How the century-old trucking industry is changing

DALLAS -- They’re literally the biggest players on the transportation landscape: tankers, flatbeds, big rigs and box trucks that roam the nation’s highways and haul billions of tons of freight worth trillions of dollars. But even the century-old trucking industry is facing changes.

“I usually start [at] like 1, 2 o'clock, something like that, 12 o’clock. Depends what kind of work I’m doing,” says Ernest Duran, a semi-truck driver in the Dallas-Fort Worth area.

Why such an early start? Duran says it comes down to one word: competition.

“Everybody’s up to the same thing, you know? The same loads,” says Duran. “So if you don’t get there early -- when you get there at 4 or 5 o clock as some divas want to do -- you know, you won’t find no loads, you know? The good ones will be gone.”

One early morning this summer, Duran’s truck hauls a load of what looks like rocks. To Duran, however, it’s a very specific crushed stone, washed and sorted into piles based on size.

In the red-hot Dallas-Fort Worth construction market, the cargo that Duran and the dozens of other local rock haulers carry is a precious commodity. His job consists of racing from quarry to job site and back again, filling orders he receives on his phone.

“You know, a good week, it’ll be four loads a day, which is 20 a week,” says Duran. “I used to do 32, 34, an average of six, seven a day. I was making $10, $12, $13,000 a week. Now it’s only like 6, 7, 5 [thousand dollars per week].”

The work is not easy. Duran often sits in the driver’s seat for up to 16 hours a day, constantly shifting gears -- Duran says he rarely uses the clutch -- and jumping out to offload a haul. At the end of the day, he says his entire body is sore.

“Everything, man, everything -- the whole body,” Duran tells ABC Audio. “Because you’re sitting here inactive really for so long. Now my knees are going … But yeah it takes a toll. Your back hurts so much sometimes you can’t even move.”

He says the job can be mentally taxing, as well.

“You’re gonna see me looking in my mirrors every 3, 5 seconds. Because you’ve got to be aware of what’s around you, just in case something in front of you happens -- you know where to go,” says Duran.

For Duran and drivers like him, the road ahead might be headed for an unexpected turn. The truck coming up in his rear-view mirror might one day have no driver at all.

“Autonomy is absolutely here,” says Ossa Fisher, president of self-driving trucking startup, Aurora.

The company’s clients include FedEx and Uber Freight. For now, a human safety driver keeps their hands inches from the controls, ready to take over in case of emergency.

“We’re driving autonomous loads every day on Texas highways,” says Fisher.

“We cannot keep pace with the amount of freight that is coming through our state,” says John Esparsa, president of the Texas Trucking Association.

Aurora CEO Chris Urmson says the big rig of the future will be loaded with technology that mimics human senses.

“The Aurora driver is this combination of the hardware, so different sensors, like a LIDAR, and camera and radar that allow it to see the world,” says Urmson. “And then some really interesting software that allows it to take that data and to figure out how to drive safely throughout the world.

In some cases, Urmson says, the tech can even surpass what a human driver is capable of.

“We can see pedestrians on the side road at night, beyond the distance of the headlights. And so we can be making a lane change away from that person walking down the side of the freeway. And so there are ways in which we are going to be safer for sure,” says Urmson.

In the same way that rock haulers are in hot competition with each other, so are companies that hope to one day replace them.

Rocky Garff is with Waymo Via, another autonomous vehicle company that’s been moving goods between Dallas and Houston since the summer of 2020.

“We currently operate with a truck driver [with a] CDL, that’s monitoring our system, but we’re working toward an autonomous future,” says Garff.

He insists that human drivers like Ernest Duran don’t have anything to worry about – at least not in the short term.

“It’s really important that we’re partnering with commercial drivers who have a ton of experience, who help our engineers determine how the truck should react, and how it should drive,” says Garff, adding that “safety is our priority -- it’s our top priority -- and we’re committed to rolling this technology out in a slow and safe manner so that it can bring the desired benefits to the road.”

For now, Duran says he hopes to retire in about three years, after he turns 67.

“And then live la vida loca, you know?” he says.

Listen to this story and more on ABC Audio's new special, On The Move:

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