As the title states I want to know how much money will actually be saved utilizing self driving trucks. I couldn't find much info on the topic, but from my quick research it doesn't seem to be too much.
First off, it looks like drivers make on average make $.50 per mile. Given this 200 mile route by Aurora, the total saving per trip is around ~$100. To me, that doesn't seem like a lot in the grand scheme of things due to all the other costs associated with trucking.
- Truck
- The average cost of semi is around 75k + 5-10k in self driving tech (Pulled the 5-10k out of thin air)
- Fuel
- The average mpg of a semi is around 7, the average cost of diesel is ~$3.50/gal, so for the 200 mile route the fuel cost will be around ~$100 (200/7 * 3.5)
- Insurance:
- Yearly insurance cost is around 15k
- This will probably decrease over time, but I imagine at the beginning it's the same, if not higher.
Given all these fixed costs, does saving ~$100 per trip really seem like huge efficiency gains?
I understand that self driving trucks don't need breaks, but they still need to be loaded and unloaded, safety checks before and after each trip, routine maintenance, fueling, and inspections, which makes running them 24hrs impossible.
Is there anything I'm missing?
How much money will actually be saved by self driving trucks?
byu/mike_gundy666 inFuturology
30 Comments
You can be sure that none of the savings would be passed along to the consumer.
Remember that a human employee nets about half or less than half as much as they cost a company. Most trucking companies salivate at the idea of eliminating human drivers.
They’re probably gonna cause so much damage. I don’t believe something that dangerous can be trusted to drive itself anywhere.
The united states has almost 3 million semi-trucks registered. Globally, this number is higher, but I couldn’t find numbers. Lets imagine 10 million globally. $100 savings per day for 10 million trucks is 1 billion dollars per day in savings.
Human drivers need to take breaks. Fully automatic semis could drive 24/7. Also a fully electric drivetrain would cost less to fuel and would require significantly less maintenance.
Being able to have 90%+ uptime is a huge gain over the heavily regulated trucking we have now. This will lead to more, faster, cheaper, and higher volumes of shipping which should reduce costs to the users of these services.
A truck can easily go 200 miles in a day. So, to save 100 dollars a day would be $36,500 a year. Plus, you remove the labor cost of the trucker. So, easily within a year or two these trucks will begin to see their worth.
Lol $75k semi trucks. Dude a new semi truck is $180k+.
No one is gonna retrofit older trucks to self drive when emissions and nothing mission systems reliability are worse on them.
200 Miles at an average speed of 55 miles per hour only represents about 3.6 hours of driving time.
There are more than 3.5mil truck drivers in the U.S alone. Multiply that by an average salary and benefits package; you have a figure in the 100s of billions.
Semi trucks won’t be going unmanned anytime soon. The technology isn’t there and even if it were, there are things drivers do besides drive that an onboard computer can’t do. The first time an autonomous truck plows through a school bus there will be no public support for them. Trucking is regulated by the federal government and I imagine we will see the DOT continue to mirror the FAA. Something along the lines of trucks being required to be driven by a human driver in town, but once on the interstate they will be allowed to switch to autonomous but with the driver still in the seat and supervising the computer just like a pilot on auto-pilot.
A new conventional semi costs between 150-300k. And if you run it nonstop you’re replacing it every year.
It might be 30-50 years before self driving trucks are profitable.
Look at the oil sites in Northern Alberta. They’ve spent hundreds of millions of dollars I’d guess to make their fleets self driving. If those greedy cocksuckers are doing that, it’s defiantly cost effective.
$5-10k seems unrealistically low for self driving tech. Add an extra 0 on to what you pulled out of thin air, and you’ll be in a closer ball park. Now double the insurance, because new tech and expensive vehicles also means higher premiums.
Also there’s another problem. Your $75k example are for used trucks that have 100’s of thousands of miles on them.
Zero. You will be cutting salaries but you’ll have to add the cost of replacing about 800,000 trucks at what? A million a truck.for the new technology.
They’ll definitely have to build some kind of infrastructure across the country to make sure communications are never lost. And if you’re building a dedicated road, you might as well just build an extra rail line to move goods.
Between insurance, fuel savings, energy savings and payroll… lots.
Impossible to tell. For example: picture how many accidents will be prevented. One guy on YouTube just killed 5 people cuz he was on TikTok. Robots have no use for TikTok. It’s unfathomable how helpful self driving trucks (and other vehicles) will be over time.
