> How is it that commercial aviation, surely a much more technically challenging endeavor than ground transport, is relatively safe, while commercial trucking is responsible for more than five thousand deaths per year? The simple reason is that commercial aviation is highly regulated, and the overseeing government administration is relatively well-funded.
The roads on the ground are vastly more complex than the highways in the sky, and the density of human pilots a few feet away is vastly higher. At the same time ground transport is handling ~600x more tonnage and ~6x more drivers per ton. To say the death difference is simply regulation ignores a lot.
How is that a thing? They don’t have an address but can get a commercial driver’s license. What do they put on the form for an address “patch of woods by I-95”, a PO box?
I mean, if you're living in the truck that you're driving across country, back and forth, and your parents have passed, where would you put as your address? You don't have an apartment you're renting, because that would just be a waste of money since you're never there.
> A 2016 study of a sample of academic journals (not news publications) that set out to test Betteridge's law and Hinchliffe's rule (see below) found that few titles were posed as questions and of those that were questions, few were yes/no questions and they were more often answered "yes" in the body of the article rather than "no".
> A 2018 study of 2,585 articles in four academic journals in the field of ecology similarly found that very few titles were posed as questions at all, with 1.82 percent being wh-questions and 2.15 percent being yes/no questions. Of the yes/no questions, 44 percent were answered "yes", 34 percent "maybe", and only 22 percent were answered "no".
> In 2015, a study of 26,000 articles from 13 news sites on the World Wide Web, conducted by a data scientist and published on his blog, found that the majority (54 percent) were yes/no questions, which divided into 20 percent "yes" answers, 17 percent "no" answers and 16 percent whose answers he could not determine.
I'm not sure humans have reached Level 5 autonomy either; many of them can't handle the full range of conditions humans drive in and occasionally need other humans to step in and help them.
Level 3 or 4 is more than enough to get most of the commercial benefits.
IMO the "failure rate" is obvious enough to be tracked, but I worry that we won't be paying enough attention to differences in error type/impact/recovery.
We've learned a lot of ways to predict, mitigate, and recover from human errors, and the equivalent ecosystem may not exist for nonhuman ones.
Level 5 means "people inside are purely passengers and never have to take steering wheel". For humans, being level 4 means that because of some road condition, driver gets out of the car and asks someone else to drive - either one of the passengers, or some sort of emergency 3rd party service.
I never did this myself (except while learning how to drive). And I don't think I've heard about my friends doing this either. Turn around because the road was impassable? Sure. Pass the wheel to someone else? nope.
That means a lot (most?) human drivers are "level 5 autonomous".
I'm thinking of a time I had to help someone with reverse parking for example. And most people aren't tested in extremes - if they think they can't conditions are harder than they want to handle they just won't go out driving.
Looking at the SAE standards document [0], I can think of a few people I know who only technically reach Level 3. Mostly older women, to be honest. They are only going to drive under certain well defined conditions and will put someone else in the hot seat the trip will be outside a limited comfort zone. They would need someone else to be able to step in at a moments notice to operate a vehicle truly safely. As an aside; the older men are more willing to be adventurous, but also more likely to kill themselves and/or run someone else over based on my experiences with accidents. And in an AI from an engineering perspective that probably bumps them more towards Level 2.
But a truck isn't going to be facing level 5 conditions in the vast majority of circumstances where it is generating economic value. It's probably going to be going in a straight line down a highway or parking in a loading bay.
EDIT And drug/alcohol affected road users probably deserve their own paragraph; but I'm not going to make time to type it up. Just because they might not ask doesn't mean they don't need someone else to drive for them.
It has happened with Waymo and recently Tesla (somewhat). From there to self driving trucks with the same capability doesn’t seem that far off. Especially if there’s money to be saved. Between the electric fuel and the driver pay I would think these things would be 80% cheaper than the alternative.
Electric semi tractors are impractical in all but drayage use cases (port to warehouse short haul). Even then, they require specialized yards and hours to charge, and they are twice as expensive as diesel tractors. Refueling a diesel truck takes minutes. Plus the electrical grid impact to supporting the charging of these trucks, keeping just 50 trucks charged annually uses as much electricity as a decent sized town.
