Autonomous Truck News

[kscarbel2]

Autonomous trucks: The reality is setting in

Sean Kilcarr, Fleet Owner  /  February 24, 2017

Despite the recent lawsuit filed against self-driving truck systems maker Otto and its new owner, Uber, regarding the theft of autonomous vehicle trade secrets as well as the ongoing reluctance among both motorists and truckers regarding the acceptance of such technology, more than a few experts believe self-driving trucks will be a daily reality sooner rather than later.

The reason boils down to a single word: Economics.

“The autonomous vehicle is going to change everything,” Robert Hooper Jr., CEO of Atlantic Logistics, recently explained to me. “It’s a Tsunami coming at our [freight] industry and if we don’t prepare for it we’ll get swept away.”

An economist by training, Hooper said the cost-savings potential of the self-driving truck is huge, especially when one contemplates eliminating the need for a full-time human driver to pilot big rigs.

By his calculations, driver pay runs the gamut from $35,000 a year for those in drayage operations up to $125,000 annually for more “specialized” markets such as household goods moving and the like.

Now compare that to expected additional cost of self-driving systems to the base sticker price of a Class 8 truck, which this study said will be a around $23,400 per unit.

That’s a one-time expense per truck, compared to the ongoing pay required for a human, and obviously that comes in well below even the lowest wage rate on the truck driver pay scale.

“That’s why there will be a huge incentive to adopt this technology,” Hooper stressed. “That’s why I am trying to prepare my business for it.”

Still, despite that “incentive,” research by Steve Sashihara, founder and CEO of Princeton Consultants, indicates that “self-driving trucks” remains the one technological advancement most freight industry denizens are the most skeptical about. 

“There are some people that believe no, this is definitely going to happen but there are a lot of other people that think in eight years; they’re not sure,” he explained. “Maybe we’ll see a few on the road but, I’m not sure it’s going to have a big impact.

In Sashihara’s view, the potential safety benefit of autonomous vehicles as a whole – cars and trucks – is what’s going to driver their adoption.

“The Insurance Institute for Highway Safety (IIHS) did a very interesting report talking about live data on self-braking technology,” he explained. “Largely, the synopses which I’m seeing say that systems with automatic braking reduce rear-end crashes by about 40% on average. That would have been 700,000 fewer police reported rear-end crashes in 2013 and I think this is very important for the adoption [of self-driving vehicles].”

That’s but one reason he believes self-driving trucks “are close to inevitable,” but the question remains: where and when?

“In terms of tailwinds, [one] thing that is propelling [self-driving trucks] forward for long haul  freight  transportation is that approximately a third of the cost of truckload transportation are drivers [and the] constant of persistent long term driver shortages, from all quarters,” Sashihara pointed out.

“Also, very few trucks, in our experience, are slip-seated. A lot of them are ‘single-opted’ so, having something that isn’t bound by hours of service (HOS) means more asset utilization,” he added.

John Larkin, managing director and head of transportation capital markets research for Stifel Capital Markets, also thinks that self-driving trucks represents but the tip of a very large iceberg in terms of radical supply chain changes racing toward us.

“How long will it be before the internet of things (IoT) monitors the amount of granola each of us has in his/her pantry and records when the granola stockpile reaches the pre-specified replenishment level?” he asked.

“How long before 3D printers are placed in each of Amazon’s delivery vehicles so that the custom door handle you just ordered will be manufactured as it makes its way through your neighborhood en route to your front door?” Larkin added.

“How long before drones start delivering shaving cream to your front porch? Our sense is that all these innovations will be upon us sooner than we think – particularly if government would simply get out of the way.”

So hold onto your hats; we may be speeding toward the advent of true self-driving truck operations faster than we think.

