Volvo debuts its fully autonomous big rig truck powered by Aurora’s tech

Some believe autonomous trucks are the answer to a shortage of truck drivers.

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[rosen380]

Granted it is a single company and just a single region for that company (pay very well may vary from region to region), but I was helping out my cousin with a data project for a company with around 200 long and short haul drivers and the approximate median base salary was right around $100k. And there were all sorts of incentives that could add probably 20-25% to that.

Half-joking I was like, "are you guys hiring?" And she said, get a CDL and it is virtually guaranteed.

 

[rosen380]

As a follow up.

Amazon could afford to pay 100,000 employees 5$ more an hour and it would only cost them 1/30 of their yearly profit.

Amazon has about 1.1M US employees, so to give each of them a $5/hr raise would cost more like a third. Not that I'm suggesting that they shouldn't

 

[rosen380]

That seems incredibly generous. Is that assuming all drivers are the owners of their trucks, free and clear? Is that also assuming they are all working in teams? Are they actually being paid salary, or by the mile? Is that assuming consistent, contracted loads to always have something to transport?

A lot of times, trucking companies lure in drivers by promising "earnings potential" of $100k+ per year. But if you are paid by the mile, your take rate will vary greatly depending on how good their people are at securing and coordinating loads with their drivers. Then the driver either has to be assigned a truck or lease one from the company, so that cuts into their earnings also.

OTR drivers can certainly net $100k/year, but there are a lot of factors working against them to achieve that, and it's not typical.

They presumably drive company-owned trucks; she said, "just get a CDL", not "get a CDL and a $100k truck" Though I have no idea if they have to pay the company to use their trucks... my cousin never mentioned and it wouldn't have been something that I would have thought to ask.


I have no idea if they drive in teams or not, I was literally just looking at data which included annual salary as a line-item. There wasn't anything there about reimbursing for truck costs, but that just might not be in the document I was looking at, as it would have been irrelevant for the project.

What I was helping with was building out some rules in an Excel spreadsheet that would calculate bonuses. I just dug around and couldn't find a copy in my email, but there were several "metrics" and depending on how the driver faired in those there was either a flat bonus (same for everyone who met thresholds) or a bonus that was a percentage of their salary.

 

[rosen380]

Not remotely commensurate to their usage or impact.

Just to throw some numbers on it... using the figures presented (and assuming all of the taxes and fees are ear-marked for road maintenance):
Gasoline $0.5084
Diesel $0.5914

Lets go with 4 MPG for big rigs and 30 MPG for a modern CUV; the tractor trailer is then looking at $0.1479 per mile and the CUV at only $0.0169.

If including empty miles, we're looking at ~40k pounds vs ~4k pounds on average, then you might say, "about 10x the weight and paying about 9x the taxes" and figure that they are pretty even, but that isn't how road wear works.

What you have to do is calculate the per axle weights (40k/5 vs 4k/2), divide the former by the latter and raise that to the 4th power. And for these numbers, that is 256x rather than the current 9x figure.

 

[rosen380]

true. Although to be fair the most profitable part of amazon is aws. The shop business already works with very thin margins as far as I know. Hence either aws subsides the other part of the business (but then why?) or they would likely need to increase cost to the end customers to cover the additional costs.

And it seems to me that Amazon is already rolling back quite a bit on the free delivery / next day delivery, so actually it is already to some part happening.

That said, I agree that profit of large companies have gone up, while the min wage has stagnated. That fueled economic inequality.

Good point. From their last annual report, the profit by segment was about:

AWS +$23.6B
North America +$10.9B
International -$4.1B

...so it looks like their NA operations are already subsidizing their international operations. "Only" $6.8B left once you zero out international. Then going with the OP's one-thirtieth, but split among all of the ~1M US workers, we're left with about $230 per employee for the year (about 10 cents an hour for a full time employee).

 

[rosen380]

It's good to put numbers to it; the average MPG for semis today is about 7 overall. Obviously that can vary depending on load, road conditions, gradients, etc. And it may sound minor, but with the amount of miles driven by the average semi, I think going with the truer average matters in any such calculations.

Either way though, the semi definitely does exponentially more damage to the road over the course of its life than a passenger car for sure.

And that only widens the gap. At 7 MPG, then the trucks are using about half as much fuel as I figured (which means paying about half as much in taxes), but still causing the same amount of road wear.

[edit]
"the annual expenditure on highways and roads in the U.S. was $181 billion in 2017" [1]

About 150B miles driven by class 8 trucks and let's just be generous and lump everything else together (mostly because I couldn't quickly find a break-out) and those are totaling about 3T miles

If the former, per mile, is causing about 40x the road wear, then they are accounting for about 67% of it.

67% of $181B is $121B, or about $0.80/mile, which is around $5.60/gallon at 7 MPG

The other 3T miles would then need to cover the remaining $60B, which works out to about 2 cents per mile or about $0.60/gallon.


So, I'd ballpark cars as actually paying roughly their fair share and I guess the taxpayers are massively subsidizing the trucking industry. But undo that and costs of goods rise to cover the higher transportation costs and it probably ends up hurting lower income folks more than the status quo.



[1] https://www.insidescience.org/news/how-much-damage-do-heavy-trucks-do-our-roads
[2] https://www.trucknews.com/transport...hose were 2.7 million,(90,480 km) per vehicle.