[zb]
anorak:
I reckon the great man has been quiet because he’s been doing his research- video hosting sites, Wikipedia, anything will do. When it is ready, he will unleash a firestorm (I think that is the right word) of perfect sense in this direction.
I was once told that a true expert can take a “difficult subject” and make it “easy to understand” I just cannot wait
Much doings, who can guess Carryfast comments, he’s not always wrong.It WILL happen, lorry driver’s days are numbered. Anybody who does a job that a robot can do is f****d.
Stupot:
0
1Just a thought
Makes a lot more sense to me, works fine in Canada, south Africa, oz, scandinavia and USA, to mention a few
Yes, Toddy, but those countries are BIG. And you really wouldn’t want to try getting a B-Double around the back streets of Caernarvon! 
even dominoes pizza are going to be trialling driverless deliveries, the post office are trialling Arrival electric vans for deliveries , but if you check the Arrival vehicles Banbury website, the 4 tonne vans are ‘autonomous ready for when regulations are in place’, they’re not even designed for rear view mirrors. amazon are trying to throw anything out of drones and driverless vans.
I think truck makers see platooning as a driver aid / fuel saving device and the government see it as part of the obsessive ’ get everything hybrid and/or electric and driverless by 2050 plan.
I wonder if the first cab-less long distance tractor unit is on the design boards yet, lets face it , it only needs to pull into the depot disconnect itself and let the shunter take over.
I wonder what the REAL reason the Government is pumping over 8 million pounds (that the nurses, teachers, firemen etc can’t have) into this ludicrous scheme is?
Even a following wind won’t save 10% on fuel so I’m sure slipstreaming won’t either. Maybe Volvo, Scania, Daf or whoever are pumping cash into Conservative party funds so they can do some R&D work on our motorways.
As for the safety implications there are far too many opportunities for disaster to be overcome, these marvellous accident preventing sensors announced to me that they couldn’t operate and the system turned off on a Volvo last winter - the reason? - a little sleet had blocked the sensor while crossing Windy Hill - foolproof eh?
My take on it is this, lorries 2 and 3, the drivers of which sit there and vegetate a few yards behind the one in front without a clue what’s going on up front, all of sudden the one in front has to take evasive action and our two camp followers are supposed to spring into action at a moments notice and make the right decision where to point and what to do, what could possibly go wrong.
Cav as usual has its spot on, and there’s never any shortage of people ready to pocket large sums of free (ours that is) money to ponce about playing, in this case playing tatas in big wagons.
Beats the hell out of working for a living for a few years dossing about on expenses having meetings and writing reports.
By the time this crap is ready for the road, we’ll be nearing 90 million people crammed onto these islands, the roads will be chock a bloody block and chucking 200 ft long platoons (idiot name for idiot idea) into the fray will help no end 
Mind you seeing the drunk and incompetent half wits out there leaving a trail of death and destruction in their wakes, increasing in number since the job itself and abilities required to do it have been dumbed down consistently, you can see why joe public could easily be persuaded this is a good idea.
In my opinion (which isn’t worth a great deal), someone in the corridors of power has got wind of this idea that the Euro Zone is going forward with this plan and is keen not to be left behind. Compared to our neighbours, we are a small, over crowded little island without the great distances which MAY make the idea feasible. Personally, I reckon this makes it a non-starter for Britain, let alone the dodgy safety aspects.
The attendants in the following two vehicles will only be there to appease the public until the concept becomes accepted and then they will be phased out with the driver of the front vehicle having full control, supported buy sensors and microprocessors that operate many times faster then even the best Human can, Sorry guys but mark my words that’s the future
What would be the point of all that electronic ■■■■■■■■ Spud.
Might just as well hitch the two trailers up behind on bogies, at least error 404 isn;t going to trigger and the previously following lorries go off on their own.
Same as Mr Denby tried, but he didn’t have the right politicians or experts making large incomes from being involved, so his idea that worked and didn’t need £millions chucking about like confetti into the correct palms, was binned.