Don’t kid yourself. They will save a lot. Also, These trucks will be electric so adjust fuel numbers accordingly.
It will have a greater cost to society than benefit, that’s for sure.
It would take upwards of 275 billion dollars off the board annually for truck drivers. Not to mention, prices will go way down, these vehicles don’t require cabs. They can fleet together in a chain and reduce fuel costs through drag alone. Special infrastructure be built for them to haul ass. Possibilities have a high ceiling.
Probably about 1 trillion worth of disruption over 5 years on the trucking sector alone, last mile will get disrupted too. The number 1 job for Americans without a college degree is trucking. Level 5 automation is around the corner.
Self Driving trucks are not likely to happen any time in the near future. While they would alleviate a perpetual driver shortage, people are not comfortable with self-driving cars so there is no reason to believe anyone would be comfortable with an automated 80,000 truck rolling down the road.
However, truck drivers are not as underpaid as you might think. That number might be accurate on a short-trip or local CDL driver but most FTL and LTL drivers make significantly more on a per mile basis if they’re not already salaried (which much of industry now does as they move to the regional routes 4 or 5 on 3 or 2 off model)
everyone seems to gloss over maintenance and the inconsistencies in the roads infrastructure and the inherent flaws in the tech.
corpos are pushing self driving out the door too hard, and more so now that we’re entering a time where infrastructure spending is going to plummet
This is a really good article about the potential market. In the USA looks like around $180 some billion estimated
https://www.mckinsey.com/industries/automotive-and-assembly/our-insights/will-autonomy-usher-in-the-future-of-truck-freight-transportation
Even if your 100$ evaluation is correct, which I don’t think it is…
Let’s say the average truck driver makes 3 “trips” a week
Let’s say they work 40 weeks a year
100 x 3 x 40 = 12k saved
Now let’s say your a larger shipping company and you employ 5000 truckers (about 0.15% of the total truckers on the US) – that nets you a yearly savings of $60M… So Yea, it’s worth it. Collectively the entire US shipping industry would save $42B a year.
Well you can’t just calculate the cost of a new Semi-Truck with the potential new tech and licenses against a truck with a person.
A truck driver has responsibilities above just driving from a to b.
Facilities would have to accommodate those trucks in both operation times and infrastructure. A autonomous truck can theoretically run 24/7 the facilities would need to do the same. Picking up fuel, inspections of cargo security, obvious damages etc. Are also things such a truck would need to be able to do automous. Which I think is unlikely as one could create solutions for that on paper, it would be just very very expensive
Human drivers take breaks…spend evenings at strip clubs drinking and snorting stuff. Then they hop in the cab the next morning an hr late and have to make up lost time while semi enebriated. Find me a self driving truck that does the same.
Aside from all my evil allegations, self driving trucks will not have any of the human elements that delay and impair driving. It will have it’s own set of issues
not much at all once people realise you can manipulate their systems into crashing or stopping then having a field day looting them like they’re a golden chest in borderlands 2
Full self driving won’t work no matter how much Elon gasses up the investors. Are you going to tell me that all its sensors would work just fine during the snowstorm we just had in Ontario and Quebec last week. Or with now invisible road lines and icy weather. These trucks are going to navigate narrow city streets with tram lines and tall buildings? No chance
They will only work hub to hub on highways away from busy city highways, still going to need regional drivers and trucks. So how much you saving really
I somewhat agree, the areas that would best be serviced by self driving trucks are also the areas where the cost of trucking labour is already the most depressed, The closer you work to a city the worse the trucking rates are, the more remote you work the better it gets and I don’t see self driving trucks chaining themselves up or navigating sketchy lease roads any time soon. But any time you can replace a perpetual expense with a single fixed one it’s worth doing.
Human drivers make fifty cents per mile. Self-driving software makes zero cents per mile. According to [Economics and Industry Data | American Trucking Associations](https://www.trucking.org/economics-and-industry-data), trucks drove 526 billion miles in 2022. Cutting the cost by 50 cents per mile is a savings of $263 billion dollars. That’s definitely worth it!
yeh most truckers dont go 200 miles a day bucko.
lets look yearly…
“Mileage: 331.27 billion miles traveled by single-unit and combination trucks in 2022.”
so 150 billion dollars a year in savings for trucking companies