Self-Driving Trucks Are Just Around the Bend --- Big rigs will become truly autonomous before cars

"Some day in the next few years, if you're on the right stretch of highway in America's Sunbelt, you are likely to have the disconcerting experience of pulling alongside a fully loaded semi truck, glancing at the cab, and seeing no one behind the wheel at all.

Unless you look closely, the truck you're likely to see will look very much like a regular big rig. It will still have a steering wheel -- twitching, as if moved by ghostly hands. It will also have those oversize rearview mirrors trucks have, only these will be even more exaggerated in scale, since they will double as mounts for sensors -- including radar, lidar, and cameras -- that help the truck see things even an experienced human driver might miss.

This truck won't be as smart or adaptable as a human, but it will have superhuman senses, and won't need to rest. What's more, it won't be susceptible to many of the pitfalls that have made autonomy in passenger vehicles largely a disappointment, with companies blowing past one self-imposed deadline after another. While the self-driving passenger-vehicle industry struggles to gain traction despite decades and tens of billions of dollars in investment, proponents of self-driving trucks say they could be here -- and making money for their operators -- much sooner.

Some of the companies involved say they will have the first trucks without drivers in the cab on America's highways by the end of next year. Those include Aurora, which has partnerships with FedEx and Werner Enterprises, and TuSimple, which has joined up with UPS and Ryder.

When it gains widespread traction, robot trucking will have big implications for how we move goods around America -- and for the companies and people involved in that process. For starters, it could help alleviate a chronic shortage of drivers, who are retiring faster than they can be replaced, leading to what the American Trucking Associations claims is a historic shortage of 80,000 drivers.

Here's the promise of robot trucks: While full self-driving in all conditions is still a pipe dream, engineers seem to be close to achieving it in limited circumstances, such as on highways on clear days. And highway driving, in good weather, happens to be exactly the context in which long-haul trucks operate for a substantial portion of the time.

One reason for that: Highways are what Aurora Chief Executive Chris Urmson calls self-similar.

"A bit of freeway in Texas looks very much like a bit of freeway in Phoenix or Minnesota," says Mr. Urmson, a former faculty member at Carnegie Mellon University and Google executive who co-founded Aurora in 2017. The similarity is good for the artificial-intelligence technology that underpins self-driving, which can be great at handling things it has seen before, and terrible at adapting to situations that are novel. Anyone who has tried GM's Super Cruise, Nissan's ProPilot Assist, or Tesla's Autopilot system has experienced this firsthand.

Highways also have the virtue of being relatively free of pedestrians, bicyclists, animals and children chasing after balls, and they tend to be well-marked and well-maintained.

Highways in Southwestern states, where the weather is generally good, are where autonomous trucking companies are currently testing their systems, carrying real loads for actual clients like FedEx and UPS, albeit with safety drivers behind the wheel in case the AI systems make a mistake -- which they still do.

So, in good weather, a robot truck will see farther than a person can. It will never grow drowsy or inattentive. It will be able to operate 24 hours a day, stopping only for fuel and maintenance.

Now, there are also reasons to discount claims about commercial autonomous trucking happening in the next couple of years, or making a big difference anytime soon.

For one, the younger companies trying to pioneer the technology have to sustain the interest of investors until they start making money.

And that could be a while: Aurora, for example, has said that it will lose money until 2027. Chief Financial Officer Richard Tame said the company has enough cash to fund operations through the introduction of its first autonomous truck next year and into 2024. The company has said in public filings that it expects it will eventually need to raise additional capital.

Even if startups do get their trucks rolling on schedule, it could take a while to have a real impact. By the end of 2023, Aurora will be putting "on the order of dozens" of driver-free trucks on America's highways, says Sterling Anderson, the company's chief product officer.

TuSimple also aims to have a fully autonomous commercial-trucking service operating in the U.S. by the end of 2023, says CEO Xiaodi Hou. In the meantime, the company also plans to begin delivering freight for Union Pacific with fully autonomous trucks, says a company spokesman.

