Isegoria

True autonomy is worth almost nothing when it comes to trucks, Stefan Seltz-Axmacher of Starsky Robotics explains:

At Starsky we modeled that our robotrucks could achieve 42% margins even if each had a dedicated remote person paying attention 100% of the time. Those margins would jump to 58% if that remote driver only needed to pay attention for the first and last miles.

True autonomy, on the other hand, would have added less than 2% to our bottom line. Which means that the technological achievement $70b has been invested in over the last decade is worth less to the trucking industry than automatic billing.

The US trucking industry is structured around the systemic shortage of long-haul truck drivers. The 3.5 weeks/mo an over-the-road (OTR) driver is expected to spend in a truck is so miserable that few will do it for even $60k/yr. On the other side, trucking is a highly fragmented commoditized industry, which puts no fleet in the position where they can raise prices sufficiently to afford to pay drivers more. The result is that the market typically has at least 50,000 too few drivers to meet demand.

This shortage defines everything in American trucking — it’s why our trucks have nice comfortable cabs (worse fuel efficiency but better driver retention), it’s why our railroads are so profitable (which is why Warren Buffet buys them), and why our supply chain has even been shaped to minimize how much time trucks need to drive in cities (drivers get paid by mile and hate driving in slow-speed cities).

[...]

$60k/yr isn’t enough to entice over-the-road drivers but it is more than enough to recruit drivers who get to sleep at home.

[...]

Trucking is a business with both high fixed and variable costs. For every dollar that comes in, the best run firms typically spend 75% of it evenly divided between fuel, equipment, and labor. They then spend another 17% or so of administrative overhead per truck before eking out an 8% profit margin.

[...]

American truck drivers are paid only for the miles they haul freight — the hours spent waiting to be loaded or unloaded and taking mandatory breaks are all unpaid. As a result, the $200/day drivers typically earn is really only for the 7 hours/day they move freight and not for the 14 total hours they’re on-duty. This delta is big — it means that the trucking company feels like they pay drivers $28/hr while drivers feel like they only get $14/hr (or $8/hr if you consider the 24 hours/day drivers spend in a truck).

Drivers who aren’t physically in a truck don’t need to lose productivity when the truck stops moving. Rather than twiddling their thumbs at a distribution center the driver could simply switch to a different truck in the fleet which has been loaded and is ready to move. The driver actually cares about earning $200/day — if they earned that by driving for 11 hours (vs being on duty for 14) their hourly rate would increase. The fleet would see their $200 buy them 57% more hours of a truck moving which would drop their labor cost by 30%, bringing it to just 17.5% of gross.

As a result a robotruck which is remotely monitored 100% of the time by a teleoperator who is looking only at that truck while it moves would cut labor cost from 25% of gross to 16.5% and have profit margins of 42.5%.

95% of the hours an OTR truck moves is on the highway. If you were able to eliminate remote supervision for the bulk of those hours you would see per-truck labor cost drop to just 1.75% of gross and profit margin would soar to 58%.

The hardest 1% of the technical problem, automating the surface streets and interchanges, would end up being worth only about $600/truck/yr. Level 4 truck autonomy has less value than a daily coffee.

Beta Technologies is valued at a billion dollars. Its Alia electric aircraft was not designed for passengers:

But Clark designed Alia primarily as a cargo aircraft, betting that a big market will develop for speeding ecommerce to and from suburban warehouses long before air taxis are considered safe to allow over city streets.

“We’re actually going to win at the passenger game because by the time others are doing passenger missions we will have thousands of aircraft, millions of flight hours and a safe, reliable, vetted design,” says the 41-year-old Clark, whose company is based in his hometown of Burlington, Vermont.

Clark is also spooling up what he thinks will be a lucrative second business: charging stations for electric aircraft of all types that he plans to dot around the country to create the aviation equivalent of Tesla’s supercharger network. There are nine up and running already, in a line from Vermont to Arkansas, with another 51 under construction or in the permitting process. Most will contain banks of used batteries from Alia aircraft, removed when their capacity has declined about 8%, giving them a profitable second life while Beta sells Alia owners replacement packs at about a half a million a pop. Equipping the charging stations with battery storage will avoid the need for expensive upgrades to the local power grid: Clark’s plan is for them to fill slowly at off-peak times, while unneeded power can be sold back at peak to utilities.

