The Real Story on the Delusion of Self Driving Trucks

Executive Summary

• The trucking industry has gotten behind self-driving trucks, in part to distract from how bad truck driving jobs have become since trucking deregulation.

Introduction

The trucking industry has seen a continual decline in standards since deregulation.

See Our References

Our references for this and other related articles can be found at this link.

The Decline of Standards in Trucking

The extensive decline of the job of truck driving is explained in the article The Real Story on the Reduced Standards in Trucking.

The Fantasy Land of Electric and Automated Trucks

While transportation and logistics have constantly been dropping their standards and behaviors, the media and investors have focused on the fantasy land of electric trucks. The explanation of how these automated trucks would work is found in the following quotation.

New jobs will emerge as a result. But they will essentially be in a different field—technology. Autonomous trucks use sensors and a navigation system to drive on the road. They brake independently and use radars and cameras to navigate around other vehicles. Alexander, of Navigant, says that automated trucks will still need people in these trucks, at least at first. But the jobs will be for people who can handle these systems’ on-board computers and fix problems that arise. This dynamic is at the core of automation: It doesn’t just get rid of jobs. It creates new jobs as well. Often, the jobs that disappear are low-paid, repetitive work and the new jobs are better, at least as measured by compensation. But the problem is that those new jobs are not ones that those low-skilled workers can easily fill, and those people are now out of luck. – The Atlantic

This quote combines projections that are exaggerated, combined with enough discussion around labor savings to appeal to investors, with some concessions made to those who might oppose the proposals as eliminating jobs, by stating that it would also create jobs. It also ends with how the new jobs are too skilled for present workers, and thus paves the way for “education” for these illusory jobs. Journalists tend to very rarely critically analyze what industry sources tell them, so this description is just repeated to the audience, even though what is written is either not likely to occur or very far out into the future. This article was written in 2017, and there are zero self driving trucks on the road in 2021.

Observe this quotation.

These lower-skilled drivers are the ones who will likely be replaced first by automation. There’s a sense in which that’s not entirely a bad thing. “It’s good riddance to a lot of very bad jobs,” Viscelli, who worked as a trucker while researching his book, told me. – The Altantic

Yes, if this were true — which it isn’t, it would mean fewer jobs for the overall economy. Those displaced workers would then have to find jobs in other areas of the economy. So it is not a good thing. And secondly, these were not always bad jobs. They were made bad jobs by trucking deregulation.

And notice this quotation.

Of course, the automation of trucking is going to create some very real pain for the truckers who like their jobs, and who are treated very well by their employers. – The Altantic

There are not that many jobs in trucking where the drivers like their jobs. But this is primarily in the private fleets or drivers that work for the delivery companies like UPS.

Self Driving Trucks

Of course, not only did Tesla envision taking the trucking industry by storm with their vaporware electric truck, but Elon wants to get rid of the drivers entirely. Of course, years ago, according to Musk, all Teslas were going to be earning money for their owners working as robot taxis when their owners were not driving them. These robotaxis have yet to be sighted.

Elon’s vision of driverless big rigs is also postponed because a.) the truck may never be brought out, and b.) the driverless technology does not appear to be progressing as anticipated.

Conclusion

Deregulation created a long-term decline in the standards of the trucking industry to the point where the job is poorly paid for the work involved and unappealing, causing a high degree of turnover of truck drivers. This has created what the industry calls a “driver shortage,” which is the industry code for a job that is so unappealing that people do not want to do that job.

One way to distract from these problems, which are easily solvable, is to propose that these jobs should “go away” anyway, and that self-driving trucks are the way to accomplish this objective. This is a way that technology is used to try to minimize poor treatment of labor.

This is all part of a long-established pattern where the elites decimate the desirability of job area after job area, continually promising that the exterminated job area is “not desirable” and will be replaced by even better jobs. This same thing was done to manufacturing, which the Clinton Administration said should be moved to overseas locations like China and Mexico, and which would then cause much “better” jobs to replace them. What happened is that the service jobs that replaced them were less productive than the manufacturing jobs and paid less.

The authors that cover this topic continually propose that there is another area where there are “good jobs.” However, the elites are constantly at work degrading the standards of all the jobs that they can. Computers and software are often proposed as to where there are good jobs, but here again, elites have been busy at work importing enormous numbers of Indian workers, which depress wages and degrade the quality of those computer jobs as well.

We may begin to see articles that call computer and software jobs as bad jobs, and that there will be new skills required to enter some new field where the good jobs are. For many people who find it difficult to work in IT due to the takeover by Indian workers, this fact will be hidden from the public by the elite media.