r/interestingasfuck • u/heyauden • 7h ago
Thieves stole Nvidia-branded trailers expecting valuable tech. They got 40,000 pounds of sand instead.
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u/Competitive_Air7402 7h ago
dont judge a cover by its book
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u/Kalkin93 7h ago
Don't judge a trailer by its... cover
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u/optiloxy 7h ago
Don't judge.
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u/heyauden 7h ago
Two trailers belonging to self-driving truck company PlusAI were stolen from its Fremont, California warehouse.
One of them had Nvidia branding, so the thieves may have thought they'd hit the jackpot.
They didn't.
Each trailer was carrying about 20,000 pounds of sand. PlusAI uses the sand to simulate the weight of real cargo while testing its autonomous trucks.
The thieves apparently broke open the trailers, found nothing valuable and abandoned them about half a mile away.
An acquaintance of a PlusAI executive happened to see the trailers near his workplace and texted:
“I have been proud of you for your adventure and success at Plus. Just saw two of your trucks near my work place!”
The trailers were recovered with all 40,000 pounds of sand still inside.
As one PlusAI executive put it:
“The whole day was bizarre.”
https://sfstandard.com/2026/09/25/plusai-autonomous-trucking-trailers-stolen-fremont/
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u/SternLecture 6h ago
oh I thought it was some kind of special sand or media for something. It was literally just sand.
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u/theLorknessMonster 2h ago
Same, like high quality raw material for silicon wafers? Nope just dumb weight.
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u/Vincentaneous 6h ago
These must be the trucks I see barreling down at 80mph in the fast lane on the freeway
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u/Famous_Track_4356 6h ago
Great, I couldn’t build my gaming PC because of the high ram prices and now I won’t be able to build my sandbox
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u/Garpeaux 5h ago
How much is 40,000 lbs of sand? Probably quite a lot. When life gives you lemons 🤷♂️
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u/DragonsRage1324 5h ago
Yeah but they won’t have any of the necessary connections to sell it. And they can’t make them without getting caught lol
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u/CatchAcceptable3898 2h ago
You mean what they got was a precious trailer of silicon^ Remember people, glass half full.
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u/Boubonic91 7h ago
So is the AI not capable of realizing the truck is being stolen and taking measures to prevent the theft? Maybe they should work on that.
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u/mattvait 6h ago
Trailers. Not the horse
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u/SaintUlvemann 6h ago
So is the AI not capable of realizing that the trailer is being stolen and taking measures to prevent the theft? Maybe they should work on that.
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u/punosauruswrecked 6h ago
They're just trailers. What're you on about?
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u/Notmuchofanyth1ng 6h ago
They don’t know anything about AI and are hoping to be snarky enough to cover that up.
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u/SaintUlvemann 6h ago
From the article, these are self-driving trucks from a company that is trying to use AI to replace the trucking industry.
So since you took an interest in the question, do you know the answer? Is their AI not capable of realizing that the trailer is being stolen and taking measures to prevent the theft?
If so, maybe they should work on that.
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u/punosauruswrecked 6h ago
They are just standard truck trailers, not some AI powered techno wagon. They weren't even coupled to anything.
The PlusAI cabs that normally pull the test trailers were parked elsewhere on the property and appeared untouched.
Why are we even arguing about this?
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u/afrothundah11 6h ago
Well since they are using it as the test version, now they know they will need that as a feature before any company will use them for transporting anything even slightly valuable.
They will also know that they will not get insurance for the contents if it cannot be monitored/secured, or they will lose insurance they get after making claims
For example: contrary to the thieves beliefs, Nvidia will not be shipping chips in an insecure truck
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u/fordfan919 4h ago
Parked trailers get stolen a lot. This is a lot security issue, nothing to do with self driving trucks.
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u/SaintUlvemann 6h ago
They are just standard truck trailers, not some AI powered techno wagon.
Okay, so you didn't read the article, right?
The locks on the trailers’ glad hands — the couplings that link the air brakes to the truck — appeared to have been forced off, the company said.
So since you took an interest in the question, do you know the answer? Is the AI in the truck that these were attached to not capable of realizing that the trailer is being stolen and taking measures to prevent the theft?
If so, maybe they should work on that.
Why are we even arguing about this?
