Thanks for the very informative article.

I suspect that the long-haul part of trucking is most likely to be automated first — at least, when the route is over controlled access roads, during weather that the systems can handle. I can envision trucks pulling off at truck stops, where a driver jumps in and drives it through the harder parts of the trip to the destination, and then drives the truck wherever it needs to go until it can get back to the roads it can handle autonomously.

Also, platooning is an obvious place for autonomy — where the first truck has a human driver, and the following just follows.