Old-timers who try to tell you what long-haul trucking was like in the 1970s will start with the frenetic rhythm of the highway and then somehow end up talking instead about the other guys lapping up the pavement, guys who were out there on the road, too. Back then, Merle Haggard crooned on the local all-night country station about Will Chandler and Sonny Pruitt making the white line move. There were, and still are, those famously long stretches of solitude, man and machine rolling on together against the peculiar luminescence of the great American unknown. Then, there were the 10 codes coming in low across the CB radio waves, the familiar faces at truck stops and diners, and the guys who showed up outside of Tulsa or Little Rock or Detroit to help out in a jam. The truck driver, the old-timers will tell you sheepishly, is the last American cowboy. 

In his collared shirt and faded dark blue jeans, Marty Glomb looks the part. Glomb, a former truck driver, now serves as board chairman of the American Truck Historical Society. When we meet, he is in Louisville, Kentucky, manning the group’s booth at the Mid-America Trucking Show, or MATS, the world’s largest and longest-running annual heavy-trucking event, boasting over 56,000 attendees. Glomb’s love affair with trucking started when he was a boy on his grandpa’s farm. He remembers sitting in his first grade class, drawing pictures of trucks in his notebooks. By the time he started long-haul trucking, it was 1978. “It was not a job back then,” he insists. “It was a profession.” Trucking took care of his young family. His daughter was just 2 years old. 

Like a lot of the guys at the show, Glomb has seen public perception of the industry change. “It was much more well respected in those early days than it is today for a lot of reasons,” he tells me. Four decades ago, he stopped to help another trucker who was having some trouble with his rig out near Austin, Texas. He says he still talks to the guy almost every day. “The friends I have are all from that time.” Now, Glomb says that through the ATHS, part of his mission is making sure those people aren’t erased. “Some of these people, what they’ve done for us,” he pauses. “They’ve changed the way we live.” 

A tension between the past and the future has emerged at MATS, as it has in the broader trucking industry. Outside, at the PKY Truck Show, where families linger, peeking inside cabins and under hoods, a century of transportation history is on display. Inside, alongside vendors selling everything from custom miniature models to massage chairs, there are tech gurus pushing AI logistics support and dispatch services. 

Meanwhile, Uber-backed self-driving vehicle technology company Aurora Innovation has announced plans to launch commercial services with its driverless trucks on public roads in Texas in April. The company says it will expand into New Mexico and Arizona later in the year. Even in inclement weather, Aurora will allow its trucks to operate with no safety driver. The 18-wheelers will run day and night in urban and suburban communities, in heavy traffic, and in highway construction zones. Aurora struck a deal with Nvidia and Continental earlier this year to deploy driverless trucks at scale with a target date of 2027. That means that within the next two or three years, Aurora and competitors in the space plan to run thousands, if not tens of thousands, of driverless trucks on public roads in the United States.

For years, autonomous vehicle technologies seemed more like science fiction than fact, even among truck drivers. It came not at all and then all at once. Gord Magill, the trucker philosopher behind the “Autonomous Trucker” Substack, says that was by design. Magill has been sounding the alarm about what automation could mean for the American truck driver for years. The profession, he says, is facing extinction. In the midst of one of the Kentucky Exposition Center’s great halls, he tells me, “MATS is really kind of a museum in waiting.” It’s true that at “the country’s biggest trucker party,” as he calls it, talk of driverless vehicