Off the top of this week's Overdrive Radio podcast is the voice of photojournalist James Year, commenting on an issue he feels holds potential to create alliances where few have existed in American culture and commentary. "In every market you can think there's a lot of disruptions starting to happen," Year said. "and it's one of those cases of strange bedfellows. ... Turns out truckers and actors and all the people that are generally fighting like hell with each other ... turns out they've got a lot in common on this topic." 

Namely, he’s talking about automation, the import technology holds for work opportunity in a variety of fields. In trucking, where that’s perhaps most salient -- certainly grabbing the most headlines -- is in the operating of the trucks themselves. The jumping-off point for the podcast is Year's recent short documentary video published via the More Perfect Union video channels. It came with an ominous title, and a video cover image clearly designed to raise a safety specter with respect to unmanned trucks on public roads: https://www.stealingfire.tech/more-perfect-union-documentary

The headline? "We chased driverless trucks in Texas. What we saw will scare you." There’s no scary crash in the video. There’s not even an unmanned, truly “driverless” truck in it. Rather Year, with a professional truck driver with him in a car, followed an Aurora Driver-outfitted truck that to start the trip actually had two operators in-cab late in April. Yet the pitch worked, clearly -- since release three weeks ago the approximately 15-minute video has been viewed nearly 2 million times, according to the Youtube counter. It all followed Year's long photojournalism project for his master’s work at Syracuse University. Year now teaches photography in Maryland.

Misleading safety marketing isn’t just the province of view-hungry video platforms. Look no farther than the messages of autonomous truck developers themselves, in some cases. On the Kodiak Robotics company’s website, for instance, the first text block you encounter purports to reveal the safety case for the "Why" behind just what the company is building with its automated driving system. It offers this statistic: “More than 85% of truck crashes in the U.S. were caused by human error.” 

Whose human error? As any trucker familiar with crash causation stats that exist well knows, the majority of that 85% weren't caused by the error of the professional truck operator. 

Year’s work is less preoccupied with automated vehicle safety than employment and work  prospects for the untold thousands of owner-operators and company drivers in the trucking industry today. The often disputed and debunked “driver shortage” narrative and how it plays into the sales pitch for automation is detailed, likewise the history of deregulation and the intense competition that resulted from the 1980s onward, all stories Overdrive readers will be largely familiar with. Year and his subjects assume autonomous tech companies will ultimately allow fleets to achieve real cost savings in safely removing the driver from the cab working on a large number of lanes. If so, what happens to all the individuals who might have otherwise done that work?

We’ve posed it before. Some of the tech companies we’ve interrogated about it no longer in fact exist, having imploded after investment cash dried up or they made a mistake of one kind or another and spooked whatever investors they did have. Still existing tech companies like Kodiak, like Aurora Innovations and Plus.ai, among others, tend all to stick to the notion that if you’re driving today, you’ll be able to retire as a truck driver. 

Yet given fleets' clear interest in helping develop these systems, for owner-operators the better question may be when will we have to compete with them at scale?

What's your take? Complete our survey via this link, where you'll find more reporting, too: https://overdriveonline.com/15749195

When should owner-operators expect competition from unmanned, truly driverless trucks?

The Overdrive Radio podcast is produced by Overdrive magazine, the Voice of the American Trucker for 60-plus years. Host Todd Dills -- with a supporting cast among Overdrive editors, contributors and others -- presents owner-operator business leading lights, interviews with extraordinary independent truckers and small fleet owners, and plenty in the way of trucking business and regulatory news and views. Access an archive of all episodes of Overdrive Radio going back more than a decade via this link: http://overdriveonline.com/overdrive-radio