless trucks on the site.
That was then and much has happened since.
> In 2018, each truck was estimated to have operated on average 700 hours more than conventional haul trucks, with 15% lower costs – delivering clear productivity benefits. They also take truck operators out of harm’s way, reducing the risks associated with working around heavy machinery.
Autonomous driving is like alphago/alpha zero: without the algorithms it's really hard to solve, but when the algorithms are ready and mature, it will be easy to do and open source.
So far the biggest winners are companies outsourcing the time of being ready to retailers: Tesla and Comma.AI
[+] [-] mdorazio|3 years ago|reply
1) The model most are working toward is "hub to hub" not point to point. As in, A human driver drives the truck from the warehouse or port to a hub on the highway outside the city surface streets. Then they get out of the truck and pick up another one that needs to go back into the city. The truck then drives itself on the highway to another hub near its destination where another human driver completes the trip. This works in multiple ways - it allows human drivers to deal with the hard part of automation while also avoiding the terrible away from home lifestyle, and it allows you to have dedicated autonomous trucks for on-highway separate from your human-driven fleet (you can swap the trailers instead of using the same cab). You'll see these hubs start cropping up in a couple years.
2) On-highway autonomy is not that far away anymore. It's definitely not a "next year" thing, but mid-late decade is a near certainty based on the current state of the tech. That's a long time for people used to software, but not a long time compared to the lifecycle of a truck.
3) There seems to be an implicit assumption in this write-up that autonomous systems will remain horribly expensive, which isn't true. They're expensive today because each generation of development is effectively custom built in small quantities. Just like Starsky said their camera system would drop in price with scale, a "ready for production" generation of autonomous driving kit in a few years will likely be close to 1/3 the current kit cost, which has very large impacts on the total ROI calculation.
I don't want to make it sound like there aren't big challenges left to solve - there are - but there's also a reason so much investment money has flowed into this space. The ROI does make sense, just not on the original hype-cycle timeline that a lot of people reported.
[+] [-] pungentcomment|3 years ago|reply
Edit: I know from experience that getting a project to what we think is 95% there is relatively easy compared to the last 5% that make the product/project 100% viable. The real life testing will kill you if the edge cases don't. (I don't mean that literally, although...)
[+] [-] cbdumas|3 years ago|reply
What's the competitive advantage of this setup over a train?
[+] [-] algo_trader|3 years ago|reply
Autonomy also dove-tails very well with the inevitable electrification (reduced maintenance, higher up time, higher capex lower opex, etc)
DO you have any opinions on etrucks-battery-swapping?
[+] [-] InfiniteRand|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|3 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] dukeofdoom|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Animats|3 years ago|reply
[1] https://medium.com/starsky-robotics-blog/the-end-of-starsky-...
[+] [-] troelsSteegin|3 years ago|reply
"While this is a lower margin business than software’s traditional 90%, we expected to be able to get to a 50% margin in time.
It took me way too long to realize that VCs would rather a $1b business with a 90% margin than a $5b business with a 50% margin, even if capital requirements and growth were the same.
And growth would be the same. The biggest limiter of autonomous deployments isn’t sales, it’s safety."
In either case, returns are gated on fleet deployments, and the teleoperator approach seems more likely to deploy sooner at scale. Is it that VC's in this case were not investing in logistics, but in AI?
[+] [-] EdwardDiego|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] IshKebab|3 years ago|reply
I mean I don't think we'll have fully autonomous vehicles using AI for a very long time because it basically requires strong AI... But it also doesn't seem like research is especially stalled.
[+] [-] senectus1|3 years ago|reply
Its not cut and dry / black and white, there has been some loss in efficiency in some areas but that is a learning process and we're constantly reviewing and updating.
For us its about economy of scale, and given we control our mine sites 100% its a bit simpler than fwy's and hwy's etc.. we dont get inattentive drivers and drunk drivers and teenagers in blinged up ricerboxes.
The value its added has shown me that autonomy on the public roads is definitely going to be a thing and probably very soon. I would expect insurance companies to be the biggest drivers... offering discounts to vehicles that are not driven by humans. follow by municipal councils, who will notice that the more autonomous vehicles there are, the fewer accidents there will be and the better traffic flow is thereby reducing the need for road expansions and traffic management upgrades.
