Author here. At the mean time between failures needed to exceed human performance, the uptime of the network connection quickly becomes a limiting factor. It’s possible to pick only routes that have great cell coverage but this limits commercial viability.
Satellite internet is fast becoming good enough and cheap enough.
As an additional safeguard, you can make your trucks go into 'safety' mode when connection becomes spotty or when too many operators become too busy with other trucks.
'Safety mode' could mean slowing down the trucks or even stopping some of them. And in general, letting the autonomous systems err on the side of caution more often.
I believe the MTBF argument still applies to Starlink.
Regarding the minimal risk condition / fallback behavior, a central point of the article was that slowing or stopping are almost always unacceptable on freeways because of the speeds involved
A centralized control like that coupled with a stop as a safe default would be a very juicy attack target. Want to cripple a city / country or create some chaos? Just jam or hack the control system.
Remote does not mean just sitting in a room far away. It could be simply one truck with a lead driver and few automated ones following it closely. Road trains are an option. Even just two autonomous trailers to a lead truck will reduce the driver costs by 2/3rds.
Unlike autonomous cars where everyone needs to go wherever, inter city trucks have fixed well known routes with predicable volume of cargo that can be easily chained together.