[BillyT]

Car and Driver made a caustic comment a couple issues ago concerning the advent of "self driving trucks"! They also did a report on the exponential increase in heavy truck involved crashes! The report surprisingly, was fair and balanced( no pun intended !) Predictably the readers comments included recommending the use of self braking and other incompetence mitigating technologies,being unaware that they are already in use! I suspect that 99percent of our members are already safe defensive drivers, but the major carriers are getting their driver pool from the same group of incompetent individuals that are driving automobiles! A recent survey indicated that a large percentage of drivers have no interest in driving(hence the push for self driving automobiles!) Most  of our members have at least a basic knowledge of mechanics and physics some are journeyman mechanics! These skills are necessary to safely operate a heavy vehicle! I believe that many prospective truck drivers are simply interested in trucking because in the present lean job market it provides above average pay without a college degree! The majority will find that they hate it and that attitude will show in their driving and attitude towards safety!I realize it's ancient history,but most of the drivers of my generation enjoyed driving and took pride in their skills!As a result I believe the self driving truck will be here in no time, and the "learning curve" will result in some really spectacular crashes and carnage on the highways!

[Timmyb]

Billy, you make some good points. 

A few issues come to mind. Driving the truck is the easy part. But have you ever driven with a difficult load? I'm checking and tightening chains every few hundred kms. 

Also, I grabbed a liner last year in my truck. Not one engine light came on, but I could hear a difference in the way my engine sounded. And noticed it was breathing heavy. An autonomous vehicle would have destroyed that engine. Tyres are something I check multiple times a day. 

And what about all the pretty girls that break down on the side of the road? An autonomous truck would drive straight past them. 

[Swishy]

Timmyb

Gudday M8

RE:   pretty girls that break down on the side of the road

Dunno wot planet u're on

the only girls th@ break down in Melbourne R 80 yo grannies th@ R 2 axle handles wide across the RSend

 

LOL

cya

§wishy

[kscarbel2]

Ted, it seems that handsome blokes like Tim only attract the best looking Sheilas.

[Timmyb]

Ok, I exaggerated a bit when I said pretty. 

But im 90% sure they were girls and I certainly didn't tamper with their car... much. 

[fxfymn]

Quote

A few issues come to mind. Driving the truck is the easy part. But have you ever driven with a difficult load? I'm checking and tightening chains every few hundred kms.

I foresee companies hiring "ride-along" operators at minimum wage to keep an eye on the load and provide security for special loads and/or flat bed loads that need tie downs.

I'm wondering how much more down time a truck will experience when there is no operator to diagnose an issue that the ECU is showing so the truck goes to the side of the road until a mechanic can be summoned. It's an absolute that as complexity goes up, reliability goes down.

Plus maintenance costs have to go up since it will take a highly skilled and trained technician to diagnose and repair what will be a pretty sophisticated hardware and software set up.

Edited February 28, 2017 by fxfymn

[BillyT]

I'm waiting to see how an autonomous truck loads and.unloads 12 cars damage free! Ties down and tarps two steel coils, cares for and nurtures a load of cattle or hogs! The list is endless! As always when dealing with management that have never done the job they supervise, whose only goal is bottom line, the results, at least from the prospective of the driver will be questionable! How will the truck sense if the pavement is icy,etc?

[BillyT]

Something I just thought of however ....an autonomous truck never runs "out of hours"!

[TeamsterGrrrl]

Actually, there are some trucking companies out there that are already about 99% autonomous, they haul a couple hundred trailers with just two crew members. Just one of them hauls 20% of the freight in North America, they could haul more but they chase away freight that isn't hugely profitable, and they make money like crazy.

They're called railroads...

[Timmyb]

I've spoke to a few guys in the mining industry and they told me the Komatsu dumps trucks are autonomous and are going great. In fact they are better than the driven ones, as they can be programmed to run 12 inches wider than the previous truck. It saves wear on the haul roads. But that's a completely different scenario. 

[BillyT]

Teamster Grrrl, that old truck vs rail has been going on since we were all little kids and will be going on when we are all gone! At this point in time nothing can compete with the rail and steel wheel for gross tonnage hauled cheaply! That being said most railroads are supported by government subsidies! Just ask Warren Buffett if he considers railroads a good investment! Having been a union car hauler and a union freight car repairman (at the same time for a while) gave me a unique perspective on both industries! Another advantage of the rail is the components of a rail car are so overbuilt that they seldom fail even when they're worn out! And believe me,many of them are worn out! I was always amused when some anti truck stroke would say "Lets get rid of all those trucks and put everything on the rail!. Ok pal then let's put a siding in your back yard! I hauled cars out of a railhead,you wouldn't believe the condition some of them were in when they came off the rail! They would shunt them off on a siding and guys would steal parts off them! In one infamous incident they pulled the whole front ends and the engine and trannys off them! Obviously an inside job!

