End of the Road for Truckers - Will Automation put an end to the American Trucker?
End of the Road for Truckers
Will Automation put an end to the American Trucker?
By Dominic Rushe in Walcott, Iowa Tuesday 10 October 2017
07.00 EDT Last modified on Tuesday 10 October 2017 10.33 EDT
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.
More than 70% of
US fears robots taking over our lives, survey finds
“I’m scared to death of that,” says Baxter, an impish man
with bad teeth that he hides behind his hand as he laughs. “I can’t operate a
pocket calculator!”
But Baxter is in the minority. Iowa 80 is a great place
to check the pulse of the trucking community. Interstate 80 – the second longest
in the country – runs from downtown San Francisco to the edge of New York City.
The truck stop, about 40 miles east of Iowa City, serves 5,000 customers each
day, offering everything they could need from shops and restaurants to a
cinema, chiropractor, dentist, barber and a chapel.
Every week, a major tech company seems to announce some
new development in automated trucking. Next month, the Tesla founder, Elon
Musk, will unveil an electric-powered semi that is likely to be
semi-autonomous. But most of the truckers I spoke to were not concerned by the
rise of the robots. “I don’t think a robot could do my job,” says Ray
Rodriguez, 38, who has driven up a batch of cars from Tennessee. “Twenty years
from now, maybe.”
Nor do the managers of the Iowa 80 see their jobs
changing any time soon. “The infrastructure just isn’t there,” says Heather
DeBaillie, marketing manager of Iowa 80. Nor does she think that people are
ready for autonomous trucks. “Think about the airplane. They could automate an
airplane now. So why don’t they have airplanes without pilots?” She also argues
that the politics of laying off so many people will not pass muster in
Washington.
The family-run Iowa 80 has been serving truckers for 53
years, and is so confident about its future that it is expanding to secure its
claim to being the world’s biggest truck stop, adding more restaurants and
shopping space to the “Disneyland of truckers”.
But not everyone is so confident that truck stops will
survive the age of the algorithm. 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.
“The only human beings left in the modern supply chain
are truck drivers. If you go to a modern warehouse now, say Amazon or Walmart,
the trucks are unloaded by machines, the trucks are loaded by machines, they
are put into the warehouse by machines. Then there is a guy, probably making
$10 an hour, with a load of screens watching these machines. Then what you have
is a truckers’ lounge with 20 or 30 guys standing around getting paid. And that
drives the supply chain people nuts,” he says.
The goal, he believes, is to get rid of the drivers and
“have ultimate efficiency”.
“I think this is imminent. Five years or so. This is a
space race – the race to get the first driverless vehicle that is viable,” says
Murphy. “My fellow drivers don’t appear to be particularly concerned about
this. They think it’s way off into the future. All the people I have talked to
on this book tour, nobody thinks this is imminent except for me. Me and Elon
Musk, I guess.”
The future is coming. Arguably it is already here.
Several states have already laid the groundwork for a future with fewer
truckers. California, Florida, Michigan and Utah have passed laws allowing
trucks to drive autonomously in “platoons”, where two or more big rigs drive
together and synchronize their movements.
The stage has been set for a battle between the forces of
labor and the tech titans. In July, the powerful Teamsters union successfully
pushed Congress to slow legislation for states looking to broaden the use of
autonomous vehicles. After arm-twisting by the union, the US House of
Representatives energy and commerce committee exempted vehicles over 10,000lb
from new rules meant to speed the development of autonomous cars. Many truckers
came into the industry after being displaced by automation in other industries,
and the transportation secretary, Elaine Chao, has said she is “very concerned”
about the impact of self-driving cars on US jobs.
But Ryan Petersen sees the Teamsters’ move as a speed
bump at best. Petersen, the founder of Flexport, a tech-savvy freight logistics
company, says fully operational self-driving trucks will start replacing jobs
within the next year, and will probably become commonplace within 10.
“Labor accounts for 75% of the cost of transporting
shipments by truck, so adopters can begin to realize those savings. Beyond
that, while truckers are prohibited from driving more than 11 hours per day
without taking an eight-hour break, a driverless truck can drive for the entire
day. This effectively doubles the output of the trucking network at a quarter
of the cost. That’s an eight-times increase in productivity, without taking
into account other benefits gained by automation,” he says.
Larger trucks making highway trips, like those occupying
the 900-truck parking spots at Iowa 90, are the lowest-hanging fruit and will
be automated first, Petersen says.
Last year, Otto, a self-driving truck company owned by
Uber, successfully delivered 45,000 cans of Budweiser in a truck that drove the
130-odd miles from Fort Collins, Colorado, to Colorado Springs. A
semi-automated platoon of trucks crossed Europe last year in an experiment
coordinated by DAF, Daimler, Iveco, MAN, Scania and Volvo.
But the automation that seems to most concern drivers at
Iowa 80 concerns their log books. Truck firms are shifting drivers over to
computerized logs – and they hate it. The new system adds another layer of
oversight to an industry that is already heavily regulated, and will limit
where and when drivers can stop. A driver looking to add an extra 30 minutes to
his ride in order to make it to the truck stop rather than rest up in a layby
might find that option gone, under a system that is centrally controlled rather
than filled in by him in the log books that occupy a long shelf in Iowa 80’s
giant trucker store.
The trucker holds a special place in American mythology:
sometimes a symbol of freedom and the open road, sometimes a threat. Truckers
entered popular culture from all directions, from the existential horror of
Spielberg’s Duel, to Convoy, the bizarre trucker protest song that became a
global hit and introduced the world to CB radio slang – “Let them truckers
roll, 10-4!”
In the 1970s, Hollywood’s he-men wanted to be truckers:
Kris Kristofferson in Convoy, inspired by the song; Burt Reynolds CB-slanging
his way through Smokey and the Bandit I and II. Thelma and Louise took their
revenge on a cat-calling trucker in 1991. Hollywood, presciently, had a cyborg
drive a big rig in Terminator 2, and went full robot with Optimus Prime in the
Transformers franchise. At the turn of the 21st century, the ever nostalgic
hipsters’ love of trucker hats and T-shirts revived America’s fetishization of
the long-distance driver.
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.
“The myth is that the long-haul truck driver is the
cultural evolution of the free-range cowboy from the 19th century,” says
Murphy. “In fact, trucking is one of the most regulated industries in the
United States. Every move the trucker makes is tracked by a computer. We have
logs we need to keep every time we stop, pull over, take a leak. The truck’s
speed, braking, acceleration is all recorded. This is not a cowboy on the open
range. This is more like 1984 than 1894.”
Douglas Barry has been driving trucks since 1990. A wiry
firecracker of a man, Barry says those pushing for automation are failing to
see the bigger picture. The general public is just not ready to see 80,000lb of
18-wheeler flying down the highway with no one at the wheel.
“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.”
He says the involvement of the tech companies has stopped
people from looking for more holistic solutions to transportation problems. The
answer is better roads, more delivery points for trains, streamlining the
supply system – not just looking for ways of cutting manpower.
“A lot of these people at Google and so forth are very
intelligent. But in a lot of ways they are out of touch with reality,” Barry
says.
Yet computers 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.
“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.”
It will also be a change in the workplace of historic
proportions. “I watch a lot of Star Trek,” says Baxter, as he prepares to get
back on the road. “The inventions of an innovative mind can accomplish a lot of
things. I just don’t want to see automated trucks coming down the road in my
lifetime.”
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