The only flaw I see with beginning with semi-trucks is the perception of driverless cars to the masses and the potential damage a driverless semi-truck accident could incur vs a driverless Prius or something smaller. Not saying there won't be a market for it in the trucking business, but seems smart to start on the smaller cars just for the sake of perceived safety.
Exactly what I thought. There is an awful lot of damage a semi-truck can do if things go wrong. But, then I realized, that there is not necessarily a need for the "trucks" to be big. Maybe you could go the Roomba route, and make them much smaller than traditional trucks, maybe even smaller than conventional cars. Since no driver is needed, you can scale out with many of them, rather than having one very large truck. Maybe that approach does not work for everything, but somehow I think having a large bunch of cargo ants is much less risky than a single very large cargo elephant.
There's a lot of cost in the mechanics of the truck and the fuel which make full-sized trucks more economical. Not to mention the convenience of not having to load and unload lots of small deliveries. I would be very surprised if self-driving mini-trucks were anywhere near economically competitive with human-driven semis.
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The only flaw I see with beginning with semi-trucks is the perception of driverless cars to the masses and the potential damage a driverless semi-truck accident could incur vs a driverless Prius or something smaller. Not saying there won't be a market for it in the trucking business, but seems smart to start on the smaller cars just for the sake of perceived safety.
Exactly what I thought. There is an awful lot of damage a semi-truck can do if things go wrong. But, then I realized, that there is not necessarily a need for the "trucks" to be big. Maybe you could go the Roomba route, and make them much smaller than traditional trucks, maybe even smaller than conventional cars. Since no driver is needed, you can scale out with many of them, rather than having one very large truck. Maybe that approach does not work for everything, but somehow I think having a large bunch of cargo ants is much less risky than a single very large cargo elephant.
If the trucks are small, they're no longer compatible with standard-sized shipping containers, which would throw up a significant barrier to adoption.
There's a lot of cost in the mechanics of the truck and the fuel which make full-sized trucks more economical. Not to mention the convenience of not having to load and unload lots of small deliveries. I would be very surprised if self-driving mini-trucks were anywhere near economically competitive with human-driven semis.