[james j neiweem]

With a woman like that who needs a hydraulic jack?

[grayhair]

On 2/28/2017 at 8:39 AM, BillyT said:

I'm waiting to see how an autonomous truck loads and.unloads 12 cars damage free! Ties down and tarps two steel coils, cares for and nurtures a load of cattle or hogs! The list is endless! As always when dealing with management that have never done the job they supervise, whose only goal is bottom line, the results, at least from the prospective of the driver will be questionable! How will the truck sense if the pavement is icy,etc?

 

So maybe the real question...  If there is a trailer problem developing, like the load is shifting, tarps coming loose, stuff falling off of or out of the trailer, then what does the trooper do when he sees that?  Make use of fancy software that enables him to take control of the truck?  If the trooper, having taken control, then crashes the truck, does the trooper and the state government then become responsible for that crash?  Or does he call dispatch to have them shut the truck down?  Or should he just shoot out the tires?

No doubt the lawyers will figure all this out.  I think it is an open question if the trucking companies will actually realize the savings they dream of.

Trains run on tracks, don't need to be steered, and even with all the fancy controls and government regulations, we still have train crashes.  And, there are a hell of a lot more trucks than trains.  This should be interesting...

[kscarbel2]

Driverless vehicles and the end of the trucker

Leslie Hook, Financial Times Weekend Magazine /  March 30, 2017

New self-driving technology threatens an American way of life

Ramona Saucedo has been on the road for nearly two months, and she’s ready to get back home. Standing in front of a dusty white truck in the parking lot of a Flying J truck stop, she fingers her iPhone as she waits for a call from her business partner, who is checking on her progress. If she stays on schedule, driving 10 or 11 hours a day, she’ll be back home in Tucson next week. “I miss cooking my own meals, believe it or not,” she says with a chuckle.

At 52, Saucedo has been driving long-haul for nearly a decade, and has the heavy-set build that comes from long hours on the road. It’s a job that runs in the family: her father, brother and son were all truck drivers, and Saucedo says she started driving mainly for the pay.

At her old job as an office worker she could barely make ends meet, and had to scrape and scrounge if one of her two children needed a little cash. Now, she drives thousands of miles a week and travels all over the country, sleeping each night inside the truck. Money is no longer a problem.

At the truck stop, Saucedo is surrounded by hundreds of drivers who have made similar trade-offs. The United States has more than three million truck drivers, many of whom drive long-haul, or “over the road” as it’s known in the business. As one of the highest paying jobs available that does not require a college degree, trucking can be an economic lifeline. But its future is increasingly uncertain.

As the sun sets, the parking lot starts to fill up with drivers stopping for the night. Sleeping in the truck is an integral part of the job. “I call this my ‘tiny house’,” grins Patrick Spicer, 67, a long-haul driver from Reno, as he shows off the inside of his new 2017 Kenworth T680. He gestures to the bunk beds, his guitar, and a box of vanilla-flavoured protein drinks sitting on the floor. There’s a cupboard for clothes, a refrigerator for food and even a pink stuffed unicorn perched on the dash.

Spicer, who has stopped to make sure his 60-tonne cargo of wine is properly balanced, is a 20-year veteran of the industry. “If you are smart and don’t waste your money, you can make a good living,” he says. Last year, the median income for a driver with three years’ experience was $57,000, according to the National Transportation Institute. Experienced drivers like Spicer can earn more than $75,000. But he’s not optimistic about what’s ahead. “There is no future in trucking,” he says. He gestures to the parking lot full of 18-wheelers: “In 10 or 15 years, these will all be autonomous trucks. There is no way to stop it.”

In an industrial neighbourhood of San Francisco, Stefan Seltz-Axmacher, 27, is one of the people trying to take the humans out of the truck. Sitting in the driver’s seat of a Daimler Freightliner that he has modified, he leans forward and adjusts a pair of robotic feet that rest over the brake and accelerator pedals. Underneath the steering wheel is a small motor that can steer the vehicle. These devices, along with radar and cameras mounted on the exterior, allow the truck to be driven remotely by a human when it is in congested city areas. Once it is on the open highway, the truck can drive itself.

