Last time I really thought about it, I figured I had things pretty much under control. That was before I ventured down to Louisville for that bit of March madness called the Mid-America Trucking Show. I trotted dutifully from one press event to another, taking notes, gathering information, and trying to make sense of an industry that’s evolving and changing at an unprecedented pace.

Back when I was driving, I never attended Mid-America. Instead, I waited for the magazine reports and sucked up all they had to offer on new products and innovations from the show. Mostly, I confess, I was interested in what my new dashboard was going to look like and how many more ponies the engine people had managed to stuff under the hood.

Drivers are still looking for that kind of information because it hits them where they live. The cabs, the engines, the tires: they all have a bearing on day-to-day life and how much fun the job can be, and are
therefore relevant.

Much of what was unveiled at Mid-America this year was cab and engine stuff, and drivers have much reason to be excited, but at the other end of the spectrum were advancements in technology that a lot of fleet owners — never mind drivers — will have a hard time getting their heads around. They’ll embrace the technology because it makes for safer and more productive trucking. And if the marketing people and the fleet accountants can demonstrate a good return on investment, they’ll buy some of it.

What really struck me at Mid-America is how wide the gap is becoming between the folks who develop the technology for this industry, and the folks who use it.

Nothing is the same as it was, even five years ago. The HOS rules have changed, cargo securement rules have changed, customs procedures have changed and continue to change on an almost weekly basis. Engine technology and braking systems are changing almost as fast as fuel prices. Lately, it occurs to me that maybe we should worry less about the hows, and more about the whys.

Take HOS for example. I sat in on a drivers’ HOS training course recently, and there were drivers in there — experienced drivers — who didn’t know that facility auditors seek out violations by comparing fuel and toll receipts to log sheets. These fellows understood the mechanics of drawing lines on a sheet of paper, and they understood, very well, the principles of banking time when the opportunity arises, making unproductive time disappear, and calculating the time required to travel a given distance. But the fundamental reasons for complying — never mind the safety aspects — were foreign to them.

The hows were clear, but the whys remained a mystery. There’s a lot of ground between understanding why it’s important to match time markers to a log sheet and understanding the fundamentals of EGR, or ABS, or the relationship between torque, horsepower, and fuel economy. Not all of us are capable of making that leap, but we should be. The demands of the job — regulatory, economic, and moral — along with the market in which we work, require that we bring at least as much intellectual horsepower to the task as mechanical horsepower.

I’m wondering here if we shouldn’t be investing a bit more time and money developing better drivers than throwing it at technology that compensates for mistakes?

There are some serious implications here that extend back to our basic truck driver training principles. Can we afford to train truck drivers to be all that these times demand they be? Can we afford not to?

In the wake of Alberta’s Delta Driving School fiasco in Calgary, it strikes me that there’s still a market for the “warm body” behind the wheel. Maybe if there were more of a premium placed on drivers’ skills — keeping up with the task of using technology, and with the regulatory changes — we’d see an influx of people who see technology as an asset rather than a threat.

An odd dichotomy exists in trucking: as an industry, we’re big users of technology, and we’re out there on the leading edge of applying it, yet many of the problems we experience are decidedly low-tech. Namely, people who don’t always understand why.