content: As much as I would love to see a general rollout of self driving vehicles - talk to some people in the industry.  It will be a long while before the algorithms are solid enough to be a full replacement for the human driver.  At best it could be a really good cruise control now and for at least the next few years.    In test tracks and in advertising campaigns you might have short runs of AI trucking - but the general rollout would have to be absolutely rock solid.  It simply is not there.  There are still far too many points of failure and far too many places where the AI does not come up with the correct solution for it to be something to trust to drive a 50 thousand pound load.    The test cases that are publicized now are in best case environments without a lot of extraneous details that fall outside the training sets.  They are also reliant on a lot of very finicky tech that fails frequently in ways that cannot be predicted.  Its sort of like were VR was about 30 years ago.  The idea was there - and a lot of the tech was there - and you could build an expensive test rig for it - but it was not public ready.    It may not be 50 years - but I think it would be optimistic to think there would be general purpose trucking done by AI in 20 years. Some problems are really hard.  This problem is really really hard.