There is a lot to automate, for example shifting the trailer tandem axles or the 'fifth wheel' to more evenly distribute the weight per axle. I don't know how an automated truck would handle driving across Wyoming with tens of thousands of big tumbleweeds blowing across the road, would the collision-avoidance system be triggered? A human knows what they are and that you just keep going full-speed.
Snow is another issue. Sometimes you can safely drive through snowdrifts at speed and keep going. Sometimes it isn't a snowdrift at all, but a car covered in snow and abandoned on the highway, and the only way to tell is to approach slowly and look for an antenna sticking up or something like that. Not an everyday occurrence but it illustrates a scenario where human intelligence keeps you moving ahead when an automated system would probably need to stop and wait for human intervention.
Trucking is a huge industry with well over 100% annual turnover, and many individual drivers taking liability for accidents that were preventable. With automated trucks, that liability burden may shift back to the companies who would no longer be able to plead ignorance. It's one more issue to deal with in addition to getting the technology right.
In the snow example in particular, a properly-equipped autotruck could scan it with short-wave radar, which would go right through snow but bounce off metal. But that's a nitpick; there's lots of things that an experienced driver can handle easily but a robodriver would have trouble with.
You could certainly keep "control centers" with a few of those experienced drivers in them, where decisions for what the automated vehicle is to do in low-confidence situations get "escalated" to a human, along with the relevant sense data.
Snow is another issue. Sometimes you can safely drive through snowdrifts at speed and keep going. Sometimes it isn't a snowdrift at all, but a car covered in snow and abandoned on the highway, and the only way to tell is to approach slowly and look for an antenna sticking up or something like that. Not an everyday occurrence but it illustrates a scenario where human intelligence keeps you moving ahead when an automated system would probably need to stop and wait for human intervention.
Trucking is a huge industry with well over 100% annual turnover, and many individual drivers taking liability for accidents that were preventable. With automated trucks, that liability burden may shift back to the companies who would no longer be able to plead ignorance. It's one more issue to deal with in addition to getting the technology right.