For autonomous trucking, you’re grossly underestimating 1) how dangerous these trucks are. A small rear end accident with a car does some damage, a small rear end from a tractor with 80k pounds of cargo kills people. 2) They are hard to drive, hard to navigate in cities, require inspections constantly for roadworthiness and safety. Sure having a tractor pull a load on a few hundred miles of straight empty highway in Texas is doable today, having that same truck get to a warehouse in the center of Dallas is a nightmare even for pro drivers.
3) Plus no one knows how to legislate or regulate these things. If a robot tractor kills someone, who is at fault? The vehicle maker? The autonomy software maker? The carrier? There are already nuclear verdict lawsuits for these types of situations with human truck drivers that can be tens to hundreds of millions of dollars I.e. shut down a carrier bad. You think a bunch of octogenarians in congress know what the hell to do with any of this stuff?
I say all of this while also fully agreeing that consumer autonomy seems to have been solved or is on its way to being solved, I’d bet in 5 years it will be weird to get an uber and there’s a person actually driving. Commercial heavy duty trucking is a whole different class of problems that goes well beyond “can the software do it”.
Source: I make software for trucking carriers and drivers
> keeping just 50 trucks charged annually uses as much electricity as a decent sized town.
Doesn't fueling a diesel require the same amount of energy? What's worse, a diesel is expelling the byproducts of that energy use right where people live.
I think these fears are over blown just like they were in the lead up to having regular driverless cars in chaotic driving conditions for example in New York City. It all worked out and very quickly and the same will happen with these things.
Fully autonomous is a long ways off, but semi-automated can't get here fast enough. Drive a comma.ai equipped car over a long road trip or other advanced driving aid, and just feel how much less frazzled you are after driving for a few hours.
could we automate the predictable, tedious sections of long drives on interstates but let humans take over for the complex 'last mile' navigating through towns and to the final destination?
those drivers could spend their lives working locally (and sleepin at home), develop deep regional expertise, and be able to handle the hardest part of the job without the fatigue from a cross-country drive.
You really think there’s more than five years between now and these things being able to do last mile? I don’t think we have the luxury of imagining in lifetimes anymore like we did 20 years ago, things are changing rapidly.
Heh I-95 has a few thoughts on what is and isn't "viable" that it's absolutely going to share with the "highway autonomous" touts and I'm betting they won't enjoy the lesson.
I just found out my state is letting autonomous semi trucks drive on its highways. I think the years since we've seen teslas kill entire families have been rare but have happened will pale in comparison to what these trucks will do to us.
I feel like given the danger these vehicles represent that their location should be published publicly so that humans can avoid the highway when they are near and possibly plan alternative routes.
Also, I believe that part of the "plan" is to eventually once the technology hits it limit of effectiveness (cant get any better but is still deadly), flood the highways with enough of them and autonomous cars to scare humans off the roads. There will be a tipping point where humans wont feel safe driving on the roads with these vehicles in large enough numbers (because they arent).
At that point we will be paying taxes for robot highways, and to fund liability protections for tech companies.
Roughly 40,000 people die in motor vehicle crashes each year in the United States (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motor_vehicle_fatality_rate_in...). This is something that we accept as normal; people who drive or ride in cars routinely take steps to minimize their chances of getting into an accident, because they are aware that this is a very real possibility, while still accepting the small risk that they'll die on a road because they or someone else drove a car unsafely. There's also enough political opposition to private car ownership to
In short, "autonomous cars scare humans off the roads" (or even "most major roads are legally for autonomous cars only, private cars are legally banned on them") is something that a substantial number of people are openly and actively hoping for, because they expect it will save about 40,000 lives a year in the US (and more worldwide).
I personally have qualms about this because I don't like the idea that people will be dependent on autonomous cars - likely controlled by some far-away authority - to get around. On the other hand, 40,000 American road deaths per year, that's a lot of preventable death.
That one of us doesn't understand FSD's capabilities isn't in question. Tesla has proven record of hyping their tech's capabilities well in excess of what would in decades past resulted in career-ending lawsuits for some combination of false advertising and outright fraud. Wake me when hostile 3rd parties have confirmed L5 parity.
It's going to be funny when there are more fatalities on the roads where people are trying to avoid the robot trucks...
Humans are such terrible drivers. Most of them don't want to drive. They want to get a private chamber to wheel them around while they look at their phones.
I'm continually shocked that people criticize autonomous vehicles along these lines... like where do you live in the US that gives you such a high opinion of human drivers? Daily dipshit human driving behaviors and a frequent cadence of bad accidents or fatalities seems the norm across major metro areas.