[+] [-] stevesimmons|3 years ago|reply
Won't this better traffic flow be offset by new congestion from AVs using the capacity of public roads as free car parks?
aka the Jevons Paradox
[+] [-] balaselvam|3 years ago|reply
The unit economics is wonderful to go through. Appreciate the research!
[+] [-] rflrob|3 years ago|reply
> The hardest 1% of the technical problem, automating the surface streets and interchanges, would end up being worth only about $600/truck/yr. Level 4 truck autonomy has less value than a daily coffee.
Note that savings is $600, not $600,000. For a $100K truck, that’s 0.6% per year. Not nothing, but they’re happy to let someone else do the Herculean effort to get to L4.
For each programmer on a team that could do it in a year for, say, $240K in comp, you’d need 400 truck-years ($40M worth of trucks for 1 year) to make it a break even proposition. How many programmer-years do you think it would take to build L4 autonomous trucks? How many programmer-years have FAANG alone (leave out auto manufacturers or taxi apps) spent over the last decade on autonomous driving?
[+] [-] mainframed|3 years ago|reply
Second, I think it is a bit naive to think that truck manufacturers/tech companies will just sell trucks for a similar fix price to traditional trucking companies. I think they will either
- lease them at an expensive rate (getting most of the additional margin, since they also deliver the value)
- offer them as a service, such that trucking companies only manage contracts (also expensive)
- found their own new companies or buy trucking companies to handle the contracts
[+] [-] atoav|3 years ago|reply
Imagine a chain of autonomous trucks on a highway — isn't this basically a less energy efficient, less capacity version of a train that pushes a part of the costs onto public infrastructure?
Granted, trucks can also cover the last and the first mile(s) with much more flexibility, but a well designed system that allows you to quickly move containers from trains to trucks and vice versa could do just that as well.
Also: while this might not be as relevant within the US, on the rest of Earth truckers often also handle the customs at national borders and need to interact with certain laws. E.g. last week Bavaria, Germany banned trucks from taking non-highway routes to Austria. Not sure how an autonomous vehicle would honor this, or how police would be able to stop them. The mechanisms for doing all the things beyond just driving are just not there.
[+] [-] aliyeysides|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] algo_trader|3 years ago|reply
Do they keep trucks longer since they do less mileage?
Do they start billing by the hour?
Does their schedule become less pre-booked and simply on-demand?
[+] [-] freemint|3 years ago|reply
Waymo seems to be working on it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z09jND0G6HQ but the fact that this 20 second maneuver is warranting a video in their eyes should tell you how complicated it is.
[+] [-] ProllyInfamous|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] BartjeD|3 years ago|reply
Imagine a new truck company created by one or more tech giants. A) Using state of the art tech. B) Assuming mostly full autonomy. C) Factor in the cost savings.
Conclusion is this company would very largely outperform traditional trucking companies in terms of profitability. And it would be extremely scalable.
If that holds then it follows that autonomy is simply the last component necessary to be able to disrupt the trucking industry as is.
The real question is to what degree autonomy is needed to be able to start doing this.
[+] [-] lazide|3 years ago|reply
Autonomous trucks only have a chance if cash is dirt cheap, maintenance on the equipment is low, but labor is very expensive.
Which… isn’t what is happening now or likely for awhile.
[+] [-] metadat|3 years ago|reply
https://www.uber.com/us/en/freight/
(p.s. not an endorsement, I'm personally not a fan of Uber due to their tendency to play the role of Bad-Actor against both their gig-economy workers and customers, even seeking out and leveraging political corruption. Really low standards for ethical code of conduct.)
[+] [-] Ekaros|3 years ago|reply
But I always consider at least 3 or maybe even more players. Each invest huge amount of money. Now there is oversupply. They must get at least some of this back. Thus they start to compete with prices. Eventually they end up with pretty slim profit margins.
[+] [-] bsder|3 years ago|reply
It would seem with modern automation that you could place relay stations at roughly 250 mile spacings so a driver can pick up a trailer near home, drive 4 hours out, drop off trailer, pick up new one, drive 4 hours back home, drop off trailer, and go home.
This seems like a much easier nut to crack than autonomous driving. Real estate in a lot of flyover country in America is really cheap. And it has other advantages like gasoline and service are at specified points. Basically, treat trailers like IP packets.
