First Driverless Semis Have Started Running Regular Longhaul Routes (cnn.com)
- Reference: 0177270929
- News link: https://tech.slashdot.org/story/25/05/02/2258206/first-driverless-semis-have-started-running-regular-longhaul-routes
- Source link: https://www.cnn.com/2025/05/01/business/first-driverless-semis-started-regular-routes
> Driverless trucks are [1]officially running their first regular long-haul routes , making roundtrips between Dallas and Houston. On Thursday, autonomous trucking firm Aurora announced it launched commercial service in Texas under its first customers, Uber Freight and Hirschbach Motor Lines, which delivers time- and temperature-sensitive freight. Both companies conducted test runs with Aurora, including safety drivers to monitor the self-driving technology dubbed "Aurora Driver." Aurora's new commercial service will no longer have safety drivers.
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> "We founded Aurora to deliver the benefits of self-driving technology safely, quickly, and broadly, said Chris Urmson, CEO and co-founder of Aurora, [2]in a release on Thursday. "Now, we are the first company to successfully and safely operate a commercial driverless trucking service on public roads." The trucks are equipped with computers and sensors that can see the length of over four football fields. In four years of practice hauls the trucks' technology has delivered over 10,000 customer loads. As of Thursday, the company's self-driving tech has completed over 1,200 miles without a human in the truck. Aurora is starting with a single self-driving truck and plans to add more by the end of 2025.
[1] https://www.cnn.com/2025/05/01/business/first-driverless-semis-started-regular-routes
[2] https://ir.aurora.tech/news-events/press-releases/detail/119/aurora-begins-commercial-driverless-trucking-in-texas
Re: (Score:2)
Or Spielberg's Duel
Weight of human centric truck cab (Score:2)
With driverless vehicles, they can simply lobby for removing all of the parts of the truck needed to hold the human driver from windshield, dashboard dials, A/C, seats, etc. etc.
It'd remove a couple (?) thousand pounds of weight, reduce the cost of the vehicle and improve fuel economy.
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Oh good several million more unemployable people (Score:5, Interesting)
I keep pointing this out but 70% of middle class jobs lost since the '80s got taken by automation not outsourcing.
Every year a productivity increases but wages don't. Eventually the service sector economy will collapse. Remember folks all those blue collar jobs in plumbing and HVAC people keep saying are the bee's knees are service sector jobs. They depend on other consumers and workers able to pay for them.
And there isn't any superfuturistic new jobs on the horizon to replace all the work we are automating. This isn't like buggy whip manufacturers going to work at the car factory. There is no car factory. There is no replacement job for what's being automated. It's not progress it's automation. So the usual thought terminating cliches don't apply.
Something has to give and so far it looks like we're just going to descend into techno feudalism while a bunch of old people insist it's not happening.
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> And there isn't any superfuturistic new jobs on the horizon to replace all the work we are automating
We're going to need a lot of Mars settlers. I'm sure the first attempts will lose all hands. The next group will be told the previous group hasn't filed any complaints, so they must really be enjoying themselves. No other job has zero complaints! Don't forget our generous 100K bonus at the end of your first year! All training performed in route. Sign up now, seats are limited. Follow Kate Perry into space.
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> I keep pointing this out but 70% of middle class jobs lost since the '80s got taken by automation not outsourcing.
And I keep pointing this out. Your comment has been repeated ad nauseum since the beginning of society itself. Nothing is going to give. Despite more people on the planet and more automation than ever before employment remains as low as ever.
Every single story about automation results in you postulating a situation where a person can only ever do a single job in their life. It makes me wonder if you've ever had more than one job. Maybe a truck driver won't be needed in the future, that doesn't mean that soc
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Despite more people on the planet and more automation than ever before employment remains as low as ever.
He did not say there will be no/fewer jobs. He said be no/fewer middle class jobs. Have you seen what's happened to the middle class over the last 20 years or so?
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The money people save from cheaper transportation of goods will help them move to a bigger house. Demand for more homes means the unemployed truck drivers can work in construction.
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I see a future in robot repair and maintenance.
Ban cars, bring back horses (Score:2)
The reality is that we've seen massive numbers of jobs lost to automation over the past 200 years, and there's been no permanent rise in unemployment. Given the absurd hours that American work compared to Europeans, there's plenty of resilience just from a change in workplace culture in the US. And the fact that there are so many immigrants in the US is also an indicator that there's no shortage of jobs.
An issue with the automation of trucking is the collateral damage that it will do to businesses such as t
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Diesel techs will be eating well for awhile yet.
Children of Luddites, Not Luddites (Score:2)
> There is no replacement job for what's being automated.
Yes there is. You need people to manage the fleet of automated lorries, to develop and maintain the AI systems that drives them and to build the larger number of vehicles that it will now be possible to deploy. Yes that's still fewer people than currently drive lorries but that was also the case with the transition from horses to cars: horses needed massively more people to house, care, feed an clean up after them than cars, the car factory jobs were a small fraction of the jobs they replaced.
