The logistics of stopping and looting a truck involves too many parties, and ensuring that each party is following enough security protocols to not be identified via face, vehicle, or gait will ensure that only a few small sophisticated heists will ever be successful.
Another, parked overnight with a load of electronics at the southern boarder. He woke up and discovered the trailer had been broken in to. Yet it didn't seem anything was missing. Maybe something "extra" had been placed on the trailer before it crossed in from Mexico?
In our company we're reminded when we'll travel through high theft areas.
If we're pulling a trailer designated as "high value," wherever we are, we're not allowed to pick it up unless we have the fuel and legal hours to go at least 200 miles before we stop.
My vague point is that every security move in history and to come can be defeated, if it's worth it to someone. And it's always with it, to someone.
[BTW, it "feels" unlikely that a judge or jury would convict based on gait analysis.]
But it does seem plausible that gait analysis could lead to a suspect, who could be convicted (or more likely, plead out) on additional evidence discovered during an investigation.
Has someone actually worked out that tons of sensors will cost far less than people-driven trucks? As it is, fuel is the big cost, followed by driver salary [1]. L5 autonomous driving is not going to come cheap, that gear is going to price as close to 3X driver salary as they can get away with, on the assumption they can run close to around the clock. Whose margin is getting compressed for the additional sensor gear?
This doesn't even touch upon that as soon as L5 is available and if 24x7 L5 operations approved, you suddenly just increased industry transport capacity 3X, leading to a sudden oversupply in certain segments and scenarios, while still requiring a certain baseline to handle peak load demands. That chaos will cause a lot of margin compression, and lots of rosy profit projections from L5 autonomous driving without drivers will turn into a race for finding more customer demand.
I can see some modest sensor gear, but nothing fancy, and not a lot of them. Perhaps high resolution visual and night vision cameras coupled with lots of street camera access, with lots of back-end software processing will deter most theft attempts?
We might ironically get to L5, only to stick lower-paid security guards on a random number of trucks.
[1] https://www.thetruckersreport.com/infographics/cost-of-truck...
Also once automated, the trucks can engage in all sorts of hyper-miling shenanigans since they don't have to worry much about traffic during a significant part of their 24/7 operation, especially on more remote roads. That's additional fuel savings.
Today it doesn't make sense, but in 10-15 years when a full self-driving solution costs maybe $1k? It's a no brainer, especially for long haul trucking.
I'd guess that putting a security guard on a truck will be an exceptional occurrence, probably only used when the truck is hauling an especially valuable cargo or going through a known trouble spot.
I once spoke with a highly-paid driver (used to be a programmer, using the gigs in truck driving to decompress because our industry generally has worse work-life balance than truck driving...chew on that for a bit) about the US logistics industry.
The driver was in high demand because they consistently tested drug-free, carried various kinds of specialized certs, was always on-schedule or always in communication about problems, and fixed many problems on their own. As I remember the explanation, there is some kind of trucking industry-wide database that contains every driver's trucking records, and it shows every ping of their record to everyone. Might have the details wrong, but the gist was every single time a competing trucking company pinged their record, they got a raise to stay without even asking. So they were in a good position to watch from the best of what the trucking industry could offer. Their contention after observing from inside the industry for a number of years is that the bulk of the US logistics industry is the train companies' to lose.
Placing enough sensors along the tracks and looking outward to the sides of tracks to detect conditions requiring trains to slow down way ahead of time, but otherwise clearing trains to run at much higher speeds than they are allowed to now, would go a long ways to fixing many of the train industry's delivery speed. Upgrade the tracks themselves and the rolling stock to boost the speed even more to match trucking's coast-to-coast delivery time, and there isn't much incentive to use trucks for those corridors rail serves.
... I just don't see how you economically protect a vehicle (vs cargo value).
And more sensors simply mean more things to steal. The minimum law enforcement response time along your entire route is the real issue, and there's no way you decrease that short of drastically increasing police staffing.
