spat
.950 JDJ
Welder
Heavy Equipment operator
any of a few dozen building trades
Lots of great careers that require some skill, but not any real higher education, and not any more skill than driving a truck.
Arkansas man facing felony gun charges after commercial truck inspection on the Thruw
- Thread starter GOYABEAN
- Start date
Heavy Equipment operator
any of a few dozen building trades
Lots of great careers that require some skill, but not any real higher education, and not any more skill than driving a truck.
Far king
.357 mag
Unfortunately the guy was careless and now he’s paying a steep price for it . NY has screwed over another hard working citizen. Fuck the asshole cops that arrested him. I’m sure they feel so much safer now.
Jsmegs77
.308 Win
The downside to all of these, is the learning and experience curve. That becomes tricky to negotiate when you’re already maxing your DOT clock in trucking to make ends meet. Doesn’t leave much time during business hours to come up to speed in another profession.
spat
.950 JDJ
No, trying to do doubles like that would be difficult.
But, it's not a 4 year degree either, so if you could save up enough for a few months you could get into a program for any of them that will get you a paycheck pretty quick, then you can start climbing again.
Far king
.357 mag
That sir, would be a dream come true. Spot fucking on !
I'm 45. I don't have time to climb all over again. I didn't start out in a high paying, cushy driving job. I had to work my way up. It's taken me 8 years to get where I am now. 8 years building up a spotless record, changing jobs, quitting, getting fired. Driving trucks, despite the drawbacks of the industry, has been the only thing I've ever been any good at, and the only job I've been able to tolerate. I can't stand behind a machine all day, or sit behind a desk all day I am a restless person and I have to be on the move constantly. I don't get along all that well with other people either, I prefer to work alone and with minimal oversight.
My current job suits me, I work nights which I like, I'm home everyday day with a 5 day work week and I average about 45 hours a week, plus hourly pay
I mostly do shuttle runs but I still, get to drive relatively long distances averaging about 400 miles a night which I also like. All my routes are dispatched in advance so I can go from one trip directly to the next without waiting around for dispatch. Aside from the occasional requirement of needing to get a particular load to a particular place by a particular time I can otherwise start my shift when I like and run at the pace of my choosing. When my routes are complete I go home. Very little dead time in my nights unless I want there to be. If I have a short night I can stretch a 30 minute lunch into a 60 minute lunch if I choose, I can take long cuts or short cuts as I please.
It's about as perfect a driving job one can get. I operate largely on my own initiative, a necessity since there is no overnight dispatch on call. I am even expected to find and run alternate loads if a dispatched load isn't available, though this only applies in certain circumstances.
My only real problems are dealing with the company since the can be sketchy if you let them get away with it, largely offset by the good working relationship that has been gradually hammered out between my dispatcher and I, and the fact our company was bought out by a large national carrier which never bodes well. However it's been almost two years now with no significant changes though I still suspect we will eventually be shut down.
Last edited:
subsonic
.44 mag
Are you still making $30 now? I have to say this thread is making me sad. Trucking is the #1 occupation in most of this country and not what it used to be in the old days before NAFTA. I see McDonald's hiring at starting at close to $16 around here and they can't find workers who give a shit. Very rural gas stations are hiring at close to $15 for entry level too.
Once self-driving trucks start to take routes it's going to get much worse, starting with the better-paid long-haul truckers.
I don't think we will see widescale self driving trucks anytime soon. Eventually yes but there have been several major accidents with Self driving pilot programs. R&D eff9rts seem to have tapered off somewhat due to a number of logistical issues as well.
Pod, look into construction.
In Syracuse NY the Electrical Union LU#43 has contractors that need drivers for big trucks https://www.oconnellelectric.com/careers-apply/?gh_jid=4838275004
Not sure if they need one today, just giving you a field of view, Micron chip manuf. Should start breaking ground soon so, dirt work first.
