[cm2187]

I'd say rather than refueling, repairing. Right now there is a human in the truck who will do basic repairs, change a wheel, etc. If you have driverless trucks, they will need people available all over the country to service them on a short notice. Although admittedly these jobs could also be automated in the long term.

[Robotenomics]

My thoughts:

Fleets of self-driving trucks will be on the roads worldwide by 2020.

Those same trucks will have a ‘delivery driver’ inside the cabin for at least another 10 years.

By 2030 all sales of new trucks will be self-driving From 2030 onwards a robot such as the latest generation Atlas will be in the cabin to handle deliveries.

By 2050 very few, if any, human couriers will be used, instead people will have new jobs coordinating the self-driving trucks, delivery robots and facilitation depots.

DHL recently hosted journalists, customers, and experts in the field of robotics at “Robotics Day” in their DHL Innovation Center in Troisdorf, Germany. The company says “Robots will be part of the future of logistics, and we’re excited to be on the ground floor of what that future cooperation will be like.” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YeL-YtaUkWc&feature=youtu.be

[orkoden]

There was a story about a Tesla's radar being blocked by a moth, that smashed to its front. A fully autonomous vehicle would have had to stop and wait for someone to come by and clean the radar. Or there need to be lots of additional minor repair gadgets added to the car to clean sensors in case of dirt.

[robotresearcher]

There are already lots of failure modes that require a tow truck to rescue a human-driven car. I bet the reduction in human-caused accidents (sleepy, drunk, distracted driver) will more than make up for weird new failure modes like sensor-splats.