Long-haul trucking would be a great use-case. Even if you need humans for local pilot guidance, you can queue them up to a "cell phone lot" and courier the last-mile drivers in between shifts of going back & forth. It would also mean drivers would be based more locally to points of loading, rather than having to be constantly on the road away from home.
>It would also mean drivers would be based more locally to points of loading, rather than having to be constantly on the road away from home.
Which would probably make it much easier to hire drivers, too. Lately, long-haul trucking has had a hard time recruiting people into the profession, because the pay isn't that great and the lifestyle completely destroys any relationship you have. Local trucking doesn't have this problem: a driver can drive for the day and be home for dinner.
Long-haul is more than just driving. Will smart trucks be able to put chains on and pull them off when necessary? Handle unloading of items of weighing process proves problematic? Call for pick up of items removed during weighing? Handle snow? Handle loss of sensors? Handle run away down hill on a steep incline. None of these are insurmountable, but all are well out of the current horizon. Heck, just refueling is hard.
Most of those can be solved by changes to the truck or delivering spot local drivers. For weighing the trucks could run different trailers with load cells to weigh itself to ensure they're under the weight limit for their route. For snow there are automatic chain systems used on buses today those might be adaptable. Run away ramps are usually marked so a combination of good mapping data for route planning and finding run offs and vision/driving they'll have anyways.