In Syracuse NY the Electrical Union LU#43 has contractors that need drivers for big trucks https://www.oconnellelectric.com/careers-apply/?gh_jid=4838275004
Not sure if they need one today, just giving you a field of view, Micron chip manuf. Should start breaking ground soon so, dirt work first.
subsonic
.44 mag
This is a head-in-the-sand attitude. I agree with Tucker Carlson that gov absolutely needs to put a lid on this technology until we have a solution to take care of all the truckers on the road and all the up-and-coming prospective truckers. But the case for autonomous trucks is on the horizon if not here already. There are already self-driving long haul trucks on the road in California, Texas, and abroad. Yes, they have human baby-sitters or caravan human-driven trucks, and yes there have been a handful of incidents with autonomous semis. But the business case is already there as soon as you have semi's that can drive long-haul safer than 50% of Class A CDL drivers. That tech may already be in the field, and the progress in machine learning in the last couple of years is phenomenal.
In the future the baby-sitter driver does not need to be behind the wheel. Like with the autonomous taxi fleets that have been fielded, you can have remote workers connected to trucks via cell/satellite that can supervise or jump in.
Well....... they had a self driven truck kill a family in car, the resultant lawsuit subsequently bankrupting one of the robot truck development companies, another caused a major wreck by pulling into but not slowing down for a scale station, another caused a major wreck by driving full speed into stopped traffic, another required human intervention when it stopped reacting to traffic signals and in general there have been a rash of incidents large and small with self driving trucks. Not to mention the technology is not at a level yet to deal with bumping docks at theshipping/receiving level, to say nothing of the need for onboard personal to perform ongoing routine maintenance.
I don't think I will be losing my job anytime soon. If I do I will burn down as much of the world as I can before they put me down.
Jsmegs77
.308 Win
Long haul is the province of mega carriers who typically pay the worst. Short haul is where the money is, dedicated accounts, LTL and local delivery, and so on. I am local delivery and I make considerably more per week than the majority of OTR drivers.
I don’t expect meaningful competition from autonomous trucks in the shorter term, especially once cargo thieves figure out how to immobilize and strip cargo from them, for example. I’m with @Podmonkey on this… there are way too many unsolved variables that human drivers wouldn’t think twice about, but would cause a robot to have fits. Could be as simple as “go to this other building, your product gets unloaded at the indoor alley dock that you have to blindside into”.
subsonic
.44 mag
I don't think you need to personally worry too much about this threat at age 45. Right now there is a trucker shortage especially on the long haul side. I wish it was reflected more in trucker pay. Hopefully you will be retired voluntarily by the time the bots have taken over. It's the younger guys I'm very worried about, though depending on how long you keep it up you'll likely see the effects.
Regarding bumping docks and maintenance; automation is going to take over long haul routes first. Stuff like truck stops and travel centers partnering to form truckports where short-haul drivers take over for last mile delivery and maintenance is done. We're not going to see trucking companies mass-firing their truckers and replacing them with self-driving rigs in the near future. What will happen is that self-driving rigs will begin to relieve the long-haul driver shortage, which will mean truckers not hired and depressed wages for those still on the road. That's something we will start to see soon, and I expect them to be a common sight on many interstates before the decade is out unless government intervenes protect truckers. From there it will be a long process of improvement and intrusion into the last mile, and less and less work for drivers of every stripe.
There certainly are edge cases but we're at an inflection point where they're being solved, and the easiest form of driving to automate is interstate highway driving.
Has it always been that way or did this flip at some point? I'm not knowledgeable about these economics but I thought the men out on the road for days/weeks on end got paid better. I wouldn't be surprised if that's changed though.
Either way to me it's bonkers that anyone with a CDL driving tons of freight any distance would get paid $30 an hour in Biden dollars!
Last edited:
spat
.950 JDJ
I expect long distance OTR to be the first thing to go.
A human would meet an autonomous truck at the exit to the interstate and take it to it's dock, then drive it back to the interstate and send it on it's way.
Would only work for large fleets of course, but I can easily see it being an intermediate step.
I could also see trucks parking themselves in a receiving area and a human taking them to the actual dock.
Think of it like how a harbor pilot works for a container ship.
The number of truck drivers would drop drastically, but not be completely eliminated.
I expect we will see that sort of thing within a decade, 2 at the most.
OTR company work has always been the entry level position. You put your time in, build experience and a good record. Once a driver has these they can move on to better jobs. Some drivers choose to stay over the road but many like myself and @Jsmegs77 migrate to local work which typically pay better and have far more favorable working conditions. The other route, and potentially the most lucrative, is to get your own truck. Owner-ops that know how to consistently find and run the best lanes can make hundreds of thousands of dollars per year with roughly half that atsoverhead. Unsavvy owner-ops can just as easily lose their ass however.
