Distance between Dallas and Houston is ~240 miles. So, something like ~4-5 times? Apart from this statement all other info in article looks like marketing.
The company’s Class 8 trucks are now making customer deliveries between Dallas and Houston, having already completed 1,200 miles “without a driver,” Aurora said.
Distance between Dallas and Houston is ~240 miles. So, something like ~4-5 times? Apart from this statement all other info in article looks like marketing.
To be fair, driving that route without an accident is only slightly less impressive than the Dallas to San Antonio route. You want a training ground with high speeds, bad poorly marked roads, and...
To be fair, driving that route without an accident is only slightly less impressive than the Dallas to San Antonio route. You want a training ground with high speeds, bad poorly marked roads, and worse, more distracted drivers, and I can't think of many in the US.
It'd be like training for an intermural league at the Red Sox training camp.
I'm cautiously optimistic. Obviously right now it's just one truck, and even if Aurora takes off, it'll probably be a long time before I ever "interact" with an autonomous semi on the highway. I...
I'm cautiously optimistic.
Obviously right now it's just one truck, and even if Aurora takes off, it'll probably be a long time before I ever "interact" with an autonomous semi on the highway.
I say "I'm cautiously optimistic" though because Texas cities, Houston especially, have got to be some of the most "baptism by fire" places for a company like Aurora to send its trucks. The roads are atrocious, the drivers even worse. I don't see much potential for a robo-semi to exacerbate the situation. What's it going to do? Speed 15 over the limit and plow into a bunch of cars? Swerve too hard and dump a six-ton rolling death-spool down the highway? Yawn.
Stuff like that happens all the time in Houston. The city teeters on the edge of post-apocalypse-highway-shutdown every day.
Hm. Maybe that's exactly why Aurora chose those routes.
...i learned to drive in houston fourty years ago; when i saw the road warrior i just figured that's how everyone drives everywhere...when i made my first road trip a couple of years later, i saw...
...i learned to drive in houston fourty years ago; when i saw the road warrior i just figured that's how everyone drives everywhere...when i made my first road trip a couple of years later, i saw a 'keep right except to pass' sign on a country highway and thought to myself: what a great idea, they should use that rule everywhere!..
(we were not taught slower-traffic-keep-right at sears driving school, just a use-your-signals-if-you-can defensive free-for-all)
I had someone near Houston flash their beams at me repeatedly because I wouldn’t go 80 mph on a highway at night that was under construction down to a single lane lined with concrete barriers.
I had someone near Houston flash their beams at me repeatedly because I wouldn’t go 80 mph on a highway at night that was under construction down to a single lane lined with concrete barriers.
They describe it as highway driving, but the couple of articles I found don't address how the trucks get to the highway, or between the highway and their destination. How tightly connected to an...
They describe it as highway driving, but the couple of articles I found don't address how the trucks get to the highway, or between the highway and their destination. How tightly connected to an on and off ramp does a sending or receiving warehouse need to be for this to work?
The plan a few years ago was to have a depot near the highway on each end, and they hand off the trailers to human drivers for the "last mile". Since the article is pretty vague on what customer...
The plan a few years ago was to have a depot near the highway on each end, and they hand off the trailers to human drivers for the "last mile". Since the article is pretty vague on what customer loads means, my guess would be that it's still something like this.
They could also be picking customers with "easy" routes, like going between distribution centers (which is still basically depot to depot). But I think they would claim something like "door to door" as a victory if they were doing so.
Urmson said the decision to move an "observer" from the rear of the cab into the driver's seat was made at the request of Paccar, the manufacturer of Aurora-owned Peterbilt trucks. [..,] Paccar wanted someone in the driver's seat "because of certain prototype parts in their base vehicle platform," Urmson wrote, without elaborating.
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Per Aurora, observers had already been riding along in the back of the cab during trips expected to run into bad weather.
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A short-seller's report by Bleecker Street Research, dated May 14, suggested Aurora and Paccar weren't on the same page about the timing of the "driver-out" commercial launch.
Indeed, the Peterbilt logo had been removed or covered in photos Aurora provided to mark the April 27 launch.
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Aurora stock is down nearly 25% in the last five trading sessions, following Anderson's departure and the Bleecker report, though it's still up more than 120% over the last year.
Distance between Dallas and Houston is ~240 miles. So, something like ~4-5 times? Apart from this statement all other info in article looks like marketing.
To be fair, driving that route without an accident is only slightly less impressive than the Dallas to San Antonio route. You want a training ground with high speeds, bad poorly marked roads, and worse, more distracted drivers, and I can't think of many in the US.
It'd be like training for an intermural league at the Red Sox training camp.
According to other articles, it’s just one truck for now. So, still far from economically meaningful, but it’s a start.
I'm cautiously optimistic.
Obviously right now it's just one truck, and even if Aurora takes off, it'll probably be a long time before I ever "interact" with an autonomous semi on the highway.
I say "I'm cautiously optimistic" though because Texas cities, Houston especially, have got to be some of the most "baptism by fire" places for a company like Aurora to send its trucks. The roads are atrocious, the drivers even worse. I don't see much potential for a robo-semi to exacerbate the situation. What's it going to do? Speed 15 over the limit and plow into a bunch of cars? Swerve too hard and dump a six-ton rolling death-spool down the highway? Yawn.
Stuff like that happens all the time in Houston. The city teeters on the edge of post-apocalypse-highway-shutdown every day.
Hm. Maybe that's exactly why Aurora chose those routes.
...i learned to drive in houston fourty years ago; when i saw the road warrior i just figured that's how everyone drives everywhere...when i made my first road trip a couple of years later, i saw a 'keep right except to pass' sign on a country highway and thought to myself: what a great idea, they should use that rule everywhere!..
(we were not taught slower-traffic-keep-right at sears driving school, just a use-your-signals-if-you-can defensive free-for-all)
I had someone near Houston flash their beams at me repeatedly because I wouldn’t go 80 mph on a highway at night that was under construction down to a single lane lined with concrete barriers.
They describe it as highway driving, but the couple of articles I found don't address how the trucks get to the highway, or between the highway and their destination. How tightly connected to an on and off ramp does a sending or receiving warehouse need to be for this to work?
The plan a few years ago was to have a depot near the highway on each end, and they hand off the trailers to human drivers for the "last mile". Since the article is pretty vague on what customer loads means, my guess would be that it's still something like this.
They could also be picking customers with "easy" routes, like going between distribution centers (which is still basically depot to depot). But I think they would claim something like "door to door" as a victory if they were doing so.
Aurora's driverless trucks have a human observer behind the wheel again (Axios)
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