- Jeff Baxter’s sunflower-yellow Kenworth truck shines as bright and almost as big as the sun. Four men clean the glistening cab in the hangar-like truck wash at Iowa 80, the world’s largest truck stop.
Baxter has made a pitstop at Iowa 80 before picking up a 116ft-long wind turbine blade that he’s driving down to Texas, 900 miles away.
Baxter, 48, is one of the 1.8 million Americans, mainly men, who drive heavy trucks for a living, the single most common job in many US states. Driving is one of the biggest occupations in the world. Another 1.7 million people drive taxis, buses and delivery vehicles in the US alone. But for how long? Having “disrupted” industries including manufacturing, music, journalism and retail, Silicon Valley has its eyes on trucking.
Google, Uber, Tesla and the major truck manufacturers are looking to a future in which people like Baxter will be replaced – or at the very least downgraded to co-pilots – by automated vehicles that will save billions but will cost millions of jobs. It will be one of the biggest changes to the jobs market since the invention of the automated loom – challenging the livelihoods of millions across the world.
. . .
Finn Murphy, author of The Long Haul, the story of his life as a long-distance truck driver, says the days of the truck driver as we know him are coming to an end. Trucking is a $700bn industry, in which a third of costs go to compensating drivers, and, he says, if the tech firms can grab a slice of that, they will.
Did you know cowboys were only really a thing for about 50 years? The profession mostly died when barbed wire was invented and major cattle paths were cordoned off on the cheap. It seems wild to me, 50 years. The way we talk about them in our history and culture, especially to young people, makes it seem like it was a huge, spanning part of our history. It makes me wonder what kind of crazy cultural worship is going to exist around truckers 50 years from now. The interstate highway was approved in 56, which gives truckers that same solid 50 years of operation. The concept is hugely American, unique because of our size and love of big cars. Are we going to have trucker tall tales in schools where we talk about mythical truckers who could wrangle a V16 with their bare hands? Oh god, Ice Road Truckers is the equivalent of Buffalo Bill's Wild West show...
Correct! This is a rare violation of "Betteridge's law of headlines".
We can only hope. Speaking as a motorcyclist, you lose all empathy for Jeff Baxter and his ilk once you've had an 80,000lb big rig spend 300 miles trying to kill you. The computer doesn't give a fuck that I'm on a Kawasaki instead of a Harley. Go computer.“That big old rig could blow sky-high, slam into a school. It needs a human being. There isn’t a machine that can equal a human being,” he says. “Artificial intelligence can be hacked ... Who is ready for that? I wouldn’t want my family going down the road next to a truck that’s computer-operated.”
“The assumption is that we are living in some kind of driver utopia now and machines are going to destroy that,” he says. “The fact is that we have 41,000 highway deaths in America every year. If we piled those bodies up, that would be a public health crisis. But we are so used to the 41,000 deaths that we don’t even think about it.” Virtually all those deaths are from driver error, he says. “What if we took that number down to 200? Here’s how it looks to me. Thirty years from now my grandchildren are going to say to me: ‘You people had pedals on machines that you slowed down and sped up with? You had a wheel to turn it? And everybody had their own? And you were killing 41,000 people a year? You people were savages!’ “They are going to look at driver-operated vehicles the way people now look at a pregnant woman smoking,” he says. “It’ll be the absolute epitome of barbarism.” Honestly, this whole article is full of bits worth discussing, agreeing on, and disagreeing on. Like this one on eroding wages . . .[C]omputers don’t get tired, don’t drink or take drugs, and don’t get distracted or get road rage. Murphy, the author, says the argument that people are better than machines will not hold for long – especially as more and more people get used to autonomous cars.
But it’s a nostalgia out of sync with a reality of declining wages, thanks in part to declining union powers, restricted freedoms, and a job under mortal threat from technology, says Murphy. Truckers made an average of $38,618 a year in 1980. If wages had just kept pace with inflation, that would be over $114,722 today – but last year the average wage was $41,340.
I'd say every 5th Lyft driver I ride with is a former long-haul or short-haul trucker. I think that speaks volumes about the costs-benefits analysis on driving a truck. Worthy of note - I have twice had truckers try to kill me. "Rage" (road or otherwise) never entered into it. In neither case did I ever so much as enter their lanes. I simply passed them, then found them attempting to run me over or run me off the road. One literally crossed three lanes of traffic so he could put me on the shoulder, and then try to push me into the dirt. This works because they can say "gee, officer, I didn't see him, you know, motorcycles, so small! And so zippy-aroundy! I guess what they say is true - they're 'murdercycles!' yuk yuk yuk!" Not saying all truckers are murderous psychopaths. But I've encountered enough that I cheer their profession's extinction.
From this ol' Cracked article that I remembered: Recent statistics are still at 90%. Yeah, when an industry has a higher turnover than burger flipping and three-week diploma mills and with much higher problems when people fuck up, I am also squarely in the camp of automating that. Maybe promoting the drivers to 'computer monitoring agents', drive vehicles 24/7 in shifts and make everyone happier."That means that, statistically speaking, every driver you see is both new to the job and about to quit."
I have interviewed or interacted with three truck drivers (above and beyond the dozen or so refugees on Lyft). They were all economic washouts with no career prospects elsewhere. The most successful of them purchased his own truck, and that worked for a while. The problem was, when you're competing against big firms who claw back their margins by treating their drivers inhumanely, your choice is to treat yourself inhumanely or go out of business. Which is what he did.
Actually, they don't need to be angry for it to be considered Road Rage. It just has to be unsafe behavior directed towards another motorist. The fact that stresses of driving and road rage are directly linked, it wouldn't surprise me if professional drivers engage in the behavior more often.
Driving home today I saw a truck tire one of the wheels of his trailer out and just keep going. A cement truck got along side him and the passenger was making a bunch of gestures, trying to get the semi driver to notice and pull over, but the dude just kept going. Watching that scene, it occurred to me that automation may not put an end to the trucker. The guy in that cabin was taking huge risks driving like that and the direct beneficiary of those risks is the company who pays him to haul. That tire probably blew out because the trailer was under-maintained. I'll bet the guy kept going because he was close to his destination and wanted to make a deadline. Freight companies can put drivers into situations where they take big risks and if those risks pay off, the company gets the reward. If they don't pay off, then they can just blame the driver. They can't do that with automation. If they under-maintain an automated truck and it crashes, they are directly, and totally, responsible. IF they program a truck to disregard the law, they are criminally responsible. No canned speech about how "we take safety very seriously" would explain away a reckless decision made by a company running an automated truck. Without a human behind the wheel, there is no reasonable doubt when it comes to culpability. Freight companies need truck drivers in the same way Wells Fargo needs tellers.
On the flip side, you could see companies start to push for automation because of those exact reasons. It removes a level of uncertainty from your supply chain (when will my truck actually arrive, versus when was it scheduled to arrive, versus dock pick-ups, etc.). Would also eliminate the risk of cross-docking loads en route to the recipient. Lots of little technical things which could be solved or at least clarified by tricking automation. Sure, the truck companies might not love going in that direction, but I think all the customers would.