YouSaid · the spoken record

Steve Viscelli

lines on the record: 185
first: 2021-11-03
most recent: 2021-11-03
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“Yeah, I mean, in a sense, it's platooning, but and I, and in fairness, right, as I pitch that idea or sort of ran that idea by the computer scientists and engineers that I would and product managers that I would talk to, they would say we thought about that, but that following truck, it's not that simple. You know, that thing basically we had to engineer that to be capable of independent self-driving because what if there was a cut in or any number of scenarios in which it lost that connection to the lead truck for whatever reason? Now, I mean, I don't know.”
2021-11-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #237 – Steve Viscelli: Trucking and the Decline of the American Dream · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So that DOT DOL process starts to happen. And I get to the workshop and a friend was sitting at the table next to me and he holds up the scenarios that they're going to have us discuss at this workshop. And he's like, hey, these look really familiar. you know, scenarios from the report, but there were only five. Instead of six”
2021-11-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #237 – Steve Viscelli: Trucking and the Decline of the American Dream · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Their decisions are more important. They're managing a more complex system, right? They're probably going to have to have some global understanding of how to environments in which it can operate safely. Right now, we're talking upskilling, right? And so, you know, the GAO sort of writes up these different scenarios. And the idea is that it's going to prepare for this Department of Transportation, Department of Labor set of processes to engage stakeholders and sort of get industry perspectives and then do a study on the labor impacts.”
2021-11-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #237 – Steve Viscelli: Trucking and the Decline of the American Dream · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“In, I guess, 2017, Jack Reed, and Susan Collins requested from the Senate requested research on what the impacts of self-driving trucks would be. And the first stage of that was for the GAO to Do a report sort of looking at the lay of the land, talking to some experts. And I was working on my 2018 report, help contribute to that GAO report. And I had the sixth scenarios, right? I'm like, okay, here's what Starsky's doing, you know, here's what embark and Uber are doing. Here's what Waymo might be doing. Nobody really knows, right? Here's what Peloton's doing, here's the autopilot scenario. And then here's this one that I think actually could be good for drivers. So now you've got that driver who's got two times the freight.”
2021-11-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #237 – Steve Viscelli: Trucking and the Decline of the American Dream · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I said, why don't you? Then that following truck takes direction from the front, it uses the rear of the trailer as a reference point. It maintains the lane. You've got cooperative adaptive cruise control that you double the productivity of that driver. You solve that problem that I hated in my urban truck ports thing about the bridge weight. Because when you get to the bridges, the two trucks can just spread out just enough to make the bridge weight, right? And you can just program that in. And they're 50 feet further apart, 100 feet further apart. So interesting, sort of, I think, story about this that leads to kind of, I think, the policy questions.”
2021-11-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #237 – Steve Viscelli: Trucking and the Decline of the American Dream · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Put them together and you go. That's a massive productivity gain, right? Because you're hauling two, three times as much freight. So the positive scenario that I threw out in 2018 was why not have a human-driven truck with a self-driving truck that follows it, right? Just a drone unit. And it was to me, this seemed as a non-computer scientist, a sociologist. This made a lot of sense because when I got done talking to the, you know, the computer scientists and the engineers, they were like, well, it's like object recognition, decision making, algorithm, all this stuff. It's like, all right, so why don't you leave the human brain in the lead vehicle, right? You got all that processing. And then all that following now, again, this is sort of me being a layperson.”
2021-11-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #237 – Steve Viscelli: Trucking and the Decline of the American Dream · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And so if you look at those really good jobs, the most likely way that you as a passenger car driver would know that it's one of those drivers is that there are multiple trailers, right? So you see these like maybe it's three small trailers. Maybe it's two sort of medium-sized trailers. Some places you might even see two really big trailers together. You do that because labor is expensive, right? And it's highly skilled. And so you use it efficiently and you say, all right, you know, rather than having you haul that little trailer out of the ports, you know, that sort of half size container, we're going to wait till we get three or we're going to coordinate the movement so that they're three ready. You go do what truckers call make a set.”
2021-11-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #237 – Steve Viscelli: Trucking and the Decline of the American Dream · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Hours a day, the driver's doing other kinds of work that you know is not driving, and then the rest of the day, they're basically living out of the truck. You really can't find a more inefficient use of an asset than that, right? Now, a big part of that is we pay for the roads and we pay for the rest areas and all this other stuff. So, the way that I work and the way that I think about these problems is I try to find analogies, right? Sort of labor processes and things that make economic sense that seem in the same area of the economy, but have some different characteristics for workers, right? And sort of try to figure out why does the economics work there?”