“Our intention is for trucks to move from A to B without a human in the vehicle,” Seltz-Axmacher explains. He is the co-founder of Starsky Robotics, a small, two-year-old start-up working on self-driving trucks. As he sees it, this is solving the “core problem” of North American logistics. “It is really hard to get people to live in a truck,” he explains. “Those long-haul drivers are the most sought-after people in logistics.”

With a US trucking industry that moves more than 10 billion tonnes of freight a year, his market is already made, he believes. “We would lease the robots to the trucking companies,” he explains. “We are able to go to people who are already looking for drivers, and be their driver.”

All over Silicon Valley, one start-up after another is making a similar bet. Not all of them are trying to take human drivers out of the truck completely, as Starsky is, but everyone agrees this will be the outcome of their technologies in the long run.

Investors are pouring in. One of these is Jim Scheinman, a venture capitalist at Maven Ventures who has backed start-ups in both autonomous trucks and cars. Self-driving trucks will arrive “significantly before” self-driving cars, he says. “It’s probably going to happen so much faster than city driving, just because [highway driving] is so much easier,” he explains. Highways are much less complex than urban areas, with fewer intersections and clearer road markings.

The economic opportunity is tantalising: in the US, trucks carry more than 70 per cent of domestic freight tonnage. Trucking industry revenues were $726bn in 2015, more than the sales of Google, Amazon and Walmart combined. “With trucks we can actually build a billion-dollar company,” Scheinman says — meaning a start-up that is valued at more than $1bn, also known in the Valley as a “unicorn”.

Not every self-driving start-up will become a unicorn, of course. Failure is common in the rough-and-tumble world of Silicon Valley, particularly when a sector becomes so hot that even bad ideas can get funding. For trucking start-ups, a turning point came last August, when Uber announced it was buying a six-month-old start-up, Otto, for a price tag of more than $600m in equity. After that, other trucking start-ups found it much easier to raise money.

Scheinman, 50, sketches out how he sees the future of transportation. “In my vision of this world of autonomous vehicles, every single vehicle is autonomous, everywhere in the world,” he says, sitting on a terrace at the Battery, a private club in San Francisco frequented by venture capitalists. “It won’t be ‘cars’ or ‘trucks’, it will just be robots. Then you have a much more perfect system, because you don’t have humans making mistakes.”

This kind of thinking is setting Silicon Valley up for a clash with the rest of the country, where those “humans making mistakes” represent millions of jobs under threat from automation. In Washington, President Donald Trump has made American jobs a cornerstone of his economic agenda, and has shown a fondness for truckers in particular.

“No one knows America like truckers know America,” he said in an Oval Office address in late March, flanked by representatives of the trucking industry. “You see it every day and you see every hill, every valley, every pothole . . . every town, every forest from border to border and ocean to ocean.” The president even climbed into a big rig parked in front of the White House, smiling, waving and honking the horn.

Partly this is pandering to his supporters: truck driving is a much more common occupation in states that voted heavily for Trump than it is in states that voted for Hillary Clinton last November. Truck drivers are often choosing between jobs in construction, oil fields or trucking, none of which requires a degree. With current oil prices low, trucking can attract people living in more depressed areas that lack local construction opportunities.

Although “over the road” driving is not an easy job, it has long been seen as a way out, and a way up, for those with few other options. The loneliness of life on the road is a frequent complaint, and some truck drivers travel with dogs, or bring their kids along during school holidays, to break the solitude. For couples, a popular option is team driving, which yields extra bonuses because they can drive twice as far in a day. “Some people don’t have houses, they just live in their trucks,” Spicer says approvingly. “If you are a young couple, that is the way to go. I know people that have done that, and saved up for a down payment on a house.”

President Trump has routinely lambasted companies that he accuses of moving jobs overseas. It can only be a matter of time, some fear, before he turns his attention to the threat posed to American jobs by robots — and, in particular, self-driving vehicles — precisely at the moment when these technologies are on the verge of maturing.

