If all the cars on the road are self-driving by now, it would be easy to say that we can have much more advanced self-driving trucks that can navigate our congested roads and steep curves.
Unlike passenger cars, the freight industry has many variations of trucks and needs to deal with all those factors. Additionally, driving a truck with and without a heavy load is an entirely different skill game.
The size of the trucking industry is not as big as cars, and there are fewer companies that are financially savvy enough to survive the long gestational period of innovation.
We will be way behind car autonomous driving systems where we were 10 years ago in cars, as behemoths like Tesla, Google, and other self-driving cars have invested billions.
The autonomous driving trucks, such as TuSimple, are filing for bankruptcy, and Locomotion is already out of business, making it hard to predict any groundbreaking developments.