Be interesting to know where the loot for this is going, follow the money 
It simply appears to be a bad idea to me.
I read ages ago that humans are not suited to ‘monitoring’. The experiment involved among other things, pigeons and corn. A conveyor belt (good game, good game!) was loaded with lots of plastic pellets, with an occasional ear of corn. Humans were bored within a few minutes and hardly ever saw the corn. Pigeons were glued to this for hours at a time, always picking out the corn.
If you’re in the second or third truck you’ll soon be taking a sneaky peak at your phone, you’ll never react in time to anything going wrong - and things always do go wrong!
Run doubles or triples and have specialised parks with their own junctions and split them up there. After all one of the major costs is wages, why have two blokes sitting idle for 90% of their shift?
Or, as someone else has suggested use the railways. Run trains like the parcels companies run parcels. A Central hub, sorting the demountable containers and curtain siders, with depots throughout the country (sort of like Freightliner - but on a good day!)
John.
John West:
It simply appears to be a bad idea to me.I read ages ago that humans are not suited to ‘monitoring’. The experiment involved among other things, pigeons and corn. A conveyor belt (good game, good game!) was loaded with lots of plastic pellets, with an occasional ear of corn. Humans were bored within a few minutes and hardly ever saw the corn. Pigeons were glued to this for hours at a time, always picking out the corn.
If you’re in the second or third truck you’ll soon be taking a sneaky peak at your phone, you’ll never react in time to anything going wrong - and things always do go wrong!
Run doubles or triples and have specialised parks with their own junctions and split them up there. After all one of the major costs is wages, why have two blokes sitting idle for 90% of their shift?
Or, as someone else has suggested use the railways. Run trains like the parcels companies run parcels. A Central hub, sorting the demountable containers and curtain siders, with depots throughout the country (sort of like Freightliner - but on a good day!)
John.
Monitoring John ! half the Town of Barrow will have been “tagged” at sometime or other ! 
Cheers Dennis.
Spud1960:
The attendants in the following two vehicles will only be there to appease the public until the concept becomes accepted and then they will be phased out with the driver of the front vehicle having full control, supported buy sensors and microprocessors that operate many times faster then even the best Human can, Sorry guys but mark my words that’s the future
I am quite sure the attendants will be done away with as soon as the politicians think they can get away with it.
But these sensors and microprocessors have to relay their data to the following members of the platoon. Now let me see, when I press Print the ethernet has a little think about it and a few clicks and whirrs later something starts to happen. When I select something on a tablet in another room or even on this desktop sometimes, a little circle appears going round and round, I think I heard that it’s called buffering. Quite often when I press call on my mobile phone…SFA happens, especially if I am in a ‘difficult’ reception zone. Then there is the family watching News at Ten on three different TVs in the house, Big Ben strikes an awful number of times. DAB digital radio - designed to make you late for an appoimtment. Wi Fi, Ethernet, etc all fiendishly clever when it can make its mind up.
Now to the accountants and politicians, an RTC causing fatalities is valued at £ how ever many thousands, so they have consulted an algorithm which predicts how frequently these will occur. The accountants have also calculated the planned theoretical fuel savings in their beloved pound notes and decided that 'the economy ’ will accrue a net benefit so they are going ahead.
Of course to the widows and orphans these experts just simply can’t add up.
If anybody watched the film iRobot (quite a good film actually), you would remember at the end the dangerous robots who took over in order to oversee the new utopia, were ‘retired’ into storage and the previous generation robots whose only purpose was to protect and serve the people who paid for everything, brought back■■?
Well this might be an idea of what needs to be done with our politicians and apparatchiks, they need to be put away or early retired (on a standard working persons state pension) for our, the people’s, safety, and replaced with those few, Jacob Rees Mogg springs to mind, who remember they are there to serve, not brainwash and order, the people who elected them about.