If more robots can drive we can actually have a hard test to pass for driving. Right now basically anyone can drive because it is too expensive to tolerate it being any different given the extent with which transportation and the economy in America is built around cars. The only people who will manually drive are people that really want to. Which is how it should be. You shouldn't be operating a vehicle if all you really want is just to appear x miles away while being able to dick around on your phone or fall asleep or whatever is causing all the lazy driving behaviors we all see around us everyday.
Why over-index on a handful of autonomous driving related fatalities? How many humans kill other humans in cars? Do we ban all cars? Why do you think robot cars will necessarily always be worse drivers than human ones?
> Humans are such terrible drivers. Most of them don't want to drive. They want to get a private chamber to wheel them around while they look at their phones.
Many of them can't even stop looking at their phones even when piloting their private chamber. It frankly frightens me far more than robots driving.
> How is it that commercial aviation, surely a much more technically challenging endeavor than ground transport, is relatively safe, while commercial trucking is responsible for more than five thousand deaths per year? The simple reason is that commercial aviation is highly regulated, and the overseeing government administration is relatively well-funded.
The roads on the ground are vastly more complex than the highways in the sky, and the density of human pilots a few feet away is vastly higher. At the same time ground transport is handling ~600x more tonnage and ~6x more drivers per ton. To say the death difference is simply regulation ignores a lot.
Trucking never had a labor shortage. It has institutional underpayment of non-union foreign workers to skirt US labor law.
If an autonomous truck runs over someone, who goes to jail?
If someone crashes into a bus stop at 75 mph and kills a family, who gets sentenced to jail?
(The answer is no one: https://abc7.com/post/mary-fong-lau-crash-driver-killed-fami...)
That is not relevant to the story. Tragic as it is, it's certainly not established policy.
It really is though. If you’re sober you can pretty much kill people with your car.
https://www.nytimes.com/2013/11/10/opinion/sunday/is-it-ok-t...
Grandparents (the earliest cause)
This is a hard question - but less overall deaths is more important than the correct punishment.
The person who got run over for interfering with the truck
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> non-domiciled” commercial drivers licenses
How is that a thing? They don’t have an address but can get a commercial driver’s license. What do they put on the form for an address “patch of woods by I-95”, a PO box?
You can have a mailing address without having a domicile.
“Non-domiciled” commercial drivers licenses are licenses issued to foreign nationals as described by the article.
In short, yes. Plenty of people don't have USPS-recognized addresses, homeless or not.
I understand that part I am just surprised that one could get a commercial driver’s license without an address
I mean, if you're living in the truck that you're driving across country, back and forth, and your parents have passed, where would you put as your address? You don't have an apartment you're renting, because that would just be a waste of money since you're never there.
That extrapolation is doing a lot of work here. Ignoring all that, you arrive at "No, the revolution is not here."
https://xkcd.com/605/
They need autonomous roads first.
Allowing fossil powered autonomous trucks would be a huge lost opportunity for mitigating the climate disaster and related megadeaths.
Autonomous driving is orthogonal to the type of engine used.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge%27s_law_of_headline...
From your link:
> A 2016 study of a sample of academic journals (not news publications) that set out to test Betteridge's law and Hinchliffe's rule (see below) found that few titles were posed as questions and of those that were questions, few were yes/no questions and they were more often answered "yes" in the body of the article rather than "no".
> A 2018 study of 2,585 articles in four academic journals in the field of ecology similarly found that very few titles were posed as questions at all, with 1.82 percent being wh-questions and 2.15 percent being yes/no questions. Of the yes/no questions, 44 percent were answered "yes", 34 percent "maybe", and only 22 percent were answered "no".
> In 2015, a study of 26,000 articles from 13 news sites on the World Wide Web, conducted by a data scientist and published on his blog, found that the majority (54 percent) were yes/no questions, which divided into 20 percent "yes" answers, 17 percent "no" answers and 16 percent whose answers he could not determine.
No. Saved you a click.
"No one really thinks Level 5 autonomy (full autonomy in all situations with no remote assistance) will happen any time soon"
I'm not sure humans have reached Level 5 autonomy either; many of them can't handle the full range of conditions humans drive in and occasionally need other humans to step in and help them.
Level 3 or 4 is more than enough to get most of the commercial benefits.
