[kposehn]

> Compared to driverless cars, driverless trucking is technically way simpler. When going from one warehouse in a sparsely populated area to a another warehouse in a similarly sparsly populated area, there’s a lot less that can go wrong.

Not quite. Long haul trucking has far more things to go wrong than a short jaunt from two packed urban spots to another. A lot goes wrong on these trips. Flat tires, accidents, bad weather and - of course - other drivers.

Case in point: a long haul truck from Oakland to Chicago has to tackle Donner Pass, the Wasatch, Sherman hill (the Wyoming continental divide) and then finally gets a flat stretch across the Great Plains.

I would counter that the best start is short-haul intermodal: trucks that pick up a container and haul it to an intermodal rail yard, and so on. Those trucks have to deal with a short route and much fewer potential problems.

[danohuiginn]

>the best start is short-haul intermodal

bingo. In container ports, long-distance drivers will generally dump their trailer to be shunted and loaded internally, and pick up another one. Separate cabs are attached to move things around within the port.

These could relatively easily become driverless. It's a highly controlled and automated environment. Every moment a ship is in the port costs money, so there's a big reward for improving reliability and shaving seconds off (un)load times. It might make financial sense even in Asian ports with low wage costs for drivers.

Same with mining or heavy industry. Where companies might now build their own railways, in the future they could build a road and run driverless trucks along it. Being outside of public road systems makes the legal situation easier, and you can always have a human jump in to drive the last mile.

[MaulingMonkey]

No "in the future" about it... we're already seeing automated ore haulers in Australia's pit mines, for example. It's a perfect storm of a controlled, sparsely populated and dangerous environment, relatively low cost (thanks to fewer, larger vehicles, and automation costs rising slower than size), etc.

[jfno67]

You can also have a convoy of 1 manned truck with n driverless truck that play follow the leader. You end up with a train model on the road infrastructure.

[nawitus]

You can already do that with a road train.

[stretchwithme]

I suspect a mile of highway has fewer hazards than a mile of Manhattan.

Trucking from the suburbs of a port city to the suburbs of another city could be 98% highway. Not many toddlers will be walking into traffic they way they might on a residential street.

[milsorgen]

>Long haul trucking has far more things to go wrong than a short jaunt from two packed urban spots to another.

Some road side service response personnel could alleviate that. I personally think automating long haul would be a great thing, I've seen a lot of hair raising driving by truckers on I-84 and if we can't expand rail transport or zone commercial/industrial near rail access then I see this as the next best thing. Of course truckers would be quite vocal about any sort of change...