2021-11-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #237 – Steve Viscelli: Trucking and the Decline of the American Dream · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Wasn't confusing for me after having talked to truckers again, who trucking is a job of last resort. These are people who've already lost that manufacturing job oftentimes, already lost that construction job to just aging, right? So what can we do? What's sort of the positive vision? Because we've got tons of highway deaths. We've got, and just the big picture is, and this is the opportunity, I guess, for investors. It's a hugely inefficient system. So we buy this truck. There's this low-wage worker in it oftentimes. And again, I'm setting aside those really good line haul jobs in LTL. Those are a different case. That low-wage worker is driving a truck that they might, the wheels might roll seven to eight hours a day. That's what the truck is designed to do, and that's what makes the money for the company.”
2021-11-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #237 – Steve Viscelli: Trucking and the Decline of the American Dream · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah. I mean, we've just lived that for four and a half years of probably elites. Let me just go out on a limb and say, not understanding the sort of emotional and psychological currents of a large portion of the population, right?”
2021-11-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #237 – Steve Viscelli: Trucking and the Decline of the American Dream · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes. Yes. Dear PhD in economics, I know that higher skilled jobs are created by technological advancement, right? I mean, there are big questions about how many. Of them, right? So the idea that we would create more expensive labor positions with a new technology, right? You better check your business plan if your idea is to take a bunch of low wage labor and replace it with the same amount of high wage labor, right? So there's a question about how many of those jobs. And there's the really important social and political question of are they the same people, right? And do they live in the same places? And I think that kind of geography is a huge issue here with the impacts, right? Lots of rural workers. Interesting politically, lots of red state workers, right? Lots of blue state, maybe union folks who are going to try to slow autonomy and lots of red state representatives in the house maybe who want to stand up for their trucker constituents. So just to defend myself. Yeah. And to elaborate.”
2021-11-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #237 – Steve Viscelli: Trucking and the Decline of the American Dream · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“If I can replace them with a $35,000 worker when I'm competing with maybe a low wage retail employer rather than some other more expensive employers for skilled blue-collar workers, I'm going to do that. And that's just what we do. And so I think. Those are the bigger questions around this technology, right? Our workers are going to get screwed by this, like, yeah, most likely. That's what we do.”
2021-11-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #237 – Steve Viscelli: Trucking and the Decline of the American Dream · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So I'm a sociologist, right? So I'm going to think about what's the structure behind that that creates that pain. And it's ownership. We don't call it capitalism for nothing. What capitalists do is they figure out cheaper, more efficient ways to do stuff and they use technology to do that oftentimes, right? This is the remarkable history of the last couple centuries and all the productivity gains is people who were in a competitive market saying if I have to do it, right? I don't have a choice because like my competitor over there is going to eat my lunch if I'm not on my game. I don't have a choice. I've got to invest in this technology to, you know, make it more efficient, to make it cheaper. And what do you look for? You look for oftentimes you look for labor costs, right? You look for high value labor. If I can take 100, you know, a lot of these truck drivers make good money, $100,000, good benefits, vacation, you know, retirement.”
2021-11-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #237 – Steve Viscelli: Trucking and the Decline of the American Dream · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Send someone to the funeral. There's a big check involved, don't be that. We don't want to go to your funeral and you don't want to be the person who caused that funeral So they just write that off. That's just part of the business model. Now, forward collision avoidance. Basically eliminate the vast majority of those accidents. That's what the value of a really expensive conscientious driver is based on. They don't run over minivans. So, as soon as you have that forward collision avoidance, what's going to happen to the wages of those drivers?”
2021-11-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #237 – Steve Viscelli: Trucking and the Decline of the American Dream · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Right, and how I was describing those long haul segments where the driver just keeps out of the situations that could become problematic. I mean, they take the job seriously and they're safe. And you can give somebody a skills test, right? As a CDL examiner, you could take them out and say, all right, I need you to go around these cones and like drive safely through this school zone. But what really proves that you're a safe driver is two years without an accident, right? Because that means that day after day, hour after hour, mile after mile, you did the right thing, right? And not when it was like, oh, some situations emerging, but just consistently over time kept yourself out of accident situations. And you can see this with drivers who are, you know, a million or two million safe miles. The value of those drivers for Walmart is they don't run over minivans. The company I work for, they ran over minivans on a regular basis. So, you know, when I was trained, they said, we kill 20 people a year.”
