I think we're quite a bit farther away from self-driving semis than from self-driving cars. Big trucks are much more dangerous vehicles than cars: their braking distances are much longer, their weight makes it possible for them to destroy any cars in their path, they can require multiple lanes to make a turn, many car drivers don't know how to drive safely near trucks, etc.
No kidding. I'll get downvoted for this but the Hacker News demographic hasn't spent much time on the road. Try driving down 710 toward Long Beach. Last time I lived down there, tons of trucks, tiny lanes, uneven pavement, completely insane. I want to see a self-driving car navigate Manhattan or Brooklyn during the day, normal driving rules do not apply there, New York drivers mean business ;-)
Sure, but the entire 710 just needs to be demolished. They should be moving those containers out of the port on trains, but they've got it backwards. They move the containers out of the port on trucks, to intermodal terminals inland where they get switched to trains. Completely backwards. If they just punched the railroads through all the way to Long Beach then they wouldn't need those trucks on 710 humping boxes to the Inland Empire.
I haven't been there in over 10 years but it was the most direct way by car to get to Long Beach from say downtown Los Angeles. It was strange to see that industrial wasteland along 710. I tried to find a shortcut through there once and ended up on a distant, post-apocalyptic planet ;-)
The promise of self-driving cars is that they will be better and safer drivers than humans. Wouldn't that imply that they would be even now suitable for high-skill, dangerous driving?
That's "the promise", yes, but delivering stuff is very different to promising stuff.
Planes are way ahead of trucks in this regard and could actually fly themselves from origin to destination most of the time, but we still keep a couple of highly-trained pilots sitting there to handle the rest of the cases.
A truck can kill nearly as many people as a plane, depending on its cargo and just how badly it screws up. In more common cases, though, I'm unconvinced by software's ability to figure out the best thing to do when it's travelling down the highway at 100 km/h and it sees something unexpected dash onto the road, with a better error rate than a human brain, which can at least immediately distinguish between humans and deer.
Computers can distinguish between human and deer with 100% accuracy in microseconds. Human brains aren't even close. You might as well compare a sprinter to an F1 car.