IMO the "failure rate" is obvious enough to be tracked, but I worry that we won't be paying enough attention to differences in error type/impact/recovery.
We've learned a lot of ways to predict, mitigate, and recover from human errors, and the equivalent ecosystem may not exist for nonhuman ones.
Level 5 means "people inside are purely passengers and never have to take steering wheel". For humans, being level 4 means that because of some road condition, driver gets out of the car and asks someone else to drive - either one of the passengers, or some sort of emergency 3rd party service.
I never did this myself (except while learning how to drive). And I don't think I've heard about my friends doing this either. Turn around because the road was impassable? Sure. Pass the wheel to someone else? nope.
That means a lot (most?) human drivers are "level 5 autonomous".
I'm thinking of a time I had to help someone with reverse parking for example. And most people aren't tested in extremes - if they think they can't conditions are harder than they want to handle they just won't go out driving.
Looking at the SAE standards document [0], I can think of a few people I know who only technically reach Level 3. Mostly older women, to be honest. They are only going to drive under certain well defined conditions and will put someone else in the hot seat the trip will be outside a limited comfort zone. They would need someone else to be able to step in at a moments notice to operate a vehicle truly safely. As an aside; the older men are more willing to be adventurous, but also more likely to kill themselves and/or run someone else over based on my experiences with accidents. And in an AI from an engineering perspective that probably bumps them more towards Level 2.
But a truck isn't going to be facing level 5 conditions in the vast majority of circumstances where it is generating economic value. It's probably going to be going in a straight line down a highway or parking in a loading bay.
EDIT And drug/alcohol affected road users probably deserve their own paragraph; but I'm not going to make time to type it up. Just because they might not ask doesn't mean they don't need someone else to drive for them.
[0] https://saemobilus.sae.org/standards/j3016_202609-taxonomy-d...
I do pass the wheel over on long trips. We take turns and we swap when someone feels to tired to remain sharp.
Good (or bad, IDK) thing only level 4 is required for autonomous trucks to run everywhere.
What about the vehicles driving regular people around Austin right now with no steering wheel or pedals?
It has happened with Waymo and recently Tesla (somewhat). From there to self driving trucks with the same capability doesn’t seem that far off. Especially if there’s money to be saved. Between the electric fuel and the driver pay I would think these things would be 80% cheaper than the alternative.
Electric semi tractors are impractical in all but drayage use cases (port to warehouse short haul). Even then, they require specialized yards and hours to charge, and they are twice as expensive as diesel tractors. Refueling a diesel truck takes minutes. Plus the electrical grid impact to supporting the charging of these trucks, keeping just 50 trucks charged annually uses as much electricity as a decent sized town.
For autonomous trucking, you’re grossly underestimating 1) how dangerous these trucks are. A small rear end accident with a car does some damage, a small rear end from a tractor with 80k pounds of cargo kills people. 2) They are hard to drive, hard to navigate in cities, require inspections constantly for roadworthiness and safety. Sure having a tractor pull a load on a few hundred miles of straight empty highway in Texas is doable today, having that same truck get to a warehouse in the center of Dallas is a nightmare even for pro drivers. 3) Plus no one knows how to legislate or regulate these things. If a robot tractor kills someone, who is at fault? The vehicle maker? The autonomy software maker? The carrier? There are already nuclear verdict lawsuits for these types of situations with human truck drivers that can be tens to hundreds of millions of dollars I.e. shut down a carrier bad. You think a bunch of octogenarians in congress know what the hell to do with any of this stuff?
I say all of this while also fully agreeing that consumer autonomy seems to have been solved or is on its way to being solved, I’d bet in 5 years it will be weird to get an uber and there’s a person actually driving. Commercial heavy duty trucking is a whole different class of problems that goes well beyond “can the software do it”.
Source: I make software for trucking carriers and drivers
> Source: I make software for trucking carriers and drivers
Is there a rough estimate of how many miles are mostly hub-to-hub and (can) by-pass urban zones?
> keeping just 50 trucks charged annually uses as much electricity as a decent sized town
My analysis is <150KW PV per tractor. So 7MW is very C&I scale. Scheduling can be tricky.
> having that same truck get to a warehouse in the center of Dallas is a nightmare even for pro drivers
This is the L5 fallacy. We will get commercial viability way before L5.
Fueling a diesel actually takes like six times the energy.