2021-11-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #237 – Steve Viscelli: Trucking and the Decline of the American Dream · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There's some important things happening right now with the remaining good jobs. So, what you're really paying for when you get a good truck driver is, you know, like I said, you get those kind of local skills of like backing and congested traffic, those it's really impressive to watch and there's some value on it certainly, but it's relatively low value in the actual driving technique, right? So you bump something back and into the dock. It's, you know, it might be a couple thousand dollars because you ruin a canopy or something over a dock or tear up a trailer. What you really want those highly skilled, conscientious drivers. And that's really what it is. And that's what computers are really good at is about being conscientious, right? In the sense of like they pay attention continually.”
2021-11-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #237 – Steve Viscelli: Trucking and the Decline of the American Dream · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Oh, no, so I'll get to that. But one more thing because this is not stopping, right? And this is another interesting question about the sort of automation. And I think Uber is an interesting example here, right? Where it's like, okay, if we had self-driving trucks or a self-driving cars, right, we could automate what used to be taxi service. There's a whole bunch of stuff that's already been automated, like the dispatching. So the dispatchers are already out of work in Rideshare. And the payment is already automated, right? So you have to automate steps like this. So you have to have that initial link to dispatch the truck. You have to have the automated mapping. So we're sort of done all this incremental automation, right, that could make the truck completely driverless.”
2021-11-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #237 – Steve Viscelli: Trucking and the Decline of the American Dream · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Know because I'm tired, you know, like I didn't sleep well. I've got to get a couple more hours. They're only going to accept that so many times, or at least some of those dispatchers are. So all this technology has made the job sort of, you know, desked the job, you know, hurt drivers in the labor market, made the work worse. So I think the burden is really on the technologists who are like, oh, this will make truck driver jobs better and sort of envision ways that it would. It's like The burden's really a proof is really on you to sort of really clearly lay out what that is going to look like because it's 30 or 40 years of history suggests that technology into labor markets where workers are really weak and cheap is what wins that new technology doesn't help workers or raise their wages.”
2021-11-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #237 – Steve Viscelli: Trucking and the Decline of the American Dream · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Now today, you know, 15 years later, truck drivers don't have to do any of that. You don't have to shift the truck. You don't have to map. You can figure out the least congested route to go on and your hours of service are recorded or a good portion of them are reported automatically. All of that has been a substantial desk on wages and allowed companies to kind of speed up, monitor, and direct, I mean, the key technology that I did work under is satellite-linked computers. So before you could kind of go out and plan your own work, and the boss really couldn't see what you were doing and push you and say, you know, you bet on break for 10 hours, why aren't you moving? And you might tell them.”
2021-11-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #237 – Steve Viscelli: Trucking and the Decline of the American Dream · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And you had to log those hours manually and sort of do the math and plan your work routine. And I would do this every day. I'd say like, okay, I'm going to get up at five. I got to think about Buffalo and there's traffic there. So I want to be through Buffalo by 630. And then that'll put me in Cleveland at 930, which means I'll miss that rush hour, right? Which is going to put me in Chicago. And so you do this.”
2021-11-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #237 – Steve Viscelli: Trucking and the Decline of the American Dream · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Which is a big deal. You take these trucks on the wrong road and you're destroying a bridge or you're doing a can opener, which is where you try to drive it under a bridge too low. You've probably seen that on YouTube. If not, check it out, truck can opener. There's some bridges that are famous for it, right? And there's one, I think, called the can opener. You can find on YouTube.”
2021-11-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #237 – Steve Viscelli: Trucking and the Decline of the American Dream · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That would mean that they're on duty according to the way that the current rules are written. They have some responsibility. And part of that is, you know, we need them to get rest, right? They need to have uninterrupted sleep. So that's what I call autopilot. The final scenario is one that I thought was actually the one scenario that was good for labor, you know, which I proposed because I was like, well, here's an idea that would be like actually good for workers. And just another brief aside here. The history of trucking over the last, you know, 40 years, there's been a lot of technological change. So when I learned to drive the truck, I had to learn to manually shift it like I was describing. You had to read these fairly complicated, you know, big sets of laminated maps to figure out where the truck can go and where it couldn't.”
