He rode across the country with an owner operator, and he tells the story.
"A true truck has eighteen wheels, or more. From Atlanta and Charlotte to North Powder, Oregon, this was the first time that Ainsworth had so much as tapped his air horn. In three thousand one hundred and ninety miles I rode with him he used it four times. He gave it a light, muted blast to thank a woman in a four-wheeler who helped us make a turn in urban traffic close to our destination, and he used it twice in the Yakima Valley, flirting with a woman who was wearing a bikini. She passed us on I-82, and must have pulled over somewhere, because she passed us again on I-90. She waved both times the horn erupted. She was riding in a convertible and her top was down."
I work for a startup in the trucking space so it's nice to see such an in depth analysis of the industry. I can agree that most of the article is accurate based on what I've seen in my 4 years in the industry. There is so much more innovation going on in the trucking industry that a lot of people don't know about.
My company, Platform Science, is building a configurable open platform that connects a lot of the different categories mentioned in the article (drivers, carriers, brokers, OEMs, software vendors, etc). If you're interested in career opportunities in the trucking industry, we're hiring for a number of open positions[1]. Feel free to send me an email (My work email is in my profile) and I can connect you with the right hiring manager.
This is another piece that I never got to talk about in my post. There's a LOT of software in trucking, the problem is that most of the software was built in a different era.
Platform Science looks pretty cool - seems like a TMS with specific improvements against legacy systems. Building a TMS is a pretty good business - massive fixed cost but once you've built the system, it's fairly hard for competitors to dislodge you.
Super interesting analysis of the trucking market.
A couple of questions would be:
* At what speed is the industry going to embrace self-driving / "augmented driving" in trucks? I'd imagine a driver would still be required at the wheel in case of emergencies for the foreseeable future. What new skills would truckers have to learn?
* Given the environmental impact of trucking (self-driving or not), what are some interesting propositions that climate change startups could come up with? Do any players in the value chain even care about climate impact? 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 find the insurance part more interesting that the factoring part. Given the generally poor service quality of insurance companies, I'm wondering if there is a possibility of a "Lemonade" like insurance company in this space? Lemonade started out as a home insurer I believe. What is the killer proposition for an insurance company in this space?
Lots more thoughts come to mind. Again, great writeup, thanks!
Margins in trucking simply can’t accommodate self driving without the costs of shipping having to go way up. The tech is expensive, we’re probably decades away from true self driving with no minder in the truck on open roads, who the hell knows how the regulatory landscape will shake out, this stuff may never work in bad weather conditions (blocking half the country for half the year). And even with self driving, you still have fuel/charging costs, tires, etc. and someone has to load and unload the truck.
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.
With all due respect the hubris (and folly) of Silicon Valley pursuing driveless cars and trucks as well as things like uber is astounding.
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.
> I'd imagine a driver would still be required at the wheel in case of emergencies for the foreseeable future.
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.)
1 - Oh man, this was one of the questions that was asked by almost every investor. The truth is that no one really knows. My best guess is that we're a decade or more away from true self-driving. Augmented driving might be sooner but trucking is one of the biggest employers in 35 states. Truck drivers are not going to let self/augmented driving eat into their paychecks.
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.
IMHO (and this is just my relatively uninformed opinion), the key driving force here will be the shift to electric trucks. These are more expensive to buy but cheaper to operate. At least right now. And also easier to turn into self driving platforms.
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.
Maybe this is a stupid question but is there any value in trying to put solar panels on the roofs of trucks to offset fuel costs?
Solar panels are (new) around $0.75 / Watt and less than that used. Maybe you could fit 9 or so on the top which, depending on what panels you use, could be about a 1kW or so in sunlight. Maybe it's too much of a stretch to ask for a modified engine but heating the driver cabin or even providing some type of heating or cooling to the container might help offset costs.
Solar powered 'reefer' trailers have been around for a long time, just not economically viable until recently. Dozens of companies showed new designs last year.
> Maybe this is a stupid question but is there any value in trying to put solar panels on the roofs of trucks to offset fuel costs?
The value is lower than putting the solar panels in a desert where they don't shake around and get worn out quicker. Perpetual solar powered auto-mobiles weight almost nothing and are more like three wheel bikes where you lay down. So on a truck it would be bugger all.
That's a lot of extra weight for maybe 9-10kWHr of energy at most (assuming a full day of perfect summertime conditions)... One gallon of diesel fuel contains about 35kWHr of energy.
Has anyone estimated what the impact on the trucking industry would be if the US repealed the Jones Act? Most of America's biggest cities are adjacent to ocean or other waterways, and water transport is cheaper than land transport. So it seems fairly plausible to me that the American trucking industry in its current form is basically just a huge source of excess carbon emissions, created as a result of bad regulation.
