Where have you been since March 2020?

Also, there will be the costs for salespeople who develop new customer relationships and maintain existing ones.

That’s not high. Administrative overhead mainly means dispatchers, schedulers, and the guys who handle getting the equipment fixed. Then you have to comply with legal, regulatory, tax, and safety rules. Running a truck company isn’t for the faint of heart.

I make a good prediction, not even a guess, that a couple of baby pics run over by Robo-Truck as it pulls over to the side of the road will ‘erode margins.’

As usual the problem is these damn people are in the way, if there were just less of them we could automate everything!

It’s like Ireland in the mid-19th century; the problem was solved by replacing difficult people with literal sheep. Sheep you know are extremely low-maintenance, high-profit and will absolutely follow commands promptly [seriously, I've seen sheep formations manoeuvre with a precision that would make Sergeant Majors weep with envy].

If we could only perhaps CRISPR sheep docility into Homo sapiens we’d have a winning and high-margin design. I’m sure someone’s working on it now…

They are walking the fine line between “this technology isn’t needed” and “we cannot make it work therefore this technology isn’t needed”.

The likes of Walmart and Amazon can probably dictate to their suppliers what technology to use, the rest of the industry not so much. On the other hand, online brokerage of freight through various apps is a competitive market and will eventually lead to standardization of electronic processes.

Be sure to also read their last post, including their comment on the technology S-curve: https://medium.com/starsky-robotics-blog/the-end-of-starsky-robotics-acb8a6a8a5f5

It was a shame that Starsky couldn’t get the dough to keep plugging. Odd, too, when you think about negative yields being so popular these days. And it’s wonderful that they are, engineer-like, putting out information about their experience. Let the whole world do the postmortem!

Remote-operating seems like something that will make a lot of little changes, that, over time and in sum, will be serious world-changers. Imagine roofing and garbage pickup mostly by remote operation.

So, about 25% of what the customer pays goes to the driver in the truck.

“They then spend another 17% or so of administrative overhead per truck”

And then the trucking company spends about 2/3 of what they pay to the driver for someone else back in an office to do “administrative overhead” — which seems rather high. There is obvious room for improvement there — perhaps that is where software could really help?

A Central Planner would see a great opportunity here to invest in expanding railroad capacity for long haul freight, which would also get a lot of trucks off inter-city freeways, reduce the need for expansion & maintenance of those roads, and make life more tolerable for drivers. It is unfortunate that Central Planning does not work.

In the case of trucking, I guess the truck could pull itself off the side of the road..*if* there is room to do so…and wait for communications to return. But the article mentions ‘interchanges’ as one of the conditions in which remote-manual help will be necessary…implies that the remote person will have to give the truck turn-by-turn guidance…so what happens if the truck is in the middle of a complex interchange when lost comms happens? I guess the best approach would be to get off *somewhere*, pull off *when possible*, and wait for comms to return.