The reason local work usually pays better is that it involves more city driving and city driving is exceptionally difficult for inexperienced drivers, to the point that most local carriers will not hire new drivers. 2 years OTR experience is what is typically asked for.
Given the rash of problems and the fact that a human operator is and will be for the foreseeable future required to be present I would place that estimate more towards the 20 year end of things.
spat
.950 JDJ
There are only a couple players that really have the capability to develop this.
And only Tesla is really credible at the moment.
Once they decide to apply their software to a real ICE truck, things will happen very quickly.
Their mistake was having people design a truck that have no experience driving one. The software is nearly ready.
subsonic
.44 mag
You would be surprised. The tech is widely dispersed and there are close to a dozen independent companies that have most of the pieces needed to teach a computer how to drive. The state of the art and dispersion of the knowledge has shifted a long ways and the barrier to entry is lower.
Tesla is actually behind the 8-ball on both autonomous capabilities and safety in particular. Tesla's self-driving product is still SAE Level 1-hands on.
The Honda Legend's SENSING Elite is approved Level 3 hands/eyes off in Japan, for highway driving with lane changes. The Mercedes S series Drive Pilot is USA Level 3 approved for congested traffic (no lane changes). Anyway, the requirements for consumer self-driving are much different than commercial trucking, and there are different sets of companies working on these problems.
The Tesla truck is pathetic. Terrible range and takes hours to charge, only work they can do currently is short range shuttle work. An OTR truck needs at least 700 miles of range and a charge time of 30 minutes to be profitable. To fully realize the potential of automated trucking you'd have to figure out some system of induction charging embedded in the roads.
spat
.950 JDJ
The levels and actual real world ability are somewhat mismatched.
You can get into a tesla and tell it to take you somewhere and it will do it completely autonomously. It's not *rated* to do that without a human at the wheel supervising, but it's capable.
The "level 3" Mercedes *is* rated for completely autonomous driving, in some very limited circumstances, but it isn't capable of doing even half the full trip on its own at all.
So, the Tesla can do the whole job, we just don't quite trust it without supervision yet. The Mercedes can do one bit, but unsupervised. The Tesla is far closer to getting the whole thing done.
subsonic
.44 mag
Ah, the old smart road thing will never-ever happen. We can hardly keep our roads maintained with crushed stone and asphalt, much less an live electronic metal grid that trucks drive on.
Don't confuse automation with power source. There's no reason to link electric cars to self-driving. The Honda Legend and Mercedes S-class have ICE engines with automated driving options, and the automated long haul trucks will have diesel engines.
If there's a solution to quick charging electric trucks could be swapping batteries. That's not a thing for consumer cars because they are extremely expensive auto components, but for fleets it might be practical. I would say we are quite a ways from electric power being practical for OTR trucking if it ever is, and still haven't even solved the challenges of making electric cars viable for the average consumer.
This has little to do with automated driving, which is getting close and will only get better, and which is a different problem for passenger cars versus commercial freight.
With passenger cars we are seeing "advanced driver-assistance systems" become progressively more advanced and spread to more models and trims. Getting to widespread Level 4 self-driving in passenger cars may be like the frog being boiled in a pot.
spat
.950 JDJ
You are of course right about all the shortcomings of the Tesla truck. Their mistake was too many engineers and not enough truck drivers during the design process. They should have had at least a couple guys with a decade or more experience driving full time in the design process.
But, the solution is much much simpler than fixing all that's wrong with their truck. You just have to stick the Tesla autopilot in a regular diesel truck. They could do that in a month once the decided to go that route.
If they cut a deal with one of the major manufacturers (or Musk buys one), they could be offering it as a factory option inside a year.
Gunright
.45 acp
Latency is a serious issue whenever distance is large. Until we have "warp drive" or worm holes for transporting signals (radio waves), we are bound by the fundamental that in the best case (no propagation delays, perfect atmospheric conditions), we are limited by the speed of light. That means if the remote worker connected to the truck via cell/sat is 2000 miles away, the delay is about .4 seconds (round trip). That is with no routing, encryptions, data transformation, computation etc. delays. Over Satellite, the numbers are considerably higher.