So far his administration has not made its position on self-driving trucks clear. However, in a recent meeting with state governors, transportation secretary Elaine Chao suggested she was worried about how autonomous vehicles might impact truck drivers. “I am very, very concerned about that and very cognisant of those challenges. So we do have to transition people and we need to keep that in mind,” she said.

How soon those “transitions” might need to occur is a matter of great debate. Self-driving start-ups can be broadly split into two camps: those working on interim solutions in which a human driver is assisted by self-driving technologies; and those that, like Starsky, are focused on removing the human from the vehicle as soon as possible.

The technologies that will hit the road first are firmly in the former camp, which means there will be a period of several years in which the human driver is working side-by-side with the self-driving systems before full autonomy can occur.

Daimler, the German carmaker that accounts for 40 per cent of the US truck market, has invested heavily in self-driving technologies. But its top self-driving engineer Derek Rotz says he doesn’t expect fully autonomous trucks — the kind with no driver at all — within his lifetime. “That’s quite frankly something that we are not looking at,” he says.

Rotz should know, because he is the engineer who helped develop the first self-driving truck to receive a testing licence in the US, in 2015. That concept vehicle, Daimler’s Freightliner Inspiration, is able to drive itself under certain conditions but also needs a human at the wheel (which is known as level-three autonomy).

Rotz explains that many of the systems developed for the Inspiration are now incorporated on current Freightliner trucks, such as predictive cruise control, which uses maps and elevation data to keep the truck at a safe speed going down hills. Drivers will still be needed for a long time to come, he adds.

One of the first steps in the journey towards autonomous trucks will be a technique known as platooning, in which trucks follow each other at close distances to save fuel. Each driver in the platoon keeps his or her hands on the wheel, but the engine and the brakes on the rear truck are linked to the front truck, allowing the two vehicles to slow down and speed up perfectly in sync. Peloton, a start-up based in Mountain View, expects to see its platooning systems in use in commercial fleets later this year. Daimler, Volvo and Scania have also demonstrated platooning systems.

While platooning is not technically considered self-driving, it is a key test of how willing the industry will be to adopt new forms of automation. Josh Switkes, the chief executive of Peloton, says the start-up is already working on more advanced forms of platooning, including having the rear vehicle steer itself. But he thinks it will be at least a decade before drivers’ jobs start to be really impacted by automation. “Truck drivers today are not going to lose their jobs,” he says. “We see a process where, at least for the foreseeable future, drivers become more important and more highly skilled.”

That view is not quite shared by other trucking start-ups in Silicon Valley, particularly those that aim to take the humans out of the vehicle entirely. However, the technical obstacles of realising their vision are significant.

Trucks have some unique challenges when it comes to self-driving technology. Their weight, which is at least 12 times greater than a standard passenger car, makes them harder to control, and the vehicle dynamics change considerably depending on their load. A commercial truck must also drive much further than a passenger car, with a typical lifespan of more than a million miles, creating much more wear on delicate self-driving sensors.

On top of that, trucks already come with a patchwork of built-in computers: new trucks today will typically have a processor for the brakes, one for the engine, one for the transmission and one for each camera or radar. A safe autonomous system must be able to communicate smoothly across components from different manufacturers.

The greatest challenge, however, is that there is simply no room for error. Humans may get distracted and fall asleep, but the general public will hold robots to a higher standard (as was demonstrated last year with the outcry over the first death from Tesla’s Autopilot). The safety advantage of autonomous vehicles is touted by their proponents as one of their key selling points. But what engineers see as a perfect future, the general public can see as terrifying — particularly if that means an 80-tonne truck flying down the freeway with no one in the driver’s seat. If robots are at the wheel, they have to be perfect.

To achieve that, autonomous driving systems must be able to recognise and quickly react to everything that crosses their path. “Safety is really not about the 99 per cent use case, it is about the .00001 per cent of the time something crazy happens,” explains Josh Hartung, founder of PolySync, a start-up that makes software for self-driving cars.

The hardest scenarios for autonomous vehicles to deal with are unlikely, one-off events, called “edge cases”, such as a child on a scooter or an unexpected stop in a construction zone. The artificial intelligence controlling the vehicle is trained with real-world experiences, so if the AI hasn’t encountered one of those situations before, it won’t know what to do.