I have no idea. All I know for sure is that you think "these are just trailers," whatever that means. Would you like to get more specific about what the hell you're on about?
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u/punosauruswrecked 6h ago
Ahh I see the problem. You don't know actually know what a truck trailer is. Never mind then.
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u/SaintUlvemann 6h ago
If you really thought that were the problem, it would be so easy for you to fix, by explaining the missing detail about how a truck trailer works.
Care to own up to your actual opinions?
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u/punosauruswrecked 4h ago edited 4h ago
Oh man. Congratulations, you are one of today's lucky 10,000
The "truck" is a completely separate entity from the "trailer".
The truck has the motor and fuel/batteries, driver or driverless systems, all that stuff. It provides the energy and does all the work to pull the trailer. It's a glorified tractor and the trailer is just an attachment.
The trailer is where the cargo goes, sand in this case. Trailers follow a pretty standard design and can be hauled by any compatible truck. They are not as a general rule tied to a specific truck. The PlusAI trucks could pull their own trailers or any other trailers from any other business.
These trailers that were stolen had nothing to do with "AI" other than holding a dummy load of sand for testing the PlusAI trucks. They were just regular trailers filled with sand that were coupled up to some thieves truck and driven away in the night. The article is very clear they were not even coupled to PlusAI trucks when stolen, the thieves just cut the locks off the trailer couplings so they could haul them away.
And to sum all that up. The trailers were stolen, not the trucks.
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u/mattvait 5h ago
When theyre not attached to each other?
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u/SaintUlvemann 4h ago
From the article, these are self-driving trucks from a company that is trying to use AI to replace the trucking industry.
The locks on the trailers’ glad hands — the couplings that link the air brakes to the truck — appeared to have been forced off, the company said.
So since you took an interest in the question, do you know the answer? Is the AI in the truck that these were attached to not capable of realizing that the trailer is being stolen and taking measures to prevent the theft?
If so, maybe they should work on that.
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u/SilverAndBack 6h ago
So nobody is going to talk about the fact The Hand is clearly digging a hole to K'un-Lun?! Dare Devil where are you
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u/LaundryMan2008 7h ago
I wished they were successful, I would have been more than happy to purchase one from a market instead of overpaying
Edit: read the story and guess they never had a chance to get the right lorry, I was thinking they had decoys to stop the legit one from being stolen like the military has for munitions, as for the downvotes, I’m going to die on this hill, AI doesn’t deserve anymore processing power than it already has, give the hardware to us please and thank you.
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u/WallyOShay 6h ago
Nope no hardware for you, best I can do is rent the software for $99.99 a month though.
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u/Notmuchofanyth1ng 6h ago
So you support fiscal loss from the company you want to provide goods and services to you?
Being you must either be very easy or very exhausting depending on if this kind of thinking is how you handle other things lol
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u/LaundryMan2008 6h ago
If the shipment was to go to an AI datacenter then to them, it’s not a massive loss on either end since the datacenter gets a replacement shipment and the company either gets an insurance payout or simply manufactures new replacements which is probably 20% to 40% of the cost due to the heavy markups, for us, it’s a jackpot since it goes to a shadow market to be sold at a significant discount for PC builders, I do understand they don’t have the video out ports but they can be soldered in.
It’s been in the news that there won’t be any hard drives for us this year since they are all booked out so if that got hijacked, at least we can have that lorry’s worth of disks, about 10,000 of them, not much to go around but in the country they got yoinked at, that’s 10,000 extra high capacity hard drives freed up for us homelabbers.
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u/Notmuchofanyth1ng 6h ago
“If” is not a valid way to weigh the situation. But I know that’s the basis for justifying hypocrisy, so that’s ok. You’re totally free to be just as logical as a flat earther. It’s your right.
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u/RandoDando10 7h ago edited 2h ago
Not a total loss, youd be shocked to find out theres a pretty big sand black market since we use it for so much stuff lmao, theres even a Wikipedia page dedicated to the concept called "Sand Theft".
Biggest example is from 2008, thieves stole a literal beach in Jamaica, taking roughly a 400 metre stretch of sand from it all thr way down to the limestone underneath in hundreds of trucks, suspected to have been re-sold illegally to luxury resorts for an estimated $1m+ usd. Cost $108m to "repair" the beach afterwards