Good news... dreaming of BEV Class A

JRscooby wrote:

Yosemite Sam1 wrote:

JRscooby wrote:

Well, this is true now. But drivers like all workers, are a expense, to the owners of the US government. And the last few years shows that rules that should protect all can be changed if the money thinks it has a better chance to breed without the rule...

The pattern, though now exactly analogous, must be the modern airplanes.

It can land and take off on it's own and glide via auto-pilot but still got an engineer, navigator and multi-redundant pilots on board.

Not sure, but I think the crew requirements might be less for planes hauling freight? Driver-less cars have been approved for passenger use in some areas. All my life the trucking companies have talked about how hard it is to get and keep good drivers. Of course, if the shippers and receivers treat drivers like something that needs scraped off their shoe...
I do know the crew required on trains has been reduced to the point accidents have happened...

Many/most modern airliners only need a pilot and co-pilot; a separate navigator, flight engineer, radio operator, etc. are obsolete, or at least becoming so. On longer flights additional flight crew are required due to work time and rest break regulations (and plain common sense).

Of the major transportation systems to be fully automated, trains would seem to me to be the most straightforward. The steering is already automated, so it's only speed control--and, with that, collision avoidance--that is required of the crew; and the speed cannot be changed any too quickly due to physics. There are plenty of fully automated small-scale and medium-scale train systems in operation carrying passengers already, such as for instance the Dubai metro.

At any rate, there's no real requirement for a driverless truck to be an electric truck; it's not really a more complicated problem for a computer to control an engine and transmission and braking system with a gas or diesel engine than it is for an electric motor. Indeed current engines are almost universally computer controlled already, as are modern automatic transmissions, and braking systems partly computer controlled with ABS and stability control systems. The much trickier problem to sort out is how to reliably navigate and interact with other vehicles and drivers on the road system, which is not really designed for automated/driverless vehicles.