Edge-case scenarios are one of the main things that have been occupying Alex Rodrigues, the co-founder of Embark, a start-up that is working on autonomous trucks. Rodrigues has been building robots since he was 13, and began with self-driving golf carts before deciding that trucks might hold more commercial opportunities. At 21, he is barely old enough to have a commercial trucking licence (he has a learner’s permit) but that hasn’t stopped him dreaming big.

“We are looking to essentially reset how the industry operates, with self-driving as a first-class citizen,” he tells me.

Embark’s idea is that its trucks will drive autonomously on highways between set staging areas, and then a human driver will fetch the truck when it exits the highway and drive it to its final destination. “We want to have hand-offs, so there is no human in the vehicle when it is on the highway,” Rodrigues explains. (Scheinman is an investor in Embark.)

As each start-up vies for success, the cut-throat competition of the sector has led to a fair share of intrigue. Uber’s purchase of Otto, which was its largest acquisition, has come under particular scrutiny. All of Otto’s co-founders had previously worked at Alphabet, the parent company of Google, which has been developing its own self-driving technology. In February, Uber was served with a lawsuit from Alphabet’s self-driving subsidiary, Waymo, which alleged one of the co-founders of Otto had stolen trade secrets and infringed on patents for a special kind of rotating radar. Uber says the lawsuit is baseless.

At the time that the Otto purchase was made, Uber’s chief executive Travis Kalanick waxed eloquent about the potential of the trucking business. In October the company released a slick promotional video that showed an Otto truck on a highway, towing a cargo of Budweiser beer while the truck’s driver sat in the back of the cabin, reading a magazine. But more recently it is Uber’s trucking ambitions that have taken a back seat. Self-driving taxis are Uber’s top priority, and most of the former Otto employees who joined through the acquisition are now working on cars instead.

As for the truckers themselves, not all of them will be sad to see their old jobs disappear. Sergei Tulei, an IT specialist and truck driver from Moldova, has sat at both sides of the table. He used to work as a test driver for Otto, an experience that has made him a big fan of what he calls, in a heavy Russian accent, “robot trucks”.

Tulei remembers the thrill of sitting behind the steering wheel as the truck started to drive itself. “It’s like you are drinking something from a cup, and you don’t know what’s in it,” he explains. The driver has to be particularly alert in case the truck does something unexpected or starts to drift out of its lane. “You would have to be crazy to say it’s not scary to test in the trucks. But it is safe.”

For Tulei, 30, trucking has been his ticket to a better life. He came to the US from Moldova six years ago, and bought his first truck, a 2007 Volvo, shortly after his child was born. He was undeterred by the fact that it had almost a million miles on it, since he had previously worked as a car mechanic. “It is not an easy job, but it is good for guys who are trying to grow, maybe they can make more money, more freedom,” he says. He points to friends in Europe who are doing the job for far less money. “They are dreaming to come here to be a truck driver.”

But as Tulei grew his fleet, he found that it was frustrating to manage the drivers on long-haul trips. “They are people, they have their own problems,” he says. “Maybe [the driver] is sick, maybe he’s in a bad mood, maybe he doesn’t want to go to Colorado because it’s snowy there.”

Driverless will solve all that, he says. “In 10 or 20 years when we have these autonomous trucks, it will be easier because we won’t have to deal with people, but with robots. If you ask them to go to Texas, they will go to Texas.”

The difficulty of recruiting long-haul drivers and the unpopularity of the work are often mentioned as key reasons why greater automation could help the industry. The American Trucking Associations, which lobbies Washington on behalf of trucking companies, estimated that there was a driver shortage of 40,000 in 2014, though it believes this situation has recently improved.

However, the ATA’s statements about a shortage of drivers — which support its lobbying efforts to lower the minimum age for long-haul drivers — are at odds with wage data. Over the past 15 years, the incomes of over-the-road truck drivers have not kept up with inflation. Fierce competition has kept freight prices, and driver wages, low. (More than 90 per cent of US trucking companies are small, independent fleets of fewer than six trucks.) At the larger fleets, rapid training programmes and signing bonuses mean a steady churn of new drivers, most of whom stay for less than a year. Annual turnover at big trucking groups is more than 80 per cent, as drivers jump from one company to the next in search of better pay.