Would be really curious for insight into why truck purchase loans run 8-10% APR with 20% down. If anything, I'd expect them to be lower risk and easier to re-posses?
I'd say it's more market conditions over anything else. Truck drivers generally have poor credit - they're not going to be able to come up with ~400k otherwise. As a result, you get lenders that charge more.
Also, repossessing trucks across the country is kinda an issue. You might need to drive hundreds or thousands of miles to claim the truck which is a nightmare that carriers deal with on a daily basis.
Probably because it's a cut throat business and truckers operating on razor thin margins are more likely to default on their loans when they get into trouble. The second hand value of the trucks is not enough to cover that risk. A two year old truck has a value of course, but it's nowhere near the new value of the truck.
I’m surprised with how much care went into breaking down the various pieces of the industry, there was zero mention of the Teamsters Union. Nor is there much mention of any of the human issues which lead to things like most trucking companies failing in the first couple of years.
Perhaps looking at trucking from a human centered design perspective would identify problems and needs which are missing from this otherwise deep analysis. What are the pain points of the various types of roles/people involved, what makeshift solutions are they currently using, and do they have money to spend on a better solution?
Author here - there's definitely a lot about trucking that I didn't get to cover. E.g. growth in autonomous vehicles, the issues recruiting drivers, federal regulation, and the lasting impacts of unions.
That being said, human centered design probably doesn't work in trucking. The assumption here is that people within a certain role has a fixed set of pain points. The truth is that trucking is too wide to categorize in that way. E.g. I met dispatchers that had a really hard time finding loads, but others had a really hard time getting drivers to pay them. Every person's experience and pain points in trucking are all slightly different simply due to the nature of the industry.
I think there's certainly an education component to most trucking companies failing but the root of the problem is the design of the industry.
This is an excellent observation. I am working a bit in the marine/rail terminal space (on the software side), it is amazing how much functionality is built specifically to fulfill union contract terms at various terminals.
Truck drivers do a lot more than just sit in the cab and drive.
Sure I guess there are operating models where you don't need one driver paired all the time with one truck but definitely can't just replace drivers IMHO
The $65k (plus/minus bits and pieces) is then consequently also the cap on the additional costs of the self-driving tech and operations per truck. It's not necessarily obvious to me that we'll be there in the next few years.
Also, some of the easy use cases for potential self-driving tech have - at least in the US - already been put on rail which is in a sense almost a self-driving truck. In my view one of the major opportunities missing for making trucking more cost competitive and reducing the societal impact of trucking (emissions, road wear, less than desirable work conditions for truck drivers) is to move more and more freight onto rail. The US is quite good at it actually, but in particular Europe needs to get their act together on it.
That’s what is at stake, but monetization will be less than that valuation because Level 5 autonomy roughly expands capacity 3X (bots don’t sleep), so there likely will be somewhat less monetized value.
Might need to add the capex of equipment costs, and subtract the externalities costs of increases wear and tear on infrastructure and equipment.
The article mentions that a lot of the trucking spot market takes place on load boards (DAT, Truckstop, etc...)
How did the spot market work before the internet/the proliferation of technological devices? Where did the "pool" of owner operators hang out before the internet? Or was trucking completely unlike it is today?
"90% of owner operators fail in their first year - trucking is incredibly cutthroat."
Maybe the disruption this market needs is a set of unions rather than just trucking companies.
It would be nice if unions were limited such that... E.G. they could not grow to larger than 15% of the workforce for a sector in any single union. Contracts would need to be approved by... some number, lets say 2/3rds of all workers across all unions. With the 15% number that would require at least 5 unions and over 66% of workers to approve of contracts.
There are some interesting podcasts about this recorded by the Bloomberg OddLots team. Interviews with the guy who runs https://www.freightwaves.com/ and at least one actual trucker. Lots of other podcasts recently about global issues affecting logistics
Pet peeve: no matter what you do in a truck someone gets mad.
You’re either driving too fast or too slow. You try to stay in the slow lane but catch up to the person going 45 on the interstate who speeds up as soon as you get next to them trapping you in the fast lane until you give them ‘incentive’ to let you back over.
I could go on and on but my government mandated 30 break was over six minutes ago and there’s people to annoy on the two lane highway I get to drive on until Texas.
Factoring is very common across sectors with long payment durations. It’s amazing for manufacturing businesses for example who may not get paid for 30, 60 or 90 days after shipping product. The great thing (and where it is nothing like payday loans when done correctly) is that the responsibility and risk of collecting payment falls to the factoring company and not you. We happily factored for years just to offload payment chasing for a tricky customer, well worth the 2%.