Beta aims to start delivering UPS’ first 10 aircraft in 2024 — assuming it wins safety certification for Alia by then from the Federal Aviation Administration. If not, the U.S. Air Force could end up fielding Alia first: Beta has won contracts worth $43.6 million to test out Alia for military use. In May, Alia became the first electric aircraft to win airworthiness approval from the Air Force for manned flight.

Beta says Alia’s bulbous cabin will be able to carry 600 pounds of payload, including the pilot, a maximum 250 nautical miles — at least 100 miles farther than any competitors that have prototypes in the air — or up to 1,250 pounds for 200 miles with one of the five battery packs removed. Clark expects FAA reserve requirements to restrict flights to 125 miles.

But given Alia’s high price — roughly double a similarly sized new Cessna Grand Caravan and up to five times the used planes that dominate small cargo fleets — Beta and UPS know Alia will only make economic sense if it flies a lot. That will require a radical reshaping of delivery networks away from the longtime hub and spoke pattern under which cargo planes typically make just one roundtrip per day, funneling packages from a local airport to a sorting center. Instead, they envision Alia flying directly from one UPS warehouse to another — cutting out truck trips as well as plane flights — and eventually straight to large customers. Frequent flying will allow savings as lower operating costs kick in. Beta promises 90% savings on fuel and cheaper maintenance due to the fewer parts of electric propulsion systems — plus a fat 35% reduction if computers eventually bump pilots from the cockpit altogether.

I was expecting cargo drones by now.

In 2010 Fisher Price re-released their Music Box Record Player, in a new version that does not work like the original:

So, starting in 2010 Fisher Price re-released their Music Box Record Player, in a classic-toy version that doesn’t work like the original. I got one, so I’m gonna take it apart pic.twitter.com/DytUrgzlCj

— foone (@Foone) October 29, 2021

The original one was made from 1971-1983, and didn’t require batteries.
You wound up the knob, and a releasing spring would drive the record under the head. pic.twitter.com/uoaI4tSq5C

— foone (@Foone) October 29, 2021

the original discs were a bunch of concentric circles with little indents on them. I’m not 100% sure but I think this basically worked like a standard music box, just with a disc instead of a cylinder pic.twitter.com/Ny764HvCks

— foone (@Foone) October 29, 2021

The first hint it’s 1000% different is the instructions which tell you to put batteries in it.
The original toy did not take batteries: it didn’t need them. pic.twitter.com/bDS18NwNLI

— foone (@Foone) October 29, 2021

So the original had a knob you used to wind the spring, right? But this one shouldn’t need that, it has batteries, so it must be electronic!

Well… Kinda. pic.twitter.com/W4WVEn6Fcb

— foone (@Foone) October 29, 2021

it turns out that knob is still used to wind a spring, which makes the disc spin.
And the spring has to be wound for the music to play, so here it is: pic.twitter.com/YijjUsihiJ

— foone (@Foone) October 29, 2021

So I went and got some duct tape and taped down the disc. It cannot spin at all. I tested by cranking up the spring and yep, no disc spinnage happens. Obviously if the disc can’t spin, there should be no music! pic.twitter.com/70GMObIvJT

— foone (@Foone) October 29, 2021

So first of all, the only smarts in this thing is this one blobbed chip.
This PC is labeled 1697-04, 2020.5.26 Rev:00
This presumably handles detecting which song to play, when to play it, and generates all the audio off some internal ROM pic.twitter.com/wDIpceyk6F

— foone (@Foone) October 30, 2021

This thing is connected to two “is it spinning?” sensors.
First, there’s 3 blobs on the wind-up knob, so the CPU can tell when you’re cranking it up. So it knows to wake up and start playing when that happens.
But how does it know when to stop? pic.twitter.com/jbc32390q0

— foone (@Foone) October 30, 2021

ok so they need a spring that can be wound up, and it can’t go too fast. They’ll need some kind of speed limiter on that, and unlike the ones used in things like toaster ovens, it needs to be relatively silent, and not make a ticking noise.

— foone (@Foone) October 30, 2021

SURPRISE! IT’S A FUCKING MUSIC BOX pic.twitter.com/mIqhLXOJ5V

— foone (@Foone) October 30, 2021

(Hat tip to commenter Chedolf.)

