But here’s the question: Do these ‘last mile’ drivers sit in the cab? Or operate the rigs from thousands of miles away, like drone pilots, with displays showing 360 degrees around the rig and access to all of its sensors?
Last mile driving may not look anything like truck driving.
Or, alternatively, do they wait at truck stops on the edge of town and meet the trucks as they come in (much like harbor pilots meet container ships at port entrances)?
If you were able to dispense with the cab and any human interfaces/amenities, that would cut out a big chunk of weight and drag. It would look radically different but just think of all of the components on a truck that are only there for the driver. No need for a cab, AC system, heater, pedals, steering wheel and linkages, airbags, seats, pretty much all of the glass and windows, doors, etc. The added sensors, telemetry, and computational requirements necessary for an autonomous vehicle suddenly don't look so pricy compared to the savings of removing a huge chunk of the vehicle, nonstop operation or maintenance, no salary for the driver, lower insurance costs, lower fuel costs, and other assorted savings. Really it's looking like more and more of an inevitability in my opinion. Once the control problem is solved, I doubt it'll be more economical to continue putting a trucker behind the wheel.
Of course if you need to provide all of that to allow for someone to drive it manually around town a lot of those benefits are gone. Who knows, there will probably be some transitional period where all automated trucks are still equipped for manual control but I doubt it'll stay that way for long.
Even if we remove all the facilities for a driver, i likely you would still need a human guard.
Although thinking about it, the guard could travel in a separate vehicle, and could be responsible for overseeing an entire convoy of trucks at one time.
I don't know what became of it, but at one point there was a DARPA initiative to do just that for military convoys. The reasoning was that automated trucks would allow soldiers to treat the convoy as a "dumb herd" that would follow and be overseen by a squad of heavily armed and armored "sheepdogs". This would improve protection for soldiers, while simultaneously improving the efficiency of battlefield logistics.
The automated part of the journey could be done by a driverless / cab-less / HID-less prime mover which drops the trailer(s) / cargo containers off at an interchanged where they are picked up by human driven vehicles for the last mile.
I don’t think so. Once you’ve already automates a truck, you have a lot more information to convey than what’s out the windshield, and you are liberated from needing to turn a steering wheel or push foot pedals.
There’s no reason to build a cab into the truck that is only used for the last mile. Telepresence will do just fine.
If that's the case, then why aren't cargo ships already automated to this extent? It seems like automating a container vessel would be even easier - there are far fewer things to run into on the water (even in a busy port) than there are on a busy highway.
I would bet because the wage paid is insignificant compared to maintenance of the vessel and that the maritime laws would be further complicating such a scenario.
Not so much maintenance as capital costs, I think. Giant cargo vessels can't be replaced as often as trucks either. But drone ships are certainly coming, it's a very trendy topic in the trade publications. I'd give it 10 years.
Crews generally aren't armed to begin with and with no humans to capture and ransom or threaten to change the ships course the amount of booty they could make off with is really limited. Most pirate attacks target hostages anyways. For engineering you could have small crews fly out to any one ship that's experienced engine trouble.
Definitely can't remotely operate a 40 ton truck. Wireless network latency is a bit high even under ideal conditions, and latency spikes could easily cause disastrous accidents.
You can continue to rely on the automated systems for avoiding collisions. The intelligence is more with dealing with the decisions that the AI can't make.
I don’t think you’re going to be “driving” such trucks. I think you’ll be making decisions. For example, when you reach a yard and need to back it into a loading bay, you may draw a path on a map of the yard, taking into account obstacles that are there at that moment. The truck will handle the turning, backing up, and so on.
Likewise, you may be monitoring city traffic and choosing alternate routes. But you won’t be driving with one foot on the brake pedal and your hands on the steering wheel.
You could make massive gains just by not having to stop and rest drivers. I suspect the drivers will be on-board but able to relax or sleep until getting close to the destination. That lets all trucks drive 24hr straight through to their destinations.
>Or operate the rigs from thousands of miles away, like drone pilots, with displays showing 360 degrees around the rig and access to all of its sensors?
Any driverless technology that requires a constant wireless internet connection is a non-starter.