There was an interesting sentence in that section. I thought that factors shouldered the non-payment risk but article seems to imply that non-payment would come back and bite the truckers
The Odd Lots podcast recently did two episodes on US trucking that were interesting. The first with an actual trucker, "The Trucking Episode: Why the Industry Is Such a Mess":
Interesting observations on tracking in that episode:
> Gord: (23:44) […] So they regulate the drivers, right? And there's going to be another book being published next month by an academic at Cornell named Karen Levy, which is called “Data Driven: Truckers, Technology and the New Workplace Surveillance.” And she has spent 10 years studying like the effects of all of the regulatory imposition on the driver through surveillance technology, driver-facing cameras, ELDs, all of this stuff that's meant to regulate us because of the public's fear of, you know, drivers driving tired over their hours, all this stuff, which is an effect of the fact that the market's been pummeled by deregulation. So there's this regulation question, but it's not looked at correctly, that they've deregulated the market, but they just moved the regulation from the operations of the companies and the rating and the business side of it, and they've moved all the regulation onto the operations and onto the driver, which is another reason people wash out.
> Because if you're somebody like me who's been in the business my entire life, my dad was a trucker, both my uncles were truckers, my grandpa was a trucker. I was helping mechanics fix trucks and driving around when I was a teenager after school. And I'm one of the sort of last of the big game hunters. I know what I'm doing. If somebody is a professional and knows what they're doing, they don't want to be told how to do their job by some human resources harridan, or a health and safety pencil neck person that's breathing down their neck. And that's a factor.
> Another thing, and this applies to more than just trucking, is like the psychology of people who work for a living. Most people that work for a living just want to do their jobs and be left alone. And we have this management mentality where like every single thing has to be done exactly as the computer models tell us and as safe as possible. And they're trying to impose theory on material reality and it drives the people actually doing the work insane. So, you know, you want to end driver churn and driver retention? One of the factors causing that is that they've overregulated the people doing the work rather than the people in charge of the markets in which the work is being done. Does that make any sense?
> Joe: (27:20) Yeah, and that's an incredible point, and I hadn't really thought about this before, this idea that it’s like, okay, the business of trucking, the business of pay, etc., [it’s] increasingly deregulated even as more burden gets shifted to the driver in the truck and the idea of monitoring. And so essentially sort of redistributing the imposition of where the regulation happens. […]
And just in the last week or so a second episode, "What Truckers Already Know About the Future of Electronic Worker Surveillance", with a researcher that just published a book on the industry:
> Long-haul truckers are the backbone of the American economy, transporting goods under grueling conditions and immense economic pressure. Truckers have long valued the day-to-day independence of their work, sharing a strong occupational identity rooted in a tradition of autonomy. Yet these workers increasingly find themselves under many watchful eyes. Data Driven examines how digital surveillance is upending life and work on the open road, and raises crucial questions about the role of data collection in broader systems of social control.
I actually had some figures around energy impact in earlier drafts of the piece. The issue I kept running into was the range of data - trucking is more inefficient than rail. But the question is how much, it could be as little as 2x more energy or as much as 100x more energy.
It depends on factors like load weight, truck conditions, rail route, and a bunch more.
[+] [-] i_am_proteus|3 years ago|reply
He rode across the country with an owner operator, and he tells the story.
"A true truck has eighteen wheels, or more. From Atlanta and Charlotte to North Powder, Oregon, this was the first time that Ainsworth had so much as tapped his air horn. In three thousand one hundred and ninety miles I rode with him he used it four times. He gave it a light, muted blast to thank a woman in a four-wheeler who helped us make a turn in urban traffic close to our destination, and he used it twice in the Yakima Valley, flirting with a woman who was wearing a bikini. She passed us on I-82, and must have pulled over somewhere, because she passed us again on I-90. She waved both times the horn erupted. She was riding in a convertible and her top was down."
[+] [-] dmd|3 years ago|reply
Now that is a great ambiguous sentence.
[+] [-] Stratoscope|3 years ago|reply
I love the ambiguity of the last sentence you quoted. I won't spoil it for others; just go read the article, it's that good.
Fair warning: it is long form journalism, of the best kind. Give yourself some time to savor it.
[+] [-] philshem|3 years ago|reply
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2003/02/17/a-fleet-of-one
[+] [-] snowypine|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dglass|3 years ago|reply
My company, Platform Science, is building a configurable open platform that connects a lot of the different categories mentioned in the article (drivers, carriers, brokers, OEMs, software vendors, etc). If you're interested in career opportunities in the trucking industry, we're hiring for a number of open positions[1]. Feel free to send me an email (My work email is in my profile) and I can connect you with the right hiring manager.
