Walmart Goes Driverless in 2021
Please note Walmart to Utilize Fully Driverless Trucks in 2021.
Walmart will use fully autonomous box trucks to make deliveries in Arkansas starting in 2021. The big-box retailer has been working with a startup called Gatik on a delivery pilot for 18 months. Next year, the two companies plan on taking their partnership to the next level by removing the safety driver from their autonomous box trucks.
Next year, the companies intend to start incorporating fully autonomous trucks into those deliveries. And they plan on expanding to a second location in Louisiana, where trucks with safety drivers will begin delivering items from a “live” Walmart Supercenter to a designated pickup location where customers can retrieve their orders. Those routes, which will begin next year, will be longer than the Arkansas operation — 20-miles between New Orleans and Metairie, Louisiana.
Walmart is working with a variety of self-driving companies in its search for the best fit for the company’s massive retail and delivery operations. In addition to Gatik, the big-box company is working with Waymo, Cruise, Nuro, Udelv, Baidu, Ford, and Postmates.
Just a Start to What’s Coming
Clearly this is just a start, but it’s also just a start to 2021.
Driverless trucks are coming. The only big missing piece is legislation.
Will Biden hold up legislation? It’s possible, but the future won’t wait long.
Cars will lag trucks by a number of years.
Mish
Here come the modern stagecoach robberies. All a group of bandits needs to do is surround the truck and force it to stop. There’s little chance of a botched robbery if there is no person in the delivery truck.
Yet in such a circumstance there is going to be extensive video evidence from multiple cameras of the perpetrators. The software is going to call in a robbery almost instantaneously as well as the trucks exact location. The truck will certainly be locked and the software could kill the ability of the truck to be driven so that it cannot be driven away. The software can also activate a very loud alarm to draw attention to what is happening as well as the vehicle horn. And most likely a few other features I have not thought of.
What does the autonomous vehicle do if a ball bounces out in the road, or a rabbit, or a plastic bag blown by the wind? Does it stop for the ball in traffic, but not the bag? Can it drive in heavy rain, with lightening flashes. How does it handle a bicycle and rider weaving along the side of the road, or a maintenance truck with flashing lights? Human drivers evaluate each situation and use “common sense.” But these robots will clearly be hazards and major annoyances. Flying delivery drones I can see as practical in the near future. But not wheeled robots in traffic.
Is your comparison to fallible human drivers? Human common sense seems to account for 30-40K deaths/year.
Good luck getting Mish to understand this. I’ve been bickering with him over this for the better part of a decade and he refuses to concede what he doesn’t understand. I recognize your handle from the same truck driver forums I frequent so I know *you* understand the underlying reality of which you speak.
I can’t see mass adoption of automated trucks until the liability and litigation are settled from the first deaths caused by computers on the highway. There will be finger pointing from the coders to the engineers to the CEO to the equipment producers… and on and on… it will be a feast for the personal injury lawyers.
In this case from August, an emergency room doctor’s automated Tesla drove into a stopped police car at night.
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-8670977/Man-using-smartphone-driving-Tesla-autopilot-crashes-police-cruiser.html
Good luck getting Mish to understand this. I’ve been bickering with him over this for the better part of a decade and he refuses to concede what he doesn’t understand. I recognize your handle from the same truck driver forums I frequent so I know *you* understand the underlying reality of which you speak.
I can’t see mass adoption of automated trucks until the liability and litigation are settled from the first deaths caused by computers on the highway. There will be finger pointing from the coders to the engineers to the CEO to the equipment producers… and on and on… it will be a feast for the personal injury lawyers.
In this case from August, an emergency room doctor’s automated Tesla drove into a stopped police car at night.
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-8670977/Man-using-smartphone-driving-Tesla-autopilot-crashes-police-cruiser.html
I can’t see mass adoption of automated trucks until the liability and litigation are settled from the first deaths caused by computers on the highway. There will be finger pointing from the coders to the engineers to the CEO to the equipment producers… and on and on… it will be a feast for the personal injury lawyers.
In this case from August, an emergency room doctor’s automated Tesla drove into a stopped police car at night.
