Next Phase – No Backup Driver
Nevada was the first state to license driverless trucks. Until now, those trucks had a driver behind the wheel, ready to take over if something went wrong. According to one Mish reader, trucks are now on Nevada highways without any backup driver.
Reader Randy reports …
Hello Mish
It looks like the testing of self-driving trucks has quietly moved into the next phase.
Driving across Nevada on I-80 last weekend, I passed a big rig. In the mirror I saw that there was no driver. The truck seemed to be following another big rig (with a driver-babysitter).
Until now, there has been an emergency driver on board the autonomous truck.
I cannot confirm this report, but it’s not surprising. As I have repeatedly sated, millions of long-haul trucking jobs will vanish by 2025.
Whether or not this story is confirmed, progress is happening even faster than I expected.
Mike “Mish” Shedlock
I hope they can handle railroad crossings: http://articles.latimes.com/2011/jun/26/nation/la-na-nevada-train-crash-20110626 Seems kind of early to have no one in the cab, but then I don’t know how many (thousands of) hours they’ve been testing.
Until there is a wreck and some Law Firm sues the “hell” out of everybody involved. One good multi-million dollar negligence/liability suit will put the drivers back. Cheaper to hire a drive for $20 an hour than pay out $20 Million.
Was thinking through the liability side before – is it the manufacturer who will have to carry the insurance , not the owner or passengers ? The owner cannot be made liable if he is permitted to take a driverless vehicle on the road as he has no say in its actions .
He will have to assume all liability. He fan sue the manufacturer. Insurance will be prohibitive.
You forgot a few variables:
1) The Fully Autonomous Vehicles will have a lot of sensors all around and will record everything. So there will be a lot less to discuss about who, what, when happened.
2) As these cars and trucks add miles over miles OR millions of miles over millions of miles, all the data will be recorded and studied by the development team to make sure any and every incident will never happen again.
3) In doubt, the car software will just stop the car and patiently wait until the anomaly will go away. And will record everything and will transmit it home where people will look at it, will understand what was done, what should be done and implement an upgrade to the software to do so.
Do you think a car could manage a old lady on a motorized wheelchair, chasing a duck with a broom out of the middle of the street. Just after a 90° turn?
It already did. It stopped, waited, started again.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3e0c0rL00bg
http://www.theverge.com/2015/3/17/8235277/sxsw-astro-teller-google-x
“Teller pointed out that with self-driving cars, there was no way for anybody to collect the list of all the things that could go wrong — the only way to do it was to start using them in the world. He told a story about how the car was able to ignore a duck being shooed across the road by a lady in an electric wheelchair, exactly the sort of thing that nobody could ever plan for.
“THE ASSUMPTION THAT HUMANS COULD BE A RELIABLE BACK-UP FOR THE SYSTEM WAS A TOTAL FALLACY.”
Teller says that Google is trying to get “stumped like the duck” again, even though there is a much easier solution for getting to market: highway driving. In the fall of 2012, Google had already given out Lexus SUVs to non-Google employees to use — and on the freeway, they worked perfectly well. “We probably could have made a lot of money selling those,” Teller said. But something surprising happened: “Even though people had sworn up and down ‘I’m going to pay so much attention,'” and there were cameras watching them too, “people do really stupid stuff when they’re driving.” Basically, “the assumption that humans could be a reliable back-up for the system was a total fallacy!” Teller said. That’s why Google began to pursue a car that doesn’t even have a steering wheel or a gas pedal.”
Pingback: Robotics In the Labour Market | thePOOG
Driverless cars and trucks are coming. It will be no fault just like most states already have in effect. There may be a few law suits. But, it won’t end the transition.
So you saw a bunch of LIDAR sensors and other telemetry? Antennas? Snap a picture next time. (and I just thought of bridge clearance limiting putting tall sensors).
Bat boy and the area 51 aliens aren’t very tall, so maybe one of them was driving – apparently aliens can get CDLs.
Obviously the driver was late getting back from the rest room at a stop and the truck got tired of waiting and left without him , typical truck behaviour and no more I say.
IMHO, this is just leading to the #1 issue facing the world economy, that is, overcapacity from efficiency. Technology will create jobs but what will the offset be, net jobs created or lost. I feel new technologies will create jobs but not enough to offset the job losses due to that technology.
Agree. The internet transferred millions of US jobs to cheaper foreign labor. Now China is losing them to Vietnam. Corporations HQs are jumping to lower taxing nations. We are in the midst of a global deflationary spiral.
Too many people already and tech is making jobs disappear while extending lifespans. Like adding lab rats to a cage, this will eventually bring a massive world conflict.
If not over jobs, food, water land…
Anyone who thinks that we are going to be able create as many jobs as AI and other innovations are going to destroy is operating out of an orthodoxy that turns their head. No way we are going to re-create the 40-50% pf jobs that are going to be lost in the next 20-30 years. Get over it. Everyone here is an awakening advocate of Wisdomics/Gracenomics
wisdomicsblog.com
Looking forward to pressing a button and having a car come and take me anywhere without me driving. I’ll be much happier. I can also liberate the capital tied up in the cars sitting in the driveway as well as the driveway itself and garage too. But much less contribution to GDP. So I have better life quality with lower economic activity. Maybe we should think about reducing GDP instead of increasing it.
Boy I can’t wait for driverless trucks. I’ll just cruise the open highways until I spot a promising one. Me and the crew will slow to a stop in front of the truck and it will have to stop. The target truck won’t be able to reverse because we will back a truck up against it while we throw the goods into our truck. We will be gone in less than a minute. Consider yourselves lucky if we dont set it on fire to cover our tracks.