Toyota is poised to put affordability, not range, at the center of its EV play:

“‘Nothing happens until you sell a car’ is an expression we have internally,” he summed. “To have a positive impact on the environment, you must sell a high volume of cars…so it’s really important that the price point is such that we can make an actual business model out of it.”

To that point, Toyota expects that it will be selling millions of electric vehicles by the end of the decade. In September, the automaker announced plans to spend $13.5 billion on battery development through then, with aims of cutting the battery cost per vehicle by 50% versus the bZ4X.

[...]

“The bottom line is, over time we view EV range similar to horsepower,” Ericksen said, comparing it to how almost any customer really wanted 400 horsepower but, at an affordability standpoint, might settle for 120 hp. “People who are affluent and can afford a really expensive vehicle can afford a lot of horsepower.”

“Batteries are expensive, and the bigger you make the battery, the more expensive it is,” Ericksen said. “So the trick, I think long-term is not all about range, range, range; the trick is matching the range and the price point to what the consumer can afford.”

“And as people become more accustomed to operating an EV I think the anxiety over range is going to dissipate,” he continued, saying that many EV shoppers are going to understand they don’t need 300 or 400 miles—and certainly not in a second or third car.

Although we tend to agree that range is a red herring, especially for that second or third car, Toyota will face some headwinds if it dives into the “just enough” category. In a study released earlier this year, J.D. Power found that EVs with more than 200 miles of range had higher levels of satisfaction than those with less. And back in 2017, a comprehensive Autolist survey on minimum range found that only 14.6% of individuals saw 200 miles of range as enough, while the largest group, 38.9%, considered 300 miles of range to be enough. It emphasized, then, that a jump from 250 to 300 miles yielded an increase of 30% more people willing to buy an EV.

Range really is like horsepower.

The Pragmatic Engineer (Gergely Orosz) looks at how Big Tech runs tech projects and ends with the following ideas as food for thought:

• Iterative changes always work better than ‘big bang’ ones. A European tech company struggling with shipping very slowly hired a new VP of Engineering. This person decided to move the whole organization to a NoEstimates method in the first few months of their tenure. They organized a major event, hired a rock band, and unveiled the new way of working. The following weeks and months were chaos, and the organization reverted to doing what it did beforehand.
• It’s more work to teach someone to fish, than it is to catch a fish for them. My approach to project management has been to coach and mentor members of my team to become project leads themselves. It was a lot more work upfront, but resulted in the team delivering more, people growing faster, getting promoted faster, and those people becoming engineering leaders faster than their peers. This approach was one of my best decisions in an empowered environment.
• Directing, mentoring and coaching all have their uses. Directing – telling people exactly how to do something – is micromanaging when they can do it themselves. However, it’s a supportive activity when they can’t. Choose your approaches depending on whether you direct, mentor or coach and give space to people or teams, based on their capabilities as well. Over time, you should be doing little to no directing. But you might need to start with this.
• The fewer people you need to make decisions, the faster you can make them. If an engineer only needs to talk to an engineer to decide, that decision will be faster than if the engineer needs to talk to their project manager, who talks to another project manager, who talks to an engineer, who talks to… you get it.
• Optimizing for reporting is optimizing for a low-trust environment. Reporting at the executive levels is important. However, if you roll out project management methodologies that add heavy processes for the sake of reporting, then you’ll get more process, lower trust, and people gaming whatever reports you’re trying to produce.
• Consultants will be biased to deliver easy-to-measure results because this is the simplest way to prove their value. If the easy-to-measure result is a good goal, this makes consultants a good investment. Just make sure it is a worthwhile goal, and directionally correct.
• Learning from direct competitors is underrated. Understanding what a faster-moving competitor is doing – and experimenting with something similar – is a very smart one. Having a coffee with a peer at a competitor can be a great professional, and networking investment, not to mention one that may inspire you.
• Some of the best engineers would rather quit than be micromanaged, especially when the job market is hot, and it’s so easy to switch jobs. A relevant quote from a response to my survey: “Recently, C-level executives have started to mandate the ways of working for all teams (everyone needs to follow the same methodology). It resulted in a lot of engineers leaving.”