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from the that-is-a-lot-bigger-than-a-car dept.
From MotorAuthority.com:
Ride-sharing giant Uber sees a future where it not only has a fleet of self-driving cars offering rides to the public, but also self-driving trucks transporting goods on the highway.
Uber on Thursday announced the acquisition of Otto, an American startup with around 90 staff working on developing self-driving trucks. The announcement was made on the same day Uber announced a deal with Volvo to source additional test cars for its growing fleet of self-driving cars.
Otto co-founder Anthony Levandowski has been put in charge of all autonomous driving efforts at the combined firms and will report to Uber CEO Travis Kalanick. Early last decade Levandowski developed the Ghostrider, a self-driving motorcycle that now sits in the Smithsonian. He was also on Google's self-driving car team.
Otto was only founded in January but much of its staff comes from more established firms including Apple, Google, Tesla Motors [NSDQ:TSLA] and Cruise Automation. Otto's goal isn't to start selling self-driving trucks but rather to develop technology that can be licensed to truck manufacturers or turned into kits that can be retrofitted to existing trucks to make them autonomous.
Also at theverge.com
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 21 2016, @12:41PM
The hardest part about self-driving is the negotiation of complicated roads in urban areas. Highway miles are by far the easiest part of the job because they are limited-access, straight, with ideal visibility and no pedestrians. Because of that interstate trucking is going to be automated before taxis, home delivery or any other industry. Imagine land-trains of 20 trucks with one driver in the lead and all the others just auto-following the truck in front of them. Cars have been shipping with the tech to do that for years already (lane-keeping and adaptive cruise-control). Deploying it in trucks is not a technical problem, just a logistical problem.
There are going to be a ton of unemployed truckers really soon. And its going to painful. Right now there are 2.4 million registered class 8 trucks (semis) [trucking.org] and 1.8 million people are employed as heavy truck drivers [bls.gov] with a median annual pay of $40K. That's good money for a job that is basically unskilled labor. Compare that to job losses in the coal mining industry - they've only lost 150K jobs over the last 30 years in just a handful of states and that's caused a collective freakout. We are going to see 10x that job loss in one third the time spread across nearly the entire country. [npr.org]
Trump might not win this election, but holy shit are there going to be a lot of really angry trumpkins in the next couple of election cycles.
(Score: 2) by TheLink on Sunday August 21 2016, @05:54PM
Truck stops too: https://medium.com/basic-income/self-driving-trucks-are-going-to-hit-us-like-a-human-driven-truck-b8507d9c5961 [medium.com]
http://www.vox.com/2016/8/3/12342764/autonomous-trucks-employment [vox.com]
When the automobiles arrived the buggy whip makers switched to making something else. BUT did most of the horses get new jobs?
Do you think those drivers are the buggy whip makers or horses in this scenario? How many of those millions of truck drivers will get new jobs that are about as good as or better than their current jobs?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Pq-S557XQU#t=3m30s [youtube.com]