We aren’t stupid. We will cover our license plates and faces because the trucks have cameras.
How are you going to stop us?
How would a single truck driver have stopped you?
Xeny,
For starters a driver would be aware he was being stopped by thieves and radio for help. He might decide to not stop and knock our car our of the way.
Most importantly is the fact that he might have a gun to protect himself.
We are opportunists. I can stop a driverless truck with a tumbleweed and not have to worry about getting shot while I rob it.
You could benefit from some courses at my online university for thieves.
You can stop a driverless truck by putting a traffic cone on the road. Do that on both sides of the highway and the police will be blocked by the traffic jams created.
A few miles of stopped traffic can disrupt the economy of an entire city. Yeah, driverless vehicles are a great idea. No problems there at all /sarc
oh ye of little faith -and 0 vision
Ray guns will temporarily freeze you in position and a robot from the truck will throw you into the pilotless police helicopter after the driverless tow truck hauls away your vehicles.
All this is probably happening in the peopleless cities (which China has already built) where it is shown on cableless TV in the peopleless apartments 😉
Note: This message is sent to you by a paperless thingy which has taken my job along with that of my son and 83 other folks who I know, since 1993 and NAFTA began to take, “Only the low level jobs.” Now we have peopleless houses and workerless factories.
“Less is more.” — Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, architect
Hyperventilating a wee bit here, possibly? Other explanations abound for the “missing driver” not visible in your correspondent’s mirror — blow job in progress, short person driver?… While I’m not sure a blowjob in progress is less dangerous than a driverless truck, it’s at least more plausible.
I know you’re big on anticipating the job losses likely associated with the adoption of driverless trucks, but it does not help your case to make far-out conspiratorial claims of secret driverless truck tests.
I’ll joke about and skip over the “small stuff” conspiracies and go to a BIGGIE…
Think about paperless ballots. We’ve all heard about the Chicago voters who elected JFK in 1960… now we’ve made it possible to elect anyone desired by a simple click of a mouse.
Soon, if not already, voterless electing.
“It’s not the people who vote that count. It’s the people who count the votes” — attributed to Josef Stalin
Security is going to be an issue. I wonder if we will see driverless trucks moving in convoys with rent a cop security of some sort? This reminds me of the convoys of ships in WWII. In the beginning there were lots of losses, but then security got better and the system worked. Oh I just had a thought. Will the rent a cps be in driverless carsas well?
Convoys would just allow us to stop more trucks at once. We could bring in a little more manpower and rob ten trucks just as easy as one truck.
The WW1 and WW2 convoys across the Atlantic had armed escorts. Maybe a couple guys from Blackwater could tag along with a convoy and keep it safe but that costs money. Two security guards would be cheaper than ten truck drivers though.
I can’t for some reason reply to your upthread reply to me; You really think a driverless truck can’t be programmed to radio when it encounters a stopped car, and maybe relay a cctv image to a remote operator? you think that guy might choose not to mow you down from the comfort of his chair?
Last week in my country, the main Telco lost all GSM voice and data virtually country wide for two hours. Millions of services were affected including control systems which have gone over to GSM technology.
Technology relying on GSM, GPS and radio has gone too far.
I read a headline the other week, which projected that half of all jobs would disappear by 2050.
What’s to like when half the jobs disappear?
Our city lost over 10,000 manufacturing jobs during the 1990s. Not only have they not been replaced by anything comparable, but now dentists and barbers are hurting because people who are stuck with houses (mortgaged) they cannot sell put off buying or using services.
Many retail businesses are hit by a lack of local buyers and more recently by the internet sales.
Monetary Grace as in the free gift is the economic paradigm. We better wake up before its too late
wisdomicsblog.com
Why are they even bothering with all the nightmare problems involving this. There are already triple trailer land trains on interstates. Have been for years.
I-80 does NOT cross Nevada. I do believe the internetz has bamboozled you on this one.
Justaned- perhaps you could look at a map and tell us about that interstate highway that enters Nevada just west of Reno and contines East through a variety of communities (Fereley, Lovelock, Winnemucca, Battle Mountain, Carlin, Elko, Wells) and leaves the state at Wendover? I’ve been up and down this road for 49 years and I always called it I-80. Perhaps it was all the blue highway signs that said “Interatate 80” that confused me.
*sigh* Geography fail – credibility destroyed. (Adjusts dunce cap and goes to corner) 🙂
LOL… Last time I checked, I-80 went through Reno… and Reno is in Nevada LOL…
Xeny,
I’m having trouble with the comments too. Long delays for posting. It must be the new system. Mish will get it sorted out most likely.
I’m sure the video of an operator using the truck to mow thieves down will play well at his murder trial.
So you are talking about adding hardware, software, bandwidth and a control center staffed by humans. Sounds awfully expensive for something that a couple bursts from my paintball gun will render completely useless. If police respond every time a truck comes to an unexpected stop they will be overwhelmed. If they are not I will make sure they are.
I’m staying low tech here to keep it simple. An RFID reader might be able to give me an idea what the cargo is and if the truck is worth stopping. A $5000 thermal imager will tell me if there are cops hiding in the truck.
Hackers? Iran has shown twice that they are able to spoof the GPS. What if all the trucks thought they were 10 meters from their actual location? At best they would all come to an immediate stop. At worst?
I would think Russia and China can spoof the GPS too but they just haven’t had a good enough reason to show their hand.
Mish, I know you are a busy guy but I expected more from you than to say I have no faith or vision.
I have faith that most humans are just greedy, opportunistic primates.
Saying that some smart people will have enough of my tax dollars to create driverless trucks is no vision.
I have put forward my vision. Now how are you going to stop me?
Pingback: What’s the Problem? | ashlandrail