Looking For Advice From Experienced Drivers!!!

Honestly @Ridgeline nailed all the high points. However, i will add my 2 cents anyway. That said what i see in the next 2 or 3 years is a cali style ban on pre emissions trucks nation wide. It may have a delayed enforcment date at best but it WILL come, especially with the left controling the senate AND house. within 5 to 8 you will see trucks older then 5 to 10 years old or with more then X miles on them banned. You also may see insurance rates that will pop the eyes out of small operations, Think 10 million in liability alone. Within a decade you will start seeing drone convoys where 1 driver is controling a small convoy of drone trucks.

Within a decade you will also either see the "electric = green" bullcrap either die off due to people realizeing electric is actully WORSE for the enviroment then diesel due to how our power is generated and how getting rid of old lithium batterys is. Or a breakthrough in battery and transmission tech making it far more practical. Likely some combination of both. Of course that is assumeing the supply of lithium doesnt dry up due to demands for it.

You may or may not also see "drone control towers" where on a local scale you will have people controling dogs and city trucks from a central location(s).

However, barring a HUGE change in how our roads are laid out and/or massive improvments in AI you simply wont see mass autonomious trucks within 50 years. They simply cant handle the rigors of the road. Wind, sleet, ice, commiefornia drivers, drunks, animals, construction fueling, and a million other things at this time. And the tech we DO have is far far FAR too unreliable to trust it on its own. What you WILL see is it take up a lot of the slack of older drivers retireing out and fewer new drivers willing to take the plunge, meanwhile actual drivers will always have a job.

 

In the 50's they thought by now we'd all be getting around in flying cars and wearing foil space suits. How'd that work out?

 

First of all if your friend buys a brand new truck and he's fine. The government is not going to take a truck that's 6 months old or a year old and say that it's obsolete.

However, with the current political climate and the push toward green energy, something is going to happen. Now it's important to realize that the government does not have to come out and just flat-out go through the front door and say all pre emissions trucks are illegal. There are plenty of backdoor ways that they can make them obsolete. They can make it so that if you run a diesel truck that your fuel tax is so high that it's outrageous. They can probably make it to the states have incentives to charge outrageous amounts of money for registration if it's not a green vehicle. They probably have some way they can work with the insurance companies and whatever else that if it's not a green vehicle that you will pay one way or another. And they can simply keep raising the price of diesel. If we get to where diesel fuel let's say is eight or nine dollars a gallon, let's just say that for the argument, when you are ready to buy a truck are you going to buy an older brick that gets 5 miles to the gallon or are you going to buy a newer emissions truck that gets whatever 8 miles or whatever they get. There are plenty of ways that they can take them from the road without actually taking them from the road although that also is a possibility. And of course they can just extort the states and tell them they don't get any federal money unless each state individually makes laws how about green energy and year of trucks etcetera etcetera her. There's always a way to bypass the front door and bypass Congress and bypass everything else.

At this point I figure I have 5 years or less with my pre emission truck. It could go on longer than that but it's not going to last forever. For me it's something very unsettling and it is a very insecure feeling because the clock is ticking. So I am working on planning my exit strategy because it definitely is going to happen at some point.

And as far as electric vehicles don't think for one minute that because the infrastructure is not in place for them that they won't push that. Not being ready and doing things that it's absolutely not the time to do seems to be the norm and that positively will not stop them.

And ironically the batteries for electric vehicles much of the minerals for them comes from mines in China which is going to create more pollution and the actual disposal of the batteries is an ecological problem. But that's not going to stop them either.

So to review, new truck okay, old truck clock is ticking, and in the meantime we sit and watch the nonsense circus before us.

Never try to make sense out of it because there is no sense there.

And most especially there's no common sense there.

 

Can’t find a place to park after 1700 in lots of places. WHERE are they going to plug all these electric trucks in?!? Also two words Elon Musk and the electric greenie weenies don’t like to talk about with electric semis;

TARE WEIGHT.

those things are VERY heavy

 

Didn't someone say they have seen a bunch of those Tesla Electric trucks behind tow trucks out in the mountains of California lately?

 

At the dock, just like they've been plugging in the forklifts for a decade plus.

 

Obviously there was much more faith in humanity back then... Can you seriously imagine the morons in 4 wheelers operating flying cars today? There wouldn't be any way to stop them from crashing mid-air and raining fire down on bystanders and buildings! It would be an apocalypse.

 

A bunch? No. They have a couple of them that they regularly run from their plant in Milpitas CA to their plant near Reno as test trucks. That's around 250 miles each way at best, and pulling a full load over Donner Summit has to darn near drain the batteries on them.