2021-11-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #237 – Steve Viscelli: Trucking and the Decline of the American Dream · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, and this gets to the really weedy policy questions, right? So basically for the Department of Transportation for you to be off duty for safety reasons, you have to be completely relieved of all responsibility. So that truck has to not encounter a construction site or inclement weather or whatever it might be and call to you and say, hey, obviously, right, we're imagining connected vehicles as well, right? So you're in a self-driving truck, you're in the back and trucks 20 miles ahead experience some problem, right, that may require teleoperation or whatever it is, right? And it signals to your truck, hey, you know, tell the driver 20 miles ahead, he's got to hop in the seat.”
2021-11-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #237 – Steve Viscelli: Trucking and the Decline of the American Dream · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The other thing you could do is to say, all right, I've got a truck that can drive itself. And I refer to this one as autopilot. But you have a human drive it out to the interstate, but rather than have that transaction where the human-driven truck detaches the trailer and it gets coupled up to a self-driving truck, they just that human driver just hops on the interstate with that truck and goes and back and goes off duty while the truck drives itself. And so you have a self-driving truck that's not driverless, right?”
2021-11-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #237 – Steve Viscelli: Trucking and the Decline of the American Dream · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Most folks are focused on another scenario, which is the exit to exit, right? Which looks like that urban truck ports thing that I laid out earlier. So you have a human-driven truck that comes out to a drop lot. It meets up with an autonomous truck. That truck then drives it on the interstate to another lot and then a human driver Know, picks it up. There are a couple variations maybe on that. Let me just run through the last two scenarios.”
2021-11-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #237 – Steve Viscelli: Trucking and the Decline of the American Dream · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, and those because that labor is expensive, they don't keep those drivers out overnight, those drivers do a run back and forth typically or in a team go back and forth in one day.”
2021-11-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #237 – Steve Viscelli: Trucking and the Decline of the American Dream · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, so I mean, the most obvious one actually is just facility to facility, right? It can't go everywhere, but a lot of logistics facilities are very close to interstates and they're on big commercial roads without bikes and parked cars and all that stuff. And some of the jobs that I think are really first on the chopping block are these LTL that less than truckload what's called line haul, right? So these are the drivers who go from terminal to terminal with those full trailers. And those facilities are often located strategically to avoid congestion and to be in big industrial facilities. So you could imagine that being the first place you see a Waymo self-driving truck roll out might be sort of direct facility to facility for UPS or FedEx. Less than truckload care.”
2021-11-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #237 – Steve Viscelli: Trucking and the Decline of the American Dream · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Who's going to lose and what we do about it, and whether or not there are opportunities there that maybe we need to put our thumb on the scale a little bit to make sure that there's some give back to the community that's taking the hit. So for instance, if there were teleoperation centers, maybe they go in these communities that we disproportionately source truck drivers from today. Now, I mean, what does that mean? It may not be the cheapest place to do it if they don't have great connectivity. And it may not be where the upper lever managers want to be at places like that, issues like that, right? So I do think it's an interesting question, both from sort of a practical scenario situation of how it's going to work, but also from a policy perspective.”
2021-11-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #237 – Steve Viscelli: Trucking and the Decline of the American Dream · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah. Yeah. So, I mean, I think there are, and we just applied for an NSF, we didn't get. Anybody's watching. But with some folks from Wisconsin who do teleoperation, right? And, you know, some of this is used for like rovers and, you know, I mean, really, you know, high stakes, difficult problems. But one of the things we wanted to study were these mines and these Rio Tinto mines in Australia where they remotely pilot the trucks. And there's some autonomy, I guess, but it's overseen by a remote operator. And they're near Perth and it's quite remote. And they retrained the truck drivers to be the remote operators, right? There's autonomy in the port of Rotterdam and places like that where there are jobs there. And so I think, you know, and maybe we'll get to this later, but there's a real policy question about sort of.”