As I said elsewhere, I do not think a constant wireless connection will be an issue, because I don’t think you’ll be operating the truck remotely the way a hobbyist operates an RC car. The truck will brake when a car, pedestrian, or bicycle cuts it off, and do it better than you could.
You are there to route it around traffic jams, talk to the foreman on site, and choose the loading bay.
Even if you had a reliable high-bandwidth/low-latency connection, the truck will be better than you are at handling things that requires instant response. You are there to make decisions.
The video stream bandwidth and requirement for near-zero latency will make remote control very challenging, if not impossible. I'd say the last-mile driver will be in the truck.
Actually you can't, for a lot of goods. Reason is that the railroad won't give you the same guarantees and trackability a truck will.
Example: you have refrigerated items (let's say a shipment of fresh fruit) that has to be maintained at a constant temperature and you want it delivered to your customer on Thursday when you ship Sunday night.
Truck: not a problem, and you can easily get updates all the time from dispatch (or if there is a GPS unit on the truck, immediately).
Railroad: maybe they will get it there, maybe they won't.
If the railroad puts a refrigerator unit on your boxcar and it breaks down, too bad - they won't reimburse you. A trucking company will.
> Railroad: maybe they will get it there, maybe they won't.
> If the railroad puts a refrigerator unit on your boxcar and it breaks down, too bad - they won't reimburse you. A trucking company will.
Sounds like both of those are more to do with shit rail companies than inherent downsides of rail (or upsides of trucking)?
Just in time delivery by rail works in Europe, perhaps because the track is maintained to a high standard and can be relied upon, and the timetable adhered to to avoid delaying passenger trains.
> Now retired after more than 30 years in the produce business, Wolf noted that farmers began growing iceberg lettuce in the region just prior to the 1930s. The demand for the hearty lettuce variety soon took off through the use of refrigerated rail cars.
IIRC because more of the highway cost is subsidized by the taxpayer, not necessarily because the cost is actually lower...
In the US, especially outside of the northeast, most interstate highways are not tolled, so users of the road don't pay any more for its maintenance than non-users do. But someone is still paying for it. Taxpayers who don't use the roads are effectively subsidizing those who do.
By contrast, railways usually own their rails and are obliged to maintain them themselves, and thus have to fold those costs into the price.
RoLa (Rollende Landstraße) as we call this in Germany, or just transporting the flatbed carriages, requires a SHITLOAD of manual work, unlike containers where you don't even need people on the locos in the yard anymore.
Not to mention that long-haul-via-rail is only viable in the US... in Europe, it virtually doesn't exist anymore. It just isn't profitable due to various external conditions:
1) train track pricing is prohibitively expensive
2) freight trains don't get priority over passenger trains - quite the contrary. If you have any time-sensitive stuff, better transport it via road instead.
3) rail tracks are massively overbooked. One single delay and the entire system grinds to a screeching halt.
4) there is no such thing as cross-Europe locomotives/conductors. There might be multi-system-capable locos, but there is not a single loco on the market able to serve the entire fragmented European railroad technology.
There may be "just" 15/25 kV AC + 1k5/3kV DC, but every country needs their own roof collectors because they're NOT compatible (some countries don't even have roof collectors, but 3rd rails or sideway rails for the low-voltage DC stuff, and the DC stuff usually doesn't pack a lot of power so you can't really use them for any heavy load), but the real tech problem is the load of bollocks called signalling/security system, every country has their own, including Germany alone with FOUR popular systems (classic form signals, light-based signals, LZB/PZB and ETCS, in addition to various customizations in Eastern Germany and the S-Bahn tracks).
Not to mention the conductors which have to know all the signalling systems AND all the languages (compared to aviation where English is the standard worldwide), and they need to be expensively re-certified...
Yeah, ETCS, I hear you, but ETCS is a joke that would require literally hundreds of billions to retrofit across the major transit routes in Europe, but that won't happen - we Europeans haven't even managed to get our freight carriages to silent brakes yet!
