2 Australian mines are now operating with an all-driverless fleet of trucks

This is an automatic summary, original reduced by 73%.

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That's where the large mining conglomerate Rio Tinto has rolled out fleets of all-driverless trucks at two iron ore mines, according to a report by Jamie Smyth at the Financial Times.

Not only does this reduce the total number of humans who are needed to run the trucking operation, but it eliminates the need to employ those humans in the remote and desolate mining country.

Of course mining operations are hardly the only companies that could save money by replacing human drivers with robots.

The big difference is that the mine setting offers a huge advantage that most companies can't match - there are no human drivers on the road. As David Roberts has written, one of the biggest technical challenges for making a general purpose autonomous vehicle is that it would have to deal with all those crazy human beings.

To most people, the current face of driverless car technology is a pretty normal-looking Google car cruising the streets of the Bay Area.

Rio Tinto is only doing this at two mines so far, and it has a lot more mines.

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