2021-11-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #237 – Steve Viscelli: Trucking and the Decline of the American Dream · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Good, you have it crash, but now you got a truck stranded on the side of the road. You're going to send out somebody to like calibrate things and check out what's going on. That sounds like expensive labor. It sounds like downtime. It sounds like the kind of things that shippers don't like to happen to their freight, you know, in a just-in-time world. And so wouldn't it be great if you could just sort of, you know, loop your way into the controls of that truck and say, all right, we've got a sensor out says that the tire's bad, but I can see visually from the camera looks fine. I'm going to drive it to our next depot, you know, maybe the next rider or Pensky location, right? Sort of all these service locations around and have a technician take a look at it. So teleoperation often gets this dismissive commentary from other folks working on other scenarios. But I think it's potentially more relevant than...”
2021-11-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #237 – Steve Viscelli: Trucking and the Decline of the American Dream · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Pull themselves off to the side of the road and say, I've got a sensor fault, I'm pulling over, you know, or maybe there's some level of critical safety critical faults or whatever it might be. So that suggests that there might be a role for teleoperation, even with self-driving. And I push people on it in the conversations. They all are like, yeah, we kind of have that on the like bottom of the list, figure out how to rescue truck. It's like on the to-do list, right? After solving the self-driving, you know, question is like, yeah, what do we do with the problems, right? I mean, now we could imagine like, all right, we have some, you know, protocol that the truck is not, you know,”
2021-11-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #237 – Steve Viscelli: Trucking and the Decline of the American Dream · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Edge, right? Computer science. So on the Tally operation question, I think this is Is a more interesting one than people would like to sort of let on, I think, publicly. Going to be problems, right? And this is one of the complexities of sort of putting these things out in the world. And if you see the real world of trucking, you realize, wow, it's rough. There are dirt lots. There's gravel. There's salt and ice and cold weather and there's equipment that just gets left out in the middle of nowhere and the brakes don't get maintained and somebody was supposed to service something and they didn't, you know. And so you imagine, okay, we've got this vehicle that can drive itself, which is going to require a whole lot of sensors to tell it that like the doors are still closed and the trailer's still hooked up and each of the tires has adequate pressure. And, you know, any number of probably hundreds of sensors that are going to be sort of relaying information. And one of them, after 500,000 miles or whatever, goes out. Now, do we have some fleet of technicians sort of continually cruising the highways and sort of servicing these things as they do what?”
2021-11-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #237 – Steve Viscelli: Trucking and the Decline of the American Dream · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, let me follow up on that question of how hard driving is because this becomes a big question for researchers who are thinking about labor market impacts, right? Because we start from a perspective of what's hard or easy for humans. And so if you were to look at truck driving prior to a lot, I mean, this has been a lot of thinking and debate in academic research circles around sort of how you estimate labor impacts, right? What these models look like. And a lot of it is about how automatable is a job. Object recognition, really easy for people, right? Really hard for computers. And so there's a whole bunch of things that truck drivers do that we see as super easy and as it would have been characterized 10 years ago routine. And it's not for a computer, right? It turns out to be something that we do naturally that is cutting.”
2021-11-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #237 – Steve Viscelli: Trucking and the Decline of the American Dream · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“One of the problems with doing research like this with all these Silicon Valley folks is the NDAs. So I don't know what I'm able to say about sort of watching it, but obviously they're public statements about sort of what the challenges are, right? And it's about the latency and the ability to sort of in real time”
2021-11-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #237 – Steve Viscelli: Trucking and the Decline of the American Dream · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Engine, right? So there are sort of adjustments that you need to make and still the benefits are there. One scenario, and that's just the automation of that acceleration and braking Starsky, which probably a lot of your listeners heard about, was working on another scenario, which was to solve that local problem. A sort of remote piloting. I had the chance to watch them do that. They drove a truck in Florida from San Francisco in one of their offices. That was really interesting. And then”
2021-11-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #237 – Steve Viscelli: Trucking and the Decline of the American Dream · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, so I mean, I think that ended up at the, I mean, Peloton, I think, is sort of winding down their work on this. And I think that ended up being still an open question. And I had a chance to interview a couple drivers who, at least one, maybe two of which had actually driven in their platoons. And I got completely different experiences. Some of them were like, it's really cool. I'm like in communication with that other driver. I can see on a screen what's out the front of his truck. And then somewhere like it's too close. And it might be one of those things that's just, you know, takes an adjustment to sort of get there. So you get the aerodynamic advantage, which saves fuel. There's some problems, though, right? So, you know, you're getting that aerodynamic advantage because there's a low pressure system in front of that following truck. But the engine is designed with higher pressure feeding that.”
