road test

Surely it's the same at al the terminals. It was a very simple drive around the block (for me anyway) with a seasoned dedicated account driver and an old beat up Freightliner that was so sloppy on the transmission it would be impossible to miss a gear. The backing test was the very last thing. It was slam dunk. Drove down the angled aisle, turned out- plenty of room to get perfectly straight with the hole, could see down both mirrors and backed it on in. Things are different now, you'll have to simulate sending a GOAL message, get out and actually look, then intermittently honk your horn as you back up.

Before all that happens they are going to want to see you perform a full pretrip. You won't be able to get away with "this side is the same as the items I covered on the other side", they want you to name off every thing on the truck both sides everything you are checking.

Then you'll get into the cab and do the in-cab things. Air brakes test is the #1 most important thing of this whole exercise. Fail that I don't know what happens.

Whenever I opened the hood on my mentor's truck he asked me why because it was a 2010, nothing could possibly be wrong with it. Once when he came back from the bathroom I told him it passed the air brakes test and he looked at me like I was crazy--- that doing that test was a waste of time and might actually hurt the truck.

Just go back thoroughly through your trucking school notes to keep it fresh in your mind leading up to the road test.

 

You sure about all that scottie? Some of the stuff you mentioned (pretrip, airbrakes) are part of testing during the academy not after you've been on your mentor truck. Guess things could have changed though. Unless things are most definitely not the same between terminals.

 

At the Decatur terminal they had you do a straight line back and a 45 degree back then a short road test. The pre-trip was eyeballing and not even talking to the tester. It must have changed a bunch if it's that involved.