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-8670977/Man-using-smartphone-driving-Tesla-autopilot-crashes-police-cruiser.html
Crazy how all asset prices are going up. I own would be considered a low income rental home. It is up 100% in valuation in 3 years. Zillow says it will go up another 15% in 2021.
Easy money.
That being said, I have had the same renter for 4 years and only increased the rent $25/month during those 4 years. The rental property management company says I can raise the rent 30% or $300 / month more as that is what nearby rentals are renting for. Rental property manager said a lot of families members are moving back home. They think it is because of Covid, which is partly true, but what if it is because they need to combine incomes to cover rent?
I do need to increase the rent at least $125 / month just to cover the increase in property tax and insurance.
Typically I see my rents go up $25-50 with every new yearly lease on properties that are renting from $1400-2000/month, in this rising market..of course demand varies….but listen to your property manger and do what they say. If they’re good, they will know.
If demand falls off…..and it does from time to time….then we have had to drop our asking rent on new aquisitions…but within a year or two if times are good we can raise them up to better levels where we wanted to be.
Raising rents is important, because it helps your cash flow. At the end of your mortgage, your monthly payment will seem quite small, compared to what it was day one…..amazing how fast that can happen in a rising market. Houses I bought in 2015 that barely flowed adequate cash….are now cash cows. Taxes do go up, and maintenance has gotten more expensive…it’s not all just gouging you customers. You have to do it.
It used to be the “final mile issue”.
Now it’s the “final 100 feet” issue.
Makes you wonder about Tesla’s rise to the stratosphere with everyone saying it is really about the autonomous tech. With this much going on across the industry it might not be that long before autonomous tech becomes a commodity.
That’s like saying cell phones will become a commodity. They are. And Apple has a market cap of $2.3 trillion.
What’s the official libertarian position on what to do if we get to a point that automation can do anything a human with an IQ below 100 can do only better and cheaper?
I don’t think libertarians officialise too much, because “official” has the air of closed dictate.
How society adapts to automation is a good question though. I guess it could go from anarcho capitalist accomodation through globalist corporate all the way to UBI and “socialist paradise”, and anything in between. What is likely to happen though is that people will become more incapable and that they will start behaving like the automation that replaces them. One generation might celebrate the efficiency of change, but the next will know nothing better.
Eventually more automation will be seen as the only possible reply to new problems, just as now the thought of living as people did even a hundred years ago is unacceptable or impossible to imagine, for most. However at some point long into the future this would all reach its limit, and then what would that then modern society that has everything provided to it be, where does it turn its attention ?
The same place as where your attention is this very moment probably, but with a concentration span of near zero that stretches to near infinity in terms of time dedicated to actually resolving anything.
Let it happen
People have been predicting the end of jobs for something like forever
If 80 years ago you told farm workers 95 out of 100 would need to do something else they would have thought you were crazy
I agree. Especially target dangerous jobs that put human into danger. Mostly likely what will happen is they will target the most bang for the buck jobs.
LOWEST PRICES EVERY DAY!!!
“Safety driver” is just for PR purposes.
A couple days of seamless operation of the autonomous driving system and the “safety driver” will have a hard time reacting to a crisis in a timely manner. Their attention wanders, the mind goes elsewhere, a cell-phone beckons….
This has been proven over and over.
And, is the risk of being a “safety driver” worth it?
…Prosecutors in Arizona have charged the safety driver behind the wheel of a self-driving Uber test car that struck and killed a woman in 2018 with negligent homicide.
Court records show that Rafaela Vasquez, 46, on Tuesday pleaded not guilty in the death of Elaine Herzberg.
Vasquez is the only person facing criminal consequences in the first death of a pedestrian involving a self-driving vehicle, after prosecutors last year said Uber was not criminally liable in the crash.
Federal regulators, however, have said that while the probable cause of the crash was Vasquez’s failure to monitor the driving environment, Uber’s technology flaws and “insufficient” state policies also played a role.
Herzberg died in March 2018 after being struck by a self-driving SUV while walking a bicycle across a street at night in Tempe, Arizona.