2021-11-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #237 – Steve Viscelli: Trucking and the Decline of the American Dream · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Trailer. I might be able to go back and forth from Chicago to Detroit. Take two trailers there, pick up two trailers going back, right? And be home every night. Now, the problem with that at the time, or one of them, was, you know, bridge weights. So you can't, not all bridges can handle that much weight on them. They can't handle these doubles, right? And some places can, some places can't. So this platooning idea was happening at the same time. And we ended up on the same panel and the founders were like, hey, so what's it like to follow really close behind another truck? Which was kind of the stage that they were at was like, you know, what's that experience going to be like? And I was like, truckers aren't going to like it. That's just like the cardinal rule is following distance. Like that's the one you really shouldn't violate, right? And when you're out on the road, like you have that trucker right on your ass. People remember that. They don't remember the 99.9% of truckers that are not on there.”
2021-11-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #237 – Steve Viscelli: Trucking and the Decline of the American Dream · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, and we have like intermodal, we have basically this would be the equivalent of rail to truck intermodal, right? So you put it on the rail and then, you know, a trucker picks it up and delivers it, right? So instead of having the rail, you'd have these super aerodynamic, hopefully platoons or what was at the time was called long combination vehicles, which is basically two trailers connected together, right? Because this is like a huge productivity gain, right? And then instead of that, driver like me, I would pick up something in upstate New York and drive to Michigan, drive to Alabama, you know, drive to Wisconsin, drive to Florida. You know, I get home every two weeks. If I'm just running that double.”
2021-11-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #237 – Steve Viscelli: Trucking and the Decline of the American Dream · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Where a local city driver who's paid by the hour kind of runs these trailers out once they're loaded. You know, doesn't sit there and wait while it's being loaded. They drop off a trailer. They go pick up one that's loaded. They run it out. When it's loaded, they call them. And they just run them out there and stage them.”
2021-11-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #237 – Steve Viscelli: Trucking and the Decline of the American Dream · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There, you want low rolling resistance tires and these super aerodynamic, sleek trucks, right? Where we know with off-the-shelf technology today, we could double the fuel economy more than double the fuel economy of the typical truck in that highway segment if we segmented the duty cycle, right? And so in the urban environment, you want a clean burning truck, so you're not giving kids asthma. You want it lighter, so it's not destroying those less strong pavements, right? You can make tighter turns. You don't need a sleeper cab because the driver, you know, hopefully is getting home at night, right? In the long haul, you want that super aerodynamic stuff. Now, that doesn't get you anything in the city. And in fact, it causes all kinds of problems because you turn too tight and you crunch up all the aerodynamics that connect the tractor and the trailer. So the idea that I had was like, okay, what if we deliberately segmented it? Like what if we created these drop lots outside cities?”
2021-11-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #237 – Steve Viscelli: Trucking and the Decline of the American Dream · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Like you got the regenerative braking, right? You can make the truck lighter, you can keep it local, right? You don't get any benefit from that hybrid electric in the rural highway, you want aerodynamics, right?”
2021-11-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #237 – Steve Viscelli: Trucking and the Decline of the American Dream · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“When I studied the drivers, you had this complete difference in the driving tasks like we were talking about before with long haul and city, right? And you're not paid in the city. You've got congestion. The turns are tight. There's lots of pedestrians and, you know, all the things that self-driving trucks don't like, truckers don't like, right? And they're not paid. There's lots of waiting time. And then in the highway, they get to cruise, they're getting paid. They have control. They go at their own pace. They're making money. They're happy. Well, it turned out, I guess it was around 2010, this is still when we were thinking about regenerative braking, you know, and hybrid trucks being sort of like the solution. The problems with them sort of and the advantages also split on what I was thinking of kind of the rural urban divide at that time, right?”
2021-11-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #237 – Steve Viscelli: Trucking and the Decline of the American Dream · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And we ended up on a panel together. And it's kind of interesting because I was on that panel because I was thinking about how we got the best return on investment for fuel efficient technologies. And if it's cool, I'll sort of set this up because it comes into sort of the story of some of these scenarios.”