Start-ups such as Embark point to these numbers as evidence that nobody will really miss the jobs that are being automated away. “When you actually have the human all the way out of the vehicle [on the highway], there’s a whole bunch more of these higher-paying, much preferred local jobs,” says Rodrigues. The drivers fetching the self-driving trucks to and from staging areas, for example, could live at home.

Jeff Scorsur, 39, a truck driver who used to own his own fleet, thinks this sounds like a great idea. “It’s not a real fun life,” he explains, referring to his years of long-haul driving. He now works at Embark, where he test drives their autonomous truck, and is optimistic about the human jobs that will exist alongside self-driving vehicles. “In the future there will be some job loss,” he says. “But it’s also an opportunity, to get maybe more skills, a job that can make more money.”

Even though drivers’ jobs will be safe while self-driving vehicles require special handling, there are millions of jobs outside of the truck cabin that will be deeply impacted by the coming shift. The trucks support a network of towns based around truck stops, where gas stations, stores, restaurants and laundromats serve the drivers. There are more than seven million people working in trucking and trucking-related industries, according to the ATA — one in 17 working adults in the US.

As trucks become self-driving, service jobs at places such as the Flying J could come under threat. It’s a problem that some in Silicon Valley are already worrying about. “What happens to the towns when the trucks don’t stop there?” asks Aaron VanDevender, chief scientist at Founders Fund, the venture capital group started by Peter Thiel. Self-driving trucks will only need maintenance at the beginning and end of their trips, he points out, whereas drivers today have to stop to eat and pee constantly.

VanDevender likens this shift to the construction of the US Interstate system in the 1950s, 60s and 70s, which bypassed the smaller towns that lay along older roads such as Route 66. “A lot of those towns were just eviscerated,” he says. “This is like that kind of structural change, but an order of magnitude more intense.” Even though self-driving trucks may be better at moving goods around, they will undermine one of the key economic flows through the centre of the country.

As automation has a growing impact on a wider range of industries, Silicon Valley is discussing what role tech companies and government should play in preparing for this shift. For the trucking towns, VanDevender believes that they will require some kind of economic support, otherwise they will collapse. “The sociopolitical consequence of not getting it right is very severe,” he says, referring to the transition to self-driving vehicles. “It’s like the iron law, hungry people riot.”

Ideas such as a universal basic income are increasingly popular in the Valley, with some prominent entrepreneurs funding research into the concept. Washington DC is also grappling with the question of how to prepare for a shift in types of jobs.

“The challenge for political leaders, for industry, is how do you incorporate the citizenry into this incredible migration to new technology,” says Michael Drobac, a tech lobbyist for Akin Gump, based in Washington DC. He notes that self-driving companies have been beefing up their lobbying teams, preparing for a debate that will profoundly shape their industry and others.

“It is not specific to truckers,” he points out. “It is not just the red states, it is everywhere. The economy is changing for everyone.”

Ramona Saucedo, the driver from Tucson, recently watched a video of a self-driving truck demo along with some other drivers. “It looked like they were doing a good job, but I don’t know what we’re going to do now,” she says. “The other guy that was sitting there was freaking out, he was like, ‘I’m going to be out of a job now.’”

The drivers wondered how robotic vehicles would be regulated, since human drivers are limited to 11 hours’ driving a day under federal law. “It doesn’t get tired, it doesn’t sleep,” Saucedo says. “Will the rules change? That’s our curiosity . . . And who will wash out the truck, if it gets dirty?”

Coming from a family of truck drivers, Saucedo feels that self-driving trucks could really impact her community. “It’s going to be devastating for a lot of people,” she says. “There are some drivers that have degrees, but a lot of drivers don’t. And this is their form of making money for their family.”

As for Saucedo herself, she says that she is planning to quit in June. It wasn’t exactly the fear of automation, nor the long hours, that prompted her decision. Rather, she points to Washington DC.

“There’s just too much uncertainty with the way things are going, with imports,” she says. She is worried that Donald Trump’s America First policies will result in less trade, and therefore less truck freight.