[0]: https://www.platformscience.com
[1]: https://www.platformscience.com/jobs
[+] [-] snowypine|3 years ago|reply
Platform Science looks pretty cool - seems like a TMS with specific improvements against legacy systems. Building a TMS is a pretty good business - massive fixed cost but once you've built the system, it's fairly hard for competitors to dislodge you.
[+] [-] mrhektor|3 years ago|reply
A couple of questions would be:
* At what speed is the industry going to embrace self-driving / "augmented driving" in trucks? I'd imagine a driver would still be required at the wheel in case of emergencies for the foreseeable future. What new skills would truckers have to learn?
* Given the environmental impact of trucking (self-driving or not), what are some interesting propositions that climate change startups could come up with? Do any players in the value chain even care about climate impact? 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 find the insurance part more interesting that the factoring part. Given the generally poor service quality of insurance companies, I'm wondering if there is a possibility of a "Lemonade" like insurance company in this space? Lemonade started out as a home insurer I believe. What is the killer proposition for an insurance company in this space?
Lots more thoughts come to mind. Again, great writeup, thanks!
[+] [-] dchuk|3 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] morpheos137|3 years ago|reply
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...
[+] [-] karussell|3 years ago|reply
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.)
[+] [-] snowypine|3 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] jillesvangurp|3 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] abetusk|3 years ago|reply
Solar panels are (new) around $0.75 / Watt and less than that used. Maybe you could fit 9 or so on the top which, depending on what panels you use, could be about a 1kW or so in sunlight. Maybe it's too much of a stretch to ask for a modified engine but heating the driver cabin or even providing some type of heating or cooling to the container might help offset costs.
[+] [-] Vvector|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rightbyte|3 years ago|reply
The value is lower than putting the solar panels in a desert where they don't shake around and get worn out quicker. Perpetual solar powered auto-mobiles weight almost nothing and are more like three wheel bikes where you lay down. So on a truck it would be bugger all.
[+] [-] kec|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ShredKazoo|3 years ago|reply
Here is some info on the Jones Act for those who are unfamiliar: https://www.cato.org/publications/policy-analysis/jones-act-...
[+] [-] coderintherye|3 years ago|reply
Would be really curious for insight into why truck purchase loans run 8-10% APR with 20% down. If anything, I'd expect them to be lower risk and easier to re-posses?
[+] [-] snowypine|3 years ago|reply
Also, repossessing trucks across the country is kinda an issue. You might need to drive hundreds or thousands of miles to claim the truck which is a nightmare that carriers deal with on a daily basis.
[+] [-] jillesvangurp|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] landemva|3 years ago|reply
It can be difficult to locate a tractor when the operator who is in default on the loan/lease has all of the lower 48 to make it disappear.
[+] [-] MadScott|3 years ago|reply
Good analysis of the nooks and crannies of potential for trucking. I work in this space and there's still a lot to learn here.
[+] [-] s1mon|3 years ago|reply
Perhaps looking at trucking from a human centered design perspective would identify problems and needs which are missing from this otherwise deep analysis. What are the pain points of the various types of roles/people involved, what makeshift solutions are they currently using, and do they have money to spend on a better solution?
[+] [-] snowypine|3 years ago|reply
That being said, human centered design probably doesn't work in trucking. The assumption here is that people within a certain role has a fixed set of pain points. The truth is that trucking is too wide to categorize in that way. E.g. I met dispatchers that had a really hard time finding loads, but others had a really hard time getting drivers to pay them. Every person's experience and pain points in trucking are all slightly different simply due to the nature of the industry.
I think there's certainly an education component to most trucking companies failing but the root of the problem is the design of the industry.
[+] [-] Scubabear68|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gnfargbl|3 years ago|reply
Am I correct in naively calculating something like $200B/year on the table for full-self-driving truck technology?
[+] [-] adaml_623|3 years ago|reply
Sure I guess there are operating models where you don't need one driver paired all the time with one truck but definitely can't just replace drivers IMHO
[+] [-] alexdoesstuff|3 years ago|reply
Also, some of the easy use cases for potential self-driving tech have - at least in the US - already been put on rail which is in a sense almost a self-driving truck. In my view one of the major opportunities missing for making trucking more cost competitive and reducing the societal impact of trucking (emissions, road wear, less than desirable work conditions for truck drivers) is to move more and more freight onto rail. The US is quite good at it actually, but in particular Europe needs to get their act together on it.
[+] [-] yourapostasy|3 years ago|reply
Might need to add the capex of equipment costs, and subtract the externalities costs of increases wear and tear on infrastructure and equipment.
