The backup camera situation?

I always laugh at these posts. It exudes such confidence about the future, while completely lacking an understanding of the trucking industry. I won’t completely destroy your theory out of kindness, just keeping on praising tech. People that do that typically can’t solve problems on their own.

When you’ve been driving more than a month, and have hauled cows, dump trailers, both baffled and unbaffled tanker, walking floor, open top cottonseed vans you load, flatbed, hook tinders, 15 stop furniture loads behind shopping centers (some with just a few inches of room to play with), then come back and say how tech will do the job.

 

While very true, it's much more fundamental than that. It completely lacks understanding of humans, much less the trucking industry.
Look at something as simple as ELD's. It's been, and still is, a battle to get what amounts to a slightly more accurate way to track time If that has been a five year battle, it boggles my mind that people think full self driving trucks have a chance in 10 years.

 

They ignore than out of 210,000 carriers, 90% own 6 trucks or less. I guess all carriers will have no problem paying extra for the equipment while paying a driver til self driving utopia is the norm. They ignore the fact that this tech can be crippling, relying on one manufacturer to solve the issues that come with alternative fuels and the ridiculous downtime.

There is liability to bear when freight damage occurs, whether it’s dead cows, or a coil that breaks loose etc. They have no answer for places I unload like tomorrow where you park in oncoming traffic to open the doors, then back in near perfect or your screwed. And if you leave there incorrectly, your trailer sits down on your drives and you need a tow. I don’t want to keep going, I can scenario it to death from real life daily experiences.

 

Lol, great story super trucker.
I39 in Wisconsin last week, 37 trucks in the ditch, 3 were were Mega’s, most had land star or rental trailers behind them.
All were boxes, not a skateboard in the bunch

 

ya right... yard dogs do more backing in a day than you could in a week on a big empty yard and they still hit things

 

Freightliner has been working for 3 years on cameras to replace the mirrors. Just getting the mounts working properly was a feat of engineering. Trying to do the same with the trailer would be a nightmare.

From the outside it looks like trailer wiring is simple, and you could easily tap into the marker lights for power. After a couple years in the industry you would see how fraught with difficulties it would be. Tonight I watched our mechanics try and deal with a midship turn signal that wouldn't turn off. The rear upper lights often have their cord pulled out/damaged in docks, by tree branches, etc. Wiring up one single trailer for a 1 truck operation wouldn't be too difficult but for fleets? Forget about it.

The study to which you refer is very dated and dealt only with backup cameras. The driver focusses too much on the tail of the trailer, while losing sight of the tandems and the nose. The tail is centered on the dock, but the traiiler is at an angle and hitting up front. Or the hood is getting rammed into things.

 

I still like the drone idea...

 

Deleted.

I have spent 4 hours carefully proofreading this #### thing only to find that it's infected wtih early Words not used since Henry the 8th in some ways but with modern grammer making me look like a total idiot to anyone in modern times.

Im going to ahead ad rebuild my computer. It wont take two hours to reimage and be back running with 6 hours of overnight dating if necessary to be fully "Here" and not just fully say... "her "

 

This is for straight trucks, not lcvs