In .4 seconds a truck moving 70 MPH will travel 41 feet. A lot of bad things can happen in 41 feet.
Now you can argue that a person sitting in the cab is also subject to delay in acting on a condition. But the scenario you suggest above (remotely jumping in) means that the condition causing the alert is either detected locally and transmitted to the remote worker, who has their own human delay (especially if "monitoring" multiple vehicles), then acted on, then transmitted back to the vehicle. If scenario is the remote worker is watching (independently), then the video/sensor output still has to be sent (and is subject to the same laws of the universe) to be viewed by the remote worker.
subsonic
.44 mag
Didn't intend to drive this thread into the nitty-gritties of autonomous vehicle challenges, but you are absolutely right here. Latency effects mean that a remote driver is never going to be a solution to taking over vehicle controls in an immediate safety emergency such as an impending collision that requires milliseconds intervention. That situation must be immediately handled on-board as best as it can. What it can help with is lower-speed "paralysis" situations, like construction zones that a system isn't trained for and isn't previously mapped. Future algorithms will be smart enough to deal with it, but a stop-gap solution is to phone home and ask for help.
Acer-m14
20×102mm Vulcan
how will a self driving truck handle this crap ..
stop slamming on your brakes .. if your a flat bed trucker .. its suicide
and not your fault .. get a dash cam
stop slamming on your brakes .. if your a flat bed trucker .. its suicide
and not your fault .. get a dash cam
Jsmegs77
.308 Win
These driver aids that are recently turning up in cars have been in commercial trucks for a few years now, much to the irritation of those of us driving said trucks. Several of the trucks I drive regularly have forward radar and cameras, which are able to steer and brake the vehicle to maintain lane, or to minimize impact/avoid a rear end collision.
They all suck. I manually switch off the steering thing every twenty minutes for my entire shift, because it cannot sanely read road markings in anything other than pristine clear windshield and weather, and when it does think I’ve ventured too near the line it feels like an unruly child tugging on the wheel (a wonderful thing in slippery weather), the forward camera/radar is shockingly bad at determining an actual threat, and has caused several very unpleasant near misses at my terminal alone, to the point the worst truck so equipped was removed from the fleet, after very nearly getting several drivers including myself rear ended at 70 mph on the thruway following a spurious alert or reacting to a situation that wouldn’t have even made a seasoned driver blink.
For my part, there is a Gypsum Express doubles driver out there somewhere who is probably very angry with me after I, or more accurately my truck, brake checked him from near 70 down to 40 mph after a car crossed in front of me to bolt off an exit. The truck reacted to the car crossing at a distance and speed that would not have even made me lift off the accelerator, and continued to brake after the offending car was away down the exit ramp, regardless of my attempting to override it.
The silicon is nowhere near where it can compete with a professional driver, and factoring in the failure rate of the cameras and sensors (it’s a lot, many of ours are inoperable and the shop won’t replace them any more) there is quite a long road to fully autonomous heavy cargo vehicles in uncontrolled interstate usage.
They all suck. I manually switch off the steering thing every twenty minutes for my entire shift, because it cannot sanely read road markings in anything other than pristine clear windshield and weather, and when it does think I’ve ventured too near the line it feels like an unruly child tugging on the wheel (a wonderful thing in slippery weather), the forward camera/radar is shockingly bad at determining an actual threat, and has caused several very unpleasant near misses at my terminal alone, to the point the worst truck so equipped was removed from the fleet, after very nearly getting several drivers including myself rear ended at 70 mph on the thruway following a spurious alert or reacting to a situation that wouldn’t have even made a seasoned driver blink.
For my part, there is a Gypsum Express doubles driver out there somewhere who is probably very angry with me after I, or more accurately my truck, brake checked him from near 70 down to 40 mph after a car crossed in front of me to bolt off an exit. The truck reacted to the car crossing at a distance and speed that would not have even made me lift off the accelerator, and continued to brake after the offending car was away down the exit ramp, regardless of my attempting to override it.
The silicon is nowhere near where it can compete with a professional driver, and factoring in the failure rate of the cameras and sensors (it’s a lot, many of ours are inoperable and the shop won’t replace them any more) there is quite a long road to fully autonomous heavy cargo vehicles in uncontrolled interstate usage.