2021-11-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #237 – Steve Viscelli: Trucking and the Decline of the American Dream · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It turns out that's really obvious and quite simple. Highway driving's a lot simpler, right? So the plan is simplify the problem and focus on highways because city driving is so much more complicated. So from that, I came up with basically six scenarios. Actually, I came up with five that the developers were talking about. And then one that I thought was a good idea that I had read about, I think in like 2013 or 2014, which was actually something that the US military was looking at. I actually first heard about the idea of this kind of automation, at least in sketched out form in like 2011, I guess it was, with Peloton, which was this sort of early technology entrant into the trucking industry, which was working on platooning platooning trucks. And all they were doing was a cooperative adaptive cruise control as they came to call it.”
2021-11-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #237 – Steve Viscelli: Trucking and the Decline of the American Dream · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, yeah. So, I mean, I'm sure you know the division of labor in these companies, right? There's sort of a business development side, you know, and then there's the engineering side, right? And the engineers are like, oh my God, what are these business development people? Why are they involved? In this process. So I ended up sort of coming up with a few different ideas that people seem to be batting around and then really tried to zero in on a layman's understanding of the limitations, right?”
2021-11-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #237 – Steve Viscelli: Trucking and the Decline of the American Dream · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“For the most part, I have no influence on sort of what these ideas were. So what the project was that I did was I said technology is created by people. They solve for X and they have some conception of what they want to do. And that's where we should start in sort of thinking about what the impacts might be. So I went and I talked to everybody I could find who was thinking about developing a self-driving truck. And the question was essentially, what are you trying to build? Like what do you envision this thing doing? It turned out that for a lot of them was an afterthought. They knew the sort of technological capabilities that a self-driving vehicle would have. And those were the problems that they were tackling. You know, they were engineers and computer scientists.”
2021-11-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #237 – Steve Viscelli: Trucking and the Decline of the American Dream · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“A driver when you're in a truck, you're up higher. So you can see further and you can see the traffic patterns. Cars move in packs. I'm sure there's academic research on this, right? But they move in packs. They kind of bunch up behind a slower car, and then a bunch of them break free. And this is sort of on almost free-flowing highways. They kind of move in packs. And you can kind of see them in the truck. So, you know, rather than platoons, we might have like hives of trucks, right? So you have like 20 trucks moving in some coordinated fashion, right? And then maybe the self-driving cars are, you know, because people don't like to be around them or whatever it is, right? You might have a pod of, you know, 20 self-driving cars sort of moving in a packet behind them.”
2021-11-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #237 – Steve Viscelli: Trucking and the Decline of the American Dream · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Batteries, you know, how are we powering these things? And how many of them are going to be? Like right now, we've got five million containers that move from LA and Long Beach to Chicago on rail. Rail is three or four times at least more efficient than trucks in terms of greenhouse gas emissions. And on that lane, it varies a lot depending on demand, but maybe rail has a 20% advantage in cost, maybe 25%, but it's a couple days slower. So now you cut the cost of that truck transportation per mile by 30%. Now it's cheaper than rail, and it gets the stuff there five days faster than rail. How many millions of containers are going to leave LA and Long Beach on self-driving trucks and go to Chicago?”
2021-11-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #237 – Steve Viscelli: Trucking and the Decline of the American Dream · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, here's, and this is where it's like, uh oh, like, yeah, so we really thought we were going to be electrifying trucks They're going twice as far. If they're moving three times as much, if they're going three times as far, right? What does that mean for how far we are behind on batteries, right? We've got sort of these ideas about like, man, here's how close we could get to meet this demand. That demand is going to radically change, right? These trucks are, you know, so then we've got to think about, all right, if it's not.”
2021-11-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #237 – Steve Viscelli: Trucking and the Decline of the American Dream · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Pretty slowly, right? E commerce aspires to do something completely different, right? Move huge varieties of things in small quantities, virtually everywhere as fast as possible. And so that is... Like that intercity trucking under the, you know, in the era of railroad monopolies, right? The demand for that is potentially enormous, right? And so there is such a, so right now I think a lot of the business plans for sort of automated trucks, right? And sort of the way that the journalistic accounts portray it is like, okay, if we swap out a human for a computer, what are the labor costs per mile and like, oh, here's the profitability of self-driving trucks? Uh-uh. This is transformative technology. We're going to change the way we get stuff.”
2021-11-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #237 – Steve Viscelli: Trucking and the Decline of the American Dream · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source