Once she sells her truck, Saucedo is planning to find work as a dispatcher or a cargo inspector — a job that is still close to the industry but will remain in demand, even when robots are driving.

Leslie Hook is a San Francisco correspondent for the FT

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Handful of Senate Democrats block progress on self-driving legislation

Eric Kulisch, Automotive News  /  January 24, 2018

WASHINGTON -- Bipartisan legislation to promote safe development of autonomous vehicle technology remains stalled in the Senate over safety concerns from three Democrats, Commerce Committee Chairman John Thune said Wednesday.

Proponents are looking for an expedited way to get the AV START Act through a crowded Senate calendar for a vote, but a "hold" placed on the bill by Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., is preventing consideration by unanimous consent.

California's senior senator has concerns about the overall safety of self-driving cars and whether the technology is ready to be placed on public roadways, said Thune, R-S.D.

Sen. Richard Blumenthal, D-Conn., has expressed concern about the need to require a fallback mechanism for a driver to take control of a vehicle in case of software failure, while Sen. Edward Markey, D-Mass., is concerned about data privacy and cybersecurity as vehicles evolve into smart devices that can access a user's information for infotainment, shopping and other purposes.

"A lot of testing is going on in her (Feinstein's) state, so I'm hoping folks will eventually be able to prevail on her to realize that this is eventually going to make roads safer, not less so," Thune told reporters after chairing a field hearing on self-driving cars held in conjunction with the Washington auto show.

If all senators agree to support a piece of legislation, it can be adopted without a floor vote, but it only takes one objection to kill such a request and retain normal protections for the minority party.

Thune said he has talked with Majority Leader Mitch McConnell about scheduling floor time for a vote or hitching autonomous vehicle legislation to, for example, a potential infrastructure bill. A stand-alone vote could require up to a week of Senate time to go through procedural steps, but the Senate's priorities in the next month include passing government funding and an immigration bill.

Thune said he hopes to accommodate the issues raised by the three Democrats "as long as it doesn't move it too far into a more regulatory, sort of heavy government direction."

The Senate bill notably bars states from imposing restrictions on autonomous vehicle safety performance and development, allows automakers to win tens of thousands of exemptions from safety rules that require human controls, and sets privacy requirements for disclosing how collected data is used. Automakers and tech companies will be required to regularly report how they are working to meet safety standards, but there are no specific mandates on how to do so.

Industry supports the light regulatory touch, saying it is necessary to encourage investment in technology, while public-interest groups say the public is being put at risk without sufficient safeguards.

"We think that NHTSA working with people who are designing these vehicles and understand these technologies are better equipped than us in Congress trying to prescribe a particular technology," Thune said. "They are in a better position to make those decisions in working with the regulators."

Sen. Gary Peters, D-Mich., the lead Democrat crafting the bill, added: "The quicker we get this done the better because the faster we get the technology developed, the faster we start saving thousands of lives on our highways."

Thune expressed hope that trucking would eventually be regulated for autonomous driving but acknowledged trucks would not be included in the current bill because of Democratic backing by labor unions, who fear robot trucks would cost commercial driving jobs.

The House version of self-driving legislation also didn't address trucks because trucking is not under the jurisdiction of the Energy and Commerce Committee, which wrote the bill.

"Eventually this has to be part of the overall equation. You can't have two safety standards out there on the highway," Thune said.

"There's lots of support for this bill. We listened a lot to stakeholders, worked with trial lawyers on liability issues, and clarified state and federal roles. I think we've got it to a point where it's a good, balanced bill. So I don't know why we shouldn't be able to get this across the finish line," Thune said.

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How many times have you heard a fleet operator, co-worker or neighbor say, "Boy, I wish that I could buy an autonomous vehicle. What's the hold up?"

Virtually no one is asking for them, and yet major governments, interfering in business, are pushing for the arrival of autonomous vehicles ASAP. Why? The market certainly hasn't requested them.

Is this a Bilderberg Group decision (the world's wealthy aristocrats who brought you the European Union and other success stories.....for the rich).

With each passing year, the world's population grows. Government's allegedly strive to create jobs for the latest citizens entering their work force. And yet, they aim to eliminate the truck driver and millions of jobs.