Concerns with the future of flatbedding

http://www.thetruckersreport.com/tr...s-into-a-bus-full-of-nuns-and-puppies.289490/

See if this works

 

Working great thanks street beater.

 

elogs are trivial. Truly, they just are. You can pencil whip them too if that's your thing.
What won't change is securement, securement, securement.
A machine is not going to tarp a load. A machine is not going to tighten chains or straps every 150 miles. A machine is not going to hear something happening with the load, stop and fix a problem.

The only people seriously talking about automated trucking are people who've never spent an hour inside a truck on the road. Forget the traffic. Driving is the LEAST of what we do and the easiest.

Every single day I see loads on the road that I take one look at and shudder because they are so poorly loaded, and it's obvious the driver had to thrwo "the book" out the window and do some real thinking. Tell me how a machine is going to do that. Tell me how a machine will pick up bad dunnage and insist the load gets reloaded on a drop trailer.

At some point in time, a LOT of what we do will get automated. That time is probably long after I'm dead. It's too complex, people won't trust the machines and frankly, freight isn't theoretical, it's practical. And it's too one-off to automate without systems that haven't even been dreamed of yet.

 

Automated trucks are the same as automated cars, (which have been around a long time) are nothing more than political pandering.

 

TripleSix, you sir, missed your calling! "A comedian should you have been!! JB the Hunt is ##### hilarious!

 

I was one of the "I'm never going to run e-logs" drivers. Then the day came I was handed the keys to my shiny new T680 with e-logs in it. So a group of us head out, 3 on paper and me on e-logs. In the past we always made it to the same stop in Montana with little time to spare. We approach Rocker and the other 3 are talking about plans for the evening. They start slowing to exit, I hit the left lane and drove another hour before I was out of time. The end result, I was sitting home on my couch 3 hours when they finally rolled through at the end of the trip.

I average more miles per week with e-logs than I ever did running legal with paper logs. However with that being said you have to be vigilant with the e-logs and be on top of switching to off-duty, waiting till your on the ramp entering the freeway to go to line 3, maximizing your line 4 time, fueling, inspecting etc. at the same time. If you ignore the e-log and let it decide what your doing you'll loose hours a week.

As for self driving trucks, yeah there's NOBODY currently in the nationwide driver pool that will be alive to see anything more than a couple experimental trucks running across barren deserted highways. Trains have been going to be operator-less for 30 years now. Well they have fewer crew members on them but at the end of the day there's a conductor/engineer/driver (whatever the hell their called) still driving the trains and they run on tracks not uncontrolled highways. The only trains running without a driver in the cab are switch engines and that guy walking along beside it, he's still controlling it from that little box hanging around his neck. Only difference, he can run the engine and do the work of the switchman.

 

Good post about self driving trucks. I'm not with you on elogs though. Lol

Look around on this site. Lots of guys that believe it's going to happen.

What a waste of money and resources. Sad part is that I'm assuming part of my pay check is going to fund crap like this.

 

Our customers and more so our insurance company will not stand for "pushing the limits" with logs. It's one thing to run funny books hauling a $20k load of lumber or $50k load of frozen chicken type crap but when there's 10's of millions of dollars on the wagon they get a little itchy when a driver doesn't want to play by the rules. So with that there's no incentive for us to push the limits or test the laws.

As for the guys that think the self driving trucks are hitting the road next week, they're the reason aluminum prices are staying high because they use A LOT of tinfoil each morning folding their new hats for the day.

Look at the amount of split second evaluation and reasoning we do several times a minute. There are powerful computers but they are still merely a fraction of a percent of the computing power of the human brain. The ONLY way it will ever happen en mass is if EVERY vehicle on the road is computer driven and there's no chance of human interaction at any point along the road. No pedestrians, no bicycles, dog walkers, joggers etc. The same powerful human brain will not interact with a brain using purely 1's and 0's. There is no 2,3,4............. in the way a computer thinks. Fortunately 99.9% of human brains operate in the upper numbers and can't even begin to operate in 1's and 0's.

Look at the Google cars, they have had 15+ accidents, every single one caused by a human computing in upper numbers. They have not ran into each other because they can predict what the other brain running 1's and 0's is going to do. They cannot predict what the human using 44, 17, 99, 184, 13, 4 etc. is going to do. Only another computer (brain) with the capacity to reason in the same way can somewhat predict the outcome.

 

LOL loved the aluminum prices comment... LOL

Yeah when a self driving car gets in an accident it has to be towed. The 1's are sitting right there waiting to be cleaned up while the 0's roll off into the ditch somewhere.