I think these fears are over blown just like they were in the lead up to having regular driverless cars in chaotic driving conditions for example in New York City. It all worked out and very quickly and the same will happen with these things.
Fully autonomous is a long ways off, but semi-automated can't get here fast enough. Drive a comma.ai equipped car over a long road trip or other advanced driving aid, and just feel how much less frazzled you are after driving for a few hours.
could we automate the predictable, tedious sections of long drives on interstates but let humans take over for the complex 'last mile' navigating through towns and to the final destination?
those drivers could spend their lives working locally (and sleepin at home), develop deep regional expertise, and be able to handle the hardest part of the job without the fatigue from a cross-country drive.
You really think there’s more than five years between now and these things being able to do last mile? I don’t think we have the luxury of imagining in lifetimes anymore like we did 20 years ago, things are changing rapidly.
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Heh I-95 has a few thoughts on what is and isn't "viable" that it's absolutely going to share with the "highway autonomous" touts and I'm betting they won't enjoy the lesson.
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All those truckers being automated out of a job, guess they should learn to code!
I just found out my state is letting autonomous semi trucks drive on its highways. I think the years since we've seen teslas kill entire families have been rare but have happened will pale in comparison to what these trucks will do to us.
I feel like given the danger these vehicles represent that their location should be published publicly so that humans can avoid the highway when they are near and possibly plan alternative routes.
Also, I believe that part of the "plan" is to eventually once the technology hits it limit of effectiveness (cant get any better but is still deadly), flood the highways with enough of them and autonomous cars to scare humans off the roads. There will be a tipping point where humans wont feel safe driving on the roads with these vehicles in large enough numbers (because they arent).
At that point we will be paying taxes for robot highways, and to fund liability protections for tech companies.
Roughly 40,000 people die in motor vehicle crashes each year in the United States (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motor_vehicle_fatality_rate_in...). This is something that we accept as normal; people who drive or ride in cars routinely take steps to minimize their chances of getting into an accident, because they are aware that this is a very real possibility, while still accepting the small risk that they'll die on a road because they or someone else drove a car unsafely. There's also enough political opposition to private car ownership to
In short, "autonomous cars scare humans off the roads" (or even "most major roads are legally for autonomous cars only, private cars are legally banned on them") is something that a substantial number of people are openly and actively hoping for, because they expect it will save about 40,000 lives a year in the US (and more worldwide).
I personally have qualms about this because I don't like the idea that people will be dependent on autonomous cars - likely controlled by some far-away authority - to get around. On the other hand, 40,000 American road deaths per year, that's a lot of preventable death.
The robot drivers will be worse than the human ones?
https://www.cbsnews.com/colorado/news/semi-truck-driver-dead...
By the industry's own admission absolutely. Nobody's claiming to even be close to meeting L5 criteria which is parity with the average human driver.
You may not be up to date with the state of the art of Tesla FSD
What are the fatality statistics on the state of the art of Tesla FSD?
That one of us doesn't understand FSD's capabilities isn't in question. Tesla has proven record of hyping their tech's capabilities well in excess of what would in decades past resulted in career-ending lawsuits for some combination of false advertising and outright fraud. Wake me when hostile 3rd parties have confirmed L5 parity.
It's going to be funny when there are more fatalities on the roads where people are trying to avoid the robot trucks...
Humans are such terrible drivers. Most of them don't want to drive. They want to get a private chamber to wheel them around while they look at their phones.
I'm continually shocked that people criticize autonomous vehicles along these lines... like where do you live in the US that gives you such a high opinion of human drivers? Daily dipshit human driving behaviors and a frequent cadence of bad accidents or fatalities seems the norm across major metro areas.
If more robots can drive we can actually have a hard test to pass for driving. Right now basically anyone can drive because it is too expensive to tolerate it being any different given the extent with which transportation and the economy in America is built around cars. The only people who will manually drive are people that really want to. Which is how it should be. You shouldn't be operating a vehicle if all you really want is just to appear x miles away while being able to dick around on your phone or fall asleep or whatever is causing all the lazy driving behaviors we all see around us everyday.
Why over-index on a handful of autonomous driving related fatalities? How many humans kill other humans in cars? Do we ban all cars? Why do you think robot cars will necessarily always be worse drivers than human ones?
I'm pretty cynical and pessimistic, but I do not see this happening.