What you a
Could Hardly Be Worse (Score:2)
After having been run off the road 3 times on one summer on I-79 IN ohio, w. Virginia, and Indiana, its hard to imagine the robots doing a worse job. We need robots with cameras all around and lacking the apparent limitations of human drivers that don't look before changing lanes, Watching videos of trucks on Facebook, we can hope for a lack of combative attitude exhibited by drivers in said videos. It's not a war, its cooperative sharing of highways, except for a lot of truckers on Facebook that think
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Trucking and freight in general is a race to the bottom. Margins are thin and companies pay the bare minimum. If you show up and have a pulse they’ll help you get a CDL.
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I frequently drive through the NYC metro area, and Long Island, and I can't freakin' wait until vehicle control is automated; especially there. On the rural backroads, it's kinda fun to just pay attention to the road and follow the curves. In metro areas, it's just awful: all it takes is one person to screw up, and the entire area is shut down. And god forbid that anyone actually exhibit some consideration when merging.
Oh, HELL NO! (Score:3)
We can't keep Teslas from fucking up Autonomous Driving, and yet we're expected to share the road at 70 miles per hour with a 60,000 pound Driverless Semi ?!?!?
Hell to the No!
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Just stay out of Texas and you will be fine, not like there aren't enough reasons to avoid it already.
Texas: The One-Star State.
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You know it's Texas when the vision range is expressed as "the length of over four football fields".
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> You know it's Texas when the vision range is expressed as "the length of over four football fields".
Phht!!!
Perfect!
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> Just stay out of Texas and you will be fine, not like there aren't enough reasons to avoid it already.
> Texas: The One-Star State.
True!
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> We can't keep Teslas from fucking up Autonomous Driving, and yet we're expected to share the road at 70 miles per hour with a 60,000 pound Driverless Semi ?!?!?
> Hell to the No!
Apples and oranges. Tesla's camera-only, no-local-knowledge system is vastly inferior to the other self-driving systems out there. Compare instead with Waymo, which has an outstanding safety record.
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>> We can't keep Teslas from fucking up Autonomous Driving, and yet we're expected to share the road at 70 miles per hour with a 60,000 pound Driverless Semi ?!?!?
>> Hell to the No!
> Apples and oranges. Tesla's camera-only, no-local-knowledge system is vastly inferior to the other self-driving systems out there. Compare instead with Waymo, which has an outstanding safety record.
You're right: The destructive force of a 4,000 pound Tesla @ 70 mph and a 60,000 Semi @ 70 mph IS "Apples and Oranges", or more like "Pebbles and Asteroids"!
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Comparing an industry to the worst and most toxic performer in it is truly stupid. If all you know about autonomous driving is what you hear from Tesla I suggest you unlearn everything and start anew.
Unlike Tesla who insists on doing things as cheaply as possible, with as little testing as possible, with hardware that the entire rest of the industry deems insufficient, and with the goal of maybe matching a human at some point (while the rest of the industry's goal is to drastically surpass humans), the self
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> Comparing an industry to the worst and most toxic performer in it is truly stupid. If all you know about autonomous driving is what you hear from Tesla I suggest you unlearn everything and start anew.
> Unlike Tesla who insists on doing things as cheaply as possible, with as little testing as possible, with hardware that the entire rest of the industry deems insufficient, and with the goal of maybe matching a human at some point (while the rest of the industry's goal is to drastically surpass humans), the self driving industry outside of Tesla has a phenomenal track record.
> Unlike humans, humans have a shit track record, and all advances in road safety have been the result of more technology thrown at the problem, not the fools errand of making a better human.
> What's significant about 60,000 pounds? Think about it? That's what you're scared of, weight. What's weight mean for others on the road? Stopping distance. What a humans good at? Being impatient fucks. What a computers good at? Following programming. There's a reason I can't set my driver assistance system to follow within 1m of the car in front of me, and likewise 60,000 pounds is completely insignificant when a system is designed with its weight and stopping distance in mind.
Found the Tesla Dealer!
1200 miles of testing? (Score:2)
So like 6 trips?
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> So like 6 trips?
Yes, like 6 trips on its own; after 10,000 trips with a person riding in the cab to supervise.
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Who cares about the trip count? Any graduate school freshman can program a robot to make identical trips when they have perfect knowledge of location and environment. Hell, high school kids do that with Lego robotic vehicles. The important number is how many edge cases came up. How many times was someone walking along the road? How many obstacles in the road? How many emergency vehicles? Any floods? Construction? Mis-painted road lines? Salt lines that look like road lines? If the car in front of
English? (Score:2)
Do the trucks speak English?
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If they speak Spanish they will be deported.
No (Score:2)
If they spoke english they'd be lorries, not trucks.
Dallas to Houston (Score:1)
That's "long haul"?
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Yup, fully automated long haul trucking is decades away. They need a whole lot more than self-driving trucks. They need weigh station automation, they need to figure out security, minor contingencies like blowing a tire, major contingencies, getting the paperwork good enough that it can be automated, including purchase and sales papers that currently need to be signed off by humans for security reasons, docking by voice, many ways a truck can accidentally drive on non-truck routes, etc etc.
That said short
Re: Dallas to Houston (Score:2)
They also need to stop at a barricade, listen to what the cop says, communicate back to him, and follow instructions
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Everything is bigger in Texas dontchaknow.
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Dallas > Houston is a longer distance than Seattle > Portland.
Its just barely long enough that a round trip w/ load/unload times might not be possible for a single driver in a single day due to length of day restrictions.