[+] [-] cobertos|3 years ago|reply
How did the spot market work before the internet/the proliferation of technological devices? Where did the "pool" of owner operators hang out before the internet? Or was trucking completely unlike it is today?
[+] [-] snowypine|3 years ago|reply
So I guess these drivers mostly hung out at truck stops (they still do today), just that most truck stops aren't as clean/nice as before.
[+] [-] waiseristy|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|3 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] mjevans|3 years ago|reply
Maybe the disruption this market needs is a set of unions rather than just trucking companies.
It would be nice if unions were limited such that... E.G. they could not grow to larger than 15% of the workforce for a sector in any single union. Contracts would need to be approved by... some number, lets say 2/3rds of all workers across all unions. With the 15% number that would require at least 5 unions and over 66% of workers to approve of contracts.
[+] [-] jborichevskiy|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tonguetrainer|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] adaml_623|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] readthenotes1|3 years ago|reply
Or at least have tracking software that fines them heavily for leaving the slow lanem
[+] [-] UncleEntity|3 years ago|reply
You’re either driving too fast or too slow. You try to stay in the slow lane but catch up to the person going 45 on the interstate who speeds up as soon as you get next to them trapping you in the fast lane until you give them ‘incentive’ to let you back over.
I could go on and on but my government mandated 30 break was over six minutes ago and there’s people to annoy on the two lane highway I get to drive on until Texas.
[+] [-] PedroBatista|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] forgetbook|3 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] simonbarker87|3 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] zabzonk|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] throw0101c|3 years ago|reply
* https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-trucking-episode-w...
* https://omny.fm/shows/odd-lots/the-trucking-episode-why-the-...
Interesting observations on tracking in that episode:
> Gord: (23:44) […] So they regulate the drivers, right? And there's going to be another book being published next month by an academic at Cornell named Karen Levy, which is called “Data Driven: Truckers, Technology and the New Workplace Surveillance.” And she has spent 10 years studying like the effects of all of the regulatory imposition on the driver through surveillance technology, driver-facing cameras, ELDs, all of this stuff that's meant to regulate us because of the public's fear of, you know, drivers driving tired over their hours, all this stuff, which is an effect of the fact that the market's been pummeled by deregulation. So there's this regulation question, but it's not looked at correctly, that they've deregulated the market, but they just moved the regulation from the operations of the companies and the rating and the business side of it, and they've moved all the regulation onto the operations and onto the driver, which is another reason people wash out.
> Because if you're somebody like me who's been in the business my entire life, my dad was a trucker, both my uncles were truckers, my grandpa was a trucker. I was helping mechanics fix trucks and driving around when I was a teenager after school. And I'm one of the sort of last of the big game hunters. I know what I'm doing. If somebody is a professional and knows what they're doing, they don't want to be told how to do their job by some human resources harridan, or a health and safety pencil neck person that's breathing down their neck. And that's a factor.
> Another thing, and this applies to more than just trucking, is like the psychology of people who work for a living. Most people that work for a living just want to do their jobs and be left alone. And we have this management mentality where like every single thing has to be done exactly as the computer models tell us and as safe as possible. And they're trying to impose theory on material reality and it drives the people actually doing the work insane. So, you know, you want to end driver churn and driver retention? One of the factors causing that is that they've overregulated the people doing the work rather than the people in charge of the markets in which the work is being done. Does that make any sense?
> Joe: (27:20) Yeah, and that's an incredible point, and I hadn't really thought about this before, this idea that it’s like, okay, the business of trucking, the business of pay, etc., [it’s] increasingly deregulated even as more burden gets shifted to the driver in the truck and the idea of monitoring. And so essentially sort of redistributing the imposition of where the regulation happens. […]
And just in the last week or so a second episode, "What Truckers Already Know About the Future of Electronic Worker Surveillance", with a researcher that just published a book on the industry:
* https://omny.fm/shows/odd-lots/what-truckers-already-know-ab...
* https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/what-truckers-already-...
> Long-haul truckers are the backbone of the American economy, transporting goods under grueling conditions and immense economic pressure. Truckers have long valued the day-to-day independence of their work, sharing a strong occupational identity rooted in a tradition of autonomy. Yet these workers increasingly find themselves under many watchful eyes. Data Driven examines how digital surveillance is upending life and work on the open road, and raises crucial questions about the role of data collection in broader systems of social control.
* https://press.princeton.edu/books/hardcover/9780691175300/da...
* https://www.karen-levy.net
[+] [-] college_physics|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] snowypine|3 years ago|reply
It depends on factors like load weight, truck conditions, rail route, and a bunch more.