The current politicians, their owners, and the apparatchiks who crave ordering people about, for their own good of course , appear to have been watching too many films such as iRobot and have got a bit carried away with how wonderful and easy to control the new society could be once the machines take over, a re-appraisal of their purpose, to serve the people who elect them is needed soon.
cav551:
Spud1960:
The attendants in the following two vehicles will only be there to appease the public until the concept becomes accepted and then they will be phased out with the driver of the front vehicle having full control, supported buy sensors and microprocessors that operate many times faster then even the best Human can, Sorry guys but mark my words that’s the futureI am quite sure the attendants will be done away with as soon as the politicians think they can get away with it.
But these sensors and microprocessors have to relay their data to the following members of the platoon. Now let me see, when I press Print the ethernet has a little think about it and a few clicks and whirrs later something starts to happen. When I select something on a tablet in another room or even on this desktop sometimes, a little circle appears going round and round, I think I heard that it’s called buffering. Quite often when I press call on my mobile phone…SFA happens, especially if I am in a ‘difficult’ reception zone. Then there is the family watching News at Ten on three different TVs in the house, Big Ben strikes an awful number of times. DAB digital radio - designed to make you late for an appoimtment. Wi Fi, Ethernet, etc all fiendishly clever when it can make its mind up.
Now to the accountants and politicians, an RTC causing fatalities is valued at £ how ever many thousands, so they have consulted an algorithm which predicts how frequently these will occur. The accountants have also calculated the planned theoretical fuel savings in their beloved pound notes and decided that 'the economy ’ will accrue a net benefit so they are going ahead.
Of course to the widows and orphans these experts just simply can’t add up.
Some interesting debate, and I agree with cav551 in that electronics technology is far from perfect. Look in any scrapyard and you’ll see plenty of cars between five and ten years old, not crashed or rotten, but written off because some module or other failed, and the cost of identifying and replacing the unit (often by trial and error) becomes more than the car is worth. As ever more complex computerised systems are introduced into vehicles, the potential for faults and resultant accidents are magnified. When some of the world’s most sophisticated computer systems can be hacked by a teenager with behavioural issues from his bedroom thousands of miles away, we need to be concerned about the safety of these things. There are just too many variables to let these things loose on todays roads, quite apart from the legalities involved.
Very interesting debate indeed and some quite polarised views, however here’s a thought over 90% of all road traffic accidents (including those involving professional drivers) are caused by Human Error not system failures.
This could go on for as long as the elusive 8 cylinder guy
Ah, statistics - the trouble is, they can be trotted out to prove anything. For example, if eight percent of fatal road accidents are caused by drunk drivers, the other ninety-two percent must therefore be caused by sober drivers, so statistically it is much safer to drive drunk. I rest my case, your Honour!
fodenway:
Ah, statistics - the trouble is, they can be trotted out to prove anything. For example, if eight percent of fatal road accidents are caused by drunk drivers, the other ninety-two percent must therefore be caused by sober drivers, so statistically it is much safer to drive drunk. I rest my case, your Honour!
Copper told my mate to drive home one night, he said “you are too ■■■■■■ to walk”
Coat on!
Not even the extremely ancient, like me, are denying that wonderful electronic twiddles can probably control endless convoys of vehicles with but one East European agency ‘minder’. That is not the problem.
The size and design of our roads, not Australia’s outback or American Interstates, and the sheer quantity of traffic, never mind current driving standards, mean that this idea is both stupid and unworkable.
If that truly is the future I’m glad I won’t be here to see it.
David
Juddian:
What would be the point of all that electronic ■■■■■■■■ Spud.
Might just as well hitch the two trailers up behind on bogies, at least error 404 isn;t going to trigger and the previously following lorries go off on their own.Same as Mr Denby tried, but he didn’t have the right politicians or experts making large incomes from being involved, so his idea that worked and didn’t need £millions chucking about like confetti into the correct palms, was binned.
Be interesting to know where the loot for this is going, follow the money
With platooning or convoying the lorries remain the same size, road trains etc will be opposed by the public because of the perception of juggernauts