What am I missing? (I suspect some sort of CapEx/OpEx accounting tomfoolery that means everybody wants everybody else to take the risk of actually owning things.)
[+] [-] elzbardico|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mgoetzke|3 years ago|reply
I doubt it is really possible to design a system for 'just' highway driving of such high quality that no intervention is required within the reaction time of a remote operator without actually trying to fully solve it. This could be limited to highways of course, but a loss of connection in city regions would then automatically mean the truck would have to stop where it is (in the middle of the road with hazards on)
I do like the remote operator scenario for start and end quite a lot though as it would ease the incremental inclusion of autonomy into the truck economy and offer higher safety with machines this big.
[+] [-] Theodores|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bigbacaloa|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] victor9000|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rpadovani|3 years ago|reply
The problem is automatizing the existing infrastructure, 'cause it requires great effort (so, money and inconveniences).
I don't think however that the lessons there are applicable to cars as well, and while I think we could and should invest a lot on train systems, the final goal for cars should be reducing them, not replacing them with autonomous systems.
[+] [-] Animats|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] divingdragon|3 years ago|reply
Traditional lineside signals and signs do give enough information to drive a train by a computer, but the rail industry has already chosen decades ago to integrate signalling and automation with the infrastructure, which is a completely different approach than today's self-driving cars. As a result, heavy rail and metro trains will not be "self-driving" in the same way as self-driving cars.
Now, if you say trams that run on streets, then possibly. Trams are often driven by sight and has stronger braking so it is possible to apply the same principles from self-driving cars. In fact, Siemens has been developing and testing one such tram. [1] Though I think the problem space is very similar to self-driving cars. There is no steering, but it still has to handle pedestrians and other road traffic.
[1]: https://www.mobility.siemens.com/global/en/portfolio/rail/ro...
[+] [-] touch_abs|3 years ago|reply
Political: union strikes (meaning if you want to automate a line you may have to accept it being closed for the duration) and public outcry over a reduction in jobs.
Cost: You often only get the benefit of the simpler domain if you can implement the whole system from scratch, if you have to deal with the existing signalling, engines, (and human-driven trains) that's a complex problem, with massive capital outlay.
[+] [-] jussij|3 years ago|reply
https://www.republicworld.com/world-news/australia/australia...
[+] [-] _delirium|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] myroon5|3 years ago|reply
I wonder how latency is handled. I wonder how close nearby you'd still want the remote driver since someone across the world would have at least hundreds of milliseconds in delay communicating back and forth
Also, what happens in periods of disconnectivity? It seems like you'd still need some autonomous capability then, although it might be lessened to only needing to pull over?
[+] [-] ThePadawan|3 years ago|reply
That makes sense, but just sounds like a worse version of freight trains to me.
(Edit: This didn't reply to the correct comment)
[+] [-] throwaway0a5e|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] LightRailTycoon|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] BMc2020|3 years ago|reply
Autonomy was acquired by Hewlett-Packard (HP) in October 2011. The deal valued Autonomy at $11.7 billion (£7.4 billion). Within a year, HP had written off $8.8 billion of Autonomy's value. HP claimed this resulted from "serious accounting improprieties" and "outright misrepresentations" by the previous management.
[+] [-] magic_hamster|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] eschluntz|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] defrost|3 years ago|reply
> Mining giant Rio Tinto is running pits at its Yandicoogina and Nammuldi mine sites, with workers controlling the driverless trucks largely from an operations centre in Perth, 1,200 kilometres away.
> Josh Bennett manages the mining operations at Yandicoogina mine north west of Newman and is closely involved with running 22 driverless trucks on the site.
That was then and much has happened since.
> In 2018, each truck was estimated to have operated on average 700 hours more than conventional haul trucks, with 15% lower costs – delivering clear productivity benefits. They also take truck operators out of harm’s way, reducing the risks associated with working around heavy machinery.
[1] https://www.abc.net.au/news/2015-10-18/rio-tinto-opens-world...
[2] https://www.riotinto.com/en/about/innovation/automation
[+] [-] freemint|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] grandmczeb|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] wilg|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mainframed|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] xiphias2|3 years ago|reply
So far the biggest winners are companies outsourcing the time of being ready to retailers: Tesla and Comma.AI