Comment by cma
2 days ago
> they won't even invest in electric trucks with drivers.
Do any of these make sense economically right now? The Tesla one is mainly being piloted hauling potato chips for Pepsico because they are so light weight. Few of the Tesla Semi numbers from the presentation seemed to come true (and the part about having autonomous follower convoys working in ~2017...), and you had the guy from Nikola rolling it down a hill and needing a presidential pardon.
People only hear about the tech companies' efforts, but actually Volvo, Peterbilt, and Freightliner have had EV models for a while now. Tesla's truck sucks but the others don't because they're built on established platforms (though their range is ~250mi). At the end of the day the trucks are way too expensive and there's no charger locations for them.
tl;dr no it's not economically viable right now, but my point is that it's an extra expense, and self-driving is more complicated/fraught than even an EV truck. trucking companies want either a very easy cost savings, or stick to what they know. (to give you an idea of this: many companies still use paper and pencil to manage driver schedules/routes)