Totally autonomous trucks driving between Dallas and Houston

I wonder how drivers in the 70s and 80s would have fared is they had to submit to random drug testing.

 

Not well. In the 70s speed was everywhere. Maybe not everywhere but in the area I ran it was easier to find bennies or diet pills than it was to find a good cheeseburger.
It wasn't uncommon for the dispatcher to be the supplier and most of the old style truck stops had a guy or two with connections. You looked for the ones, male and female, with more tattoos than teeth.
By the 80s I was driving short regional and local so I lost track of who had what.
I'm sure somebody will show up here and disclaim everything I've said and I'm sure there were drivers who never got wired up. I just go by what I saw and what I heard.

 

Do you REALLY want someone that isnt paying attention directly in front of you? At least with him behind you, you have a fighting chance to avoid what he is going to hit...

Clearly the prudent move is to hit an off ramp and put out a tire fire and let him go on up the road (and maybe block it for hours), but that isnt always practical.

 

and you base that on fact, personal experience, or hearsay..???

did you hear 1 driver say that he used such drugs, and right away you assumed they all did..???

 

Several years ago my instructors in CDL school all openly admitted to the class at the local community college (that was sponsoring the CDL course) that they used drugs and abused alcohol back during that time period and that they were specifically abusing drugs so as to be able to complete their coast to coast runs quicker than what they could have done without drugs. One of the instructors said he was surprised that he was still living, with how much he had abused his body.

Regardless, it seems clear to me that not everything was better in "the good old days". I think it's a good thing that nowadays we have less substance abuse in the trucking industry and that they test for it.

I felt bad for my instructors when they talked about abusing alcohol and drugs back in the 70's and 80's. They certainly weren't talking about it in a bragging manner or in a positive manner, it was more of a cautionary tale to the students of how not to live your life. It made me wonder how many families lost their dads to this kind of stuff back in the day.

And right on cue......

 

Have you not seen all the questions on here, and in trucking-related media, about using weed and/or beating a drug test?

 

To me thats someone trying to turn their life around. Maybe they will make it , maybe they wont. The drug tests work well to keep them out.
What I have not seen is drivers with CDLs actually doing drugs or evidence of it.
I was at a second chance company when I started because they were the only ones at the time that hired from my area.
Some people would fail to make it through orientation but you never heard about drivers getting popped on a random and losing their license.

 

"We’ve introduced the final driving capabilities needed to commercially haul freight between these two cities — without a human behind the wheel." Not sure about anyone else but any time I have seen one of these secretions on the highway been at least one HUMAN in the truck. So essentially what, just going to decide one find Wednesday hey piss on it, lets roll without 'em?

 

Surely he gets first degree manslaughter there in Oklahoma rather than second degree. Second degree would only be 2-4 years per count. I hope he serves it day for day, consecutive and not concurrent too.