5) There are still restrictions like maximum train lengths and the plain fact that European freight carriages only carry a pneumatic line for the brakes, but no data lines for controlling middle/back locos - so there's no technical way of extending train lengths because there's simply no loco combo capable of pulling >700m length heavy freight carriages with 3 locos on the front and no way to control a pushing loco in the back of the train. Simple physics, the good old screw coupling just can't support more load. There are alternatives (C-AKv coupling, it's high load AND compatible with the old coupling) but once again a retrofit would cost billions (see #4)...
Trains might be more efficient from an environmental and human-resources POV, but they're fucked up on any economic scale - and politicians all over Europe don't give a single fuck, instead they are all letting their rail systems rot to pieces and squeeze every tiny penny from the rail companies to fix up their even more rotten state budgets!
> RoLa (Rollende Landstraße) as we call this in Germany, or just transporting the flatbed carriages, requires a SHITLOAD of manual work, unlike containers where you don't even need people on the locos in the yard anymore.
Isn't using containers much more efficient anyway, instead of moving the whole truck?
> Isn't using containers much more efficient anyway, instead of moving the whole truck?
The core problem is that freight companies in Europe standardized on the Euro Pool Palette (EPAL) but ISO containers worldwide use the non-metric US measurement system - thus leading to waste of space and potential safety issues (sliding palettes due to slack space on the floor).
Trucks, however, are fitted to the metric system and can safely transport EPALs, so you've got next to no alternative.
ETCS is coming - it may take twenty years to be rolled out everywhere but it will happen. In the meantime they're focusing on the strategic routes first. These things take time, but it is happening.
> 2) freight trains don't get priority over passenger trains
Interestingly in the northwestern u.s. (and I suspect throughout the western u.s.) the main rail corridors prioritize freight.
Discovered this while, as a regular Seattle - Portland traveler, I found myself stationary while lumber rolled by. Amtrak's leases are subordinate to the freight lines.
> 2) freight trains don't get priority over passenger trains
Freight trains get priority here and it still doesn't make sense to ship by train. Rail is pretty limited by the huge size of our country, and they need to be able to ship to tiny random stores all over the place. It makes more sense to send one truck that can stop anywhere there's a road than send it out via train and then transfer to a local truck, which might be sitting unused the rest of the time.
> Rail is pretty limited by the huge size of our country
Quite the contrary, the US is better suited for rail than the rest of the world, at least for cross-country moving of goods (one single area of law, no customs crap to deal with, the only thing I'm not sure is signalling and interoperability of locomotives on rail systems in different states).
Trains are perfect for inter-city travel, the first/last mile should be handled with trucks unless the facility is so large that it can source or sink a huge number of trains (e.g. automobile, steel factories, coal mines, fossil power plants).
How long do you imagine it takes to unload a single car or two cars in a given city and move on to the next city? Once that "last mile" is handled, what else is that truck going to do until the next train shipment arrives? It'll sit doing nothing. If it moved on to another city, it could have just been loaded somewhere else and didn't need to be loaded at last mile.
Trains have several single points of failure for a larger load. When there is a problem, all of the load is affected, it takes longer to repair, and problems with both the rails and the trains happen regularly. And trains have more complex maneuvering than trucks; switching lines is a non-trivial time-consuming matter and operators have a tough job just on the existing lines.
The fact remains we don't have enough rail to service most of the country, and nobody is paying for new rail, not to mention the issue of fitting more track on the existing land and bridges used for rail. Demand has been increasing steadily on rail, and only so much traffic can possibly run on the rails - which are shared with passenger trains, btw. To switch to trains you'd be adding 230% more traffic to the rails.
> Once that "last mile" is handled, what else is that truck going to do until the next train shipment arrives? It'll sit doing nothing
If you're a responsible freight truck company, you want to avoid this situation at all costs. There's always cargo that wants to be shipped - the only scarce resources are drivers and tractor units, and some companies even let multiple drivers share the tractors to maximize the usage of their tractors (that really depends on the company though, there are also companies where every driver "owns" his tractor).
> The fact remains we don't have enough rail to service most of the country, and nobody is paying for new rail
Yes, indeed. The beginnings of the stock markets actually were railroad construction companies, but these days the financial markets only care about the next big unicorn and not about creating something with real long term value, which a train track certainly is given that, once the track is laid, the land belongs to the company and the only major investments required are 50-year overhauls and regular maintenance. It's a shame.