Compared with the total number of large trucks rolling in America today -- nearly four million, half of them the type that haul freight long distance -- the scant dozens of self-driving trucks projected to be on the road by the end of 2023 would be a drop in the ocean.

Waymo -- which, as a unit of Google parent Alphabet, has less pressing concerns about funding -- is less aggressive in its prediction for the arrival of robo-rigs. Its trucking-focused arm, Waymo Via, hasn't set a date for its trucks to operate with no human in the cab, despite having already entered partnerships with trucking companies C.H. Robinson and J.B. Hunt and truck maker Daimler Truck, among others. Waymo has many reasons for that reticence, says Charlie Jatt, its head of commercialization for trucking. An important one is that there is no production-ready, commercially available truck with the redundant control systems that a self-driving system would require.

If power steering goes out in a human-controlled vehicle, a driver could still potentially muscle it to the side of the road. But with no human in the cab, an autonomous vehicle must have backup steering, braking and electrical systems, says Mr. Jatt. Getting all of these into trucks that can be made not just one at a time but by the tens of thousands is why Waymo has joined with Daimler Truck, he adds.

Indeed, everyone I interviewed for this piece, except for TuSimple, said that the potential for their systems to make mistakes is the reason they haven't rolled them out yet -- even those who claim to be close to doing so. (A recent report from the U.S. National Highway Traffic Safety Administration listed more than 100 accidents involving vehicles equipped with autonomous driving systems over the past year.)

Still, the potential financial benefits of robo-trucking technology are so enormous that shippers and trucking companies are likely to embrace it as soon as they feel it is ready.

Adding even $20,000 of hardware, in the form of additional sensors and powerful computers, to a long-haul truck is quickly offset by the elimination of labor costs, which typically represent 15% to 20% of the cost of operating a truck. Another big economic impact is that by law a human driving a truck must stop and rest. That means every truck, which can cost between $100,000 and $200,000, is being used only about 30% to 40% of the time. Just running them 24 hours, stopping only for fuel and maintenance, increases their utilization by a factor of two or more.

Regulations are hardly a barrier to rolling out autonomous trucks. NHTSA has created suggested guidelines, which most states have adopted. These call for companies to, in essence, self-regulate. "A small handful of states have certain certifications or prohibitions, but all the rest are open for business," says Aurora's Mr. Anderson.

Autonomous-truck companies like his have for the most part moved on to validating their tech, rather than continuing to build it, says Don Burnette, CEO of Kodiak Robotics, another self-driving trucking startup. That's why, for the industry as a whole, deployment of safe, commercially viable, fully autonomous trucks is just a couple of years away, he adds.

Longer term, robot trucks could go from driver-shortage solution to driver-job killer.

As self-driving trucks become more capable, and can perform most of the driving on long trips throughout most of America, they could ultimately threaten nearly all the roughly 500,000 long-haul trucking jobs in the U.S.

It's worth noting that existing long-haul trucking jobs are already a far cry from the solid middle-class gigs they were in the 1970s, before deregulation of the trucking industry, says Steve Viscelli, an expert in the trucking industry at the University of Pennsylvania and a member of the industry advisory council at Aurora. He believes self-driving trucks will continue what has been a decadeslong transformation of the industry.

"I think after that the pace of adoption could be significantly faster than people expect, over the following decade," says Dr. Viscelli. "These trucks are going to have different capabilities than a human-driven truck will have, so they will not be used in the way a human-driven truck will be used -- in the same way a hundred guys with shovels are not an excavator."” [1]

Trucks are becoming information technology things. In information technology  the best as a rule takes all the market. Some truck producing countries who are late to the party will go out of business. Self-driving trucks are important in reducing risk of military land transportation. War in Iraq showed that this risk is a significant problem. This why countries will rush to introduce this technology. Truck drivers are doomed.

1.  EXCHANGE --- Keywords: Self-Driving Trucks Are Just Around the Bend --- Big rigs will become truly autonomous before cars, but are still years from having a major impact on how we transport goods
Mims, Christopher. 
Wall Street Journal, Eastern edition; New York, N.Y. [New York, N.Y]. 18 June 2022: B.2.