[FussyZeus]

Cabs are harder though. Cabs need to negotiate the complex and often extremely busy city routes. Most truck driving is LTL to warehouses on the edge of cities, and if a truck had sufficient fuel, it would have no reason to ever leave the freeway.

[Spooky23]

Not really. All of the tech people like to talk about how easy trucking is because of the distance aspect. That's like saying pilots are obsolete because autopilot does 95% of the work. "The work" is actually the 5%.

Cabs need to drop you to a 50 meter circle adjacent to a street address. Trucks need to land at a specific dock at a specific warehouse at a specific time. Some warehouses are highly optimized and organized. Others are a total shitshow... Amazon warehouses for example often have trucks queued up for hours due to staff shortages or general incompetence at the docks.

So the business case for the automated truck is to take a trailer from X to Y, and be capable of taking direction from a $10/hr temp who can't find his ass with both hands. Or... you need to deliver the trailer to some staging area, and pay drivers to figure out that mess. Or some other solution. In any case, the "getting on the interstate" part is the most trivial problem to solve.

[FussyZeus]

In the distro center I worked at, it was incredibly rare for the long haul trucks to actually attach the trailers to the building. They would jack up the trailers in the lot, let the truck go, then use a switcher to do the remaining lot because the switcher can just pick the thing up and go instead of having to have a worker there to wind the legs up and down on the trailer. Ours was not a huge distro hub either, pretty small one so I'd imagine larger ones have even more infrastructure to handle the freight that doesn't involve the pull truck.