I barely saw the aggressive driver swerve off a side street before he entered the lane right in front of me. In response, I hit the brakes hard, but the loaded trailer hitched behind me forced the truck to keep rolling much farther than I expected.
The heavyweight vehicle shuddered as the tires squealed on the pavement. Then they finally gripped the road, and my vehicle slowed in time to avoid a collision. And as my heart thumped, I cursed myself for being so easily distracted—I’d been watching a pedestrian walk his prancing puppy down the sidewalk.
Fortunately, there was no risk involved. The whole scenario was merely an exercise dictated by a highly realistic simulator of an 18-wheel tractor-trailer navigating the streets of a digital city.
This was no video game, but rather a sophisticated training tool used by the fleet operator and transportation service provider Werner to teach new hires how to operate its heavy-duty trucks. It included a full dashboard with directional signals on the steering column, gas and brake pedals, a seatbelt on a rumbling car seat that reacted to every turn, and flat-screen television monitors where the windshield and side windows would be.
I got the chance to drive it on a trade show floor in Orlando, Florida, and quickly realized that my years of experience driving my Toyota SUV provided very little training for operating an 18-wheeler. It took my full attention to swing that truck through a 90-degree turn at a stop sign while avoiding the traffic cones of a construction crew in the opposite lane. At the end of the exercise, this reporter passed the driving test … barely. If there had been a digital traffic cop in the simulation, I would have racked up two speeding tickets in less than a mile of city driving.
Training skilled drivers is difficult. Trucking companies have struggled for years to find enough candidates. Many of the larger fleets cite a shortage of labor, while union groups say there are plenty of drivers but note that the profession suffers from high turnover caused by low wages and long hours behind the wheel. Whoever is correct, the trucking labor pool has been drained even further in recent months by White House policies restricting driving schools, imposing new English language requirements, cracking down on “non-compliant” electronic logging devices (ELDs), and revoking commercial driver’s licenses (CDLs) issued to “non-domiciled” out-of-state drivers.
There’s no doubt that it’s tough to run a trucking fleet nowadays. But just two months after my ride in the Werner simulator, I had a chance to test a second technology that some say could solve the whole problem.
This time I was standing on a sidewalk in Atlanta, flagging down an Uber at the end of a long day covering the massive Modex trade show. Tuckered out from a day of reporting, I hopped in the back of the car without paying much attention and greeted the driver with a standard “Good evening, how’s your day going?”… only to realize that there was no driver on board, and I had just addressed the cold electronic circuits of an autonomous Waymo sedan.
The car pulled away from the curb, and for the next two and a half miles I was left to sit alone in silence as the machine changed lanes with a blinker, slowly stopped for red lights, and trailed at a respectful distance behind two other driverless Waymo cabs on the same stretch of road.
Can autonomous technology replace truck drivers in 18-wheelers just as it seems to be replacing Uber drivers in Georgia? That remains to be seen, but I can report that my Waymo vehicle did not incur any speeding tickets or appear to get distracted by people walking cute puppies.