Tempe police said the self-driving car was driving at about 40 miles an hour in autonomous mode at the time of the crash, and a police report said Vasquez was repeatedly looking down while the car was moving instead of keeping her eyes on the road. Vasquez was the vehicle’s “backup” driver, meaning she sat in the front seat and was responsible for monitoring the car’s movements….
I believe eventually the automated systems will be safer overall.
The default safety choice is “slower” or “stop”–easy for an automated system to choose, a less clear option for people on-the-clock.
“Herzberg died in March 2018 after being struck by a self-driving SUV while walking a bicycle across a street at night in Tempe, Arizona.”
This is not actually quite correct. Herzberg was crossing a freeway ramp, and there was already a sign there warning pedestrians to NOT cross there, because it was dangerous….with fast traffic and limited visibility for the oncoming drivers.
I wonder when I can get a driverless car good enough to let me sleep safely on my commute…that would be nice.
It was not a freeway ramp, but she was crossing away from the designated crossing area.
As for limited visibility–it was a slightly curving road, the woman that was hit had already crossed multiple lanes of the road–there was no issue with sight lines.
It’s a common urban experience–people cross roads in places other than designated cross-walks.
Take a minute, read the story, look at the video, open up a google map. It’s a different tale than what you tell.
Thanks for the correction. I read about it at the time, and I’ve obviously slept since then….but the takeaway is still the same.
From your article:
A large median at the site of the crash has signs warning people not to cross mid-block and to use the crosswalk to the north at Curry Road instead. But the median also has a brick pathway cutting through the desert landscaping that accommodates people who do cross at that site.
The bicyclist made a very poor and dangerous decision to cross at a place that had a wringing sign (which usually means multiple accidents have already happened there, that’s how those signs come to be placed.)
“It’s very clear it would have been difficult to avoid this collision in any kind of mode (autonomous or human-driven) based on how she came from the shadows right into the roadway,” Moir also told the San Francisco Chronicle after viewing the footage.
I went to the trouble of finding a photo of the site…..sure looks like a freeway access to me, fwiw.
Park on one side of the road, theater on the other side of the road. No barrier to pedestrians crossing. the walker was in the open 3 or 4 lanes across the road and should have been seen by driver or by machine systems.
And do you notice the decorative insets in the sidewalks that line up across the full width of the road (and in a better google maps view, actually line up with the openings in the plantings at the center island of the road. Seems to me that that is an invitation to cross at that point, if I were a liability attorney.
Not saying the person that was struck was blameless, but still, for a human driver that would be a potential involuntary manslaughter charge.
she probably did not know there would be a driverless vehicle coming down the road. Some people cross road assuming you see them and will slow down. Or if you going around a corner, the vehicle with a driver probably would have slowed down or would have veered since it is two lanes.
They probably need to put a flashing yellow light on top of these driverless cars to give you a warning the will not stop so don’t risk it?
Automation. Fighting that is like the Teamster’s battling the rail cars carrying truck trailers. Everywhere you go the results of that battle are shown as a train passes you by with 100 to 200 trailers. Lots of trucking jobs open out there for truck drivers it seems the younger generation doesn’t want them, maybe they see the future as being unemployed 10 or more years down the road.
I dont think trucking jobs are what they used to be. The whole driver school and buy your own truck through the company, from what i gather, is boarder line scam.
this highlights that the danger to u.s. workers isn’t foreign competition but automation. Trump is fighting the wrong bogeymen
you are wrong, we have had automation for …350 years. during the last expansion that ended on 02/2020, productivity was rising at…1 % and it contracted during some months, so there was no automation going on. In fact, it took the devastating Covid 19 pandemic to raise productivity…which means automation
to operate a two-mile route between a distribution center and a Walmart store in Bentonville, Ark. –just a guess but doubt there are traffic lights and cross walks or much traffic
“Neighborhood Market” versions of Walmart stores require a neighborhood–which means live people, streets and intersections, traffic control devices, etc. They are like a pretty nice, well-stocked convenience/corner store.
We went through Bentonville a couple of years back, thought why aren’t these Neighborhood Markets in more places.
Visited the Crystal Bridge Museum–pretty nice collection of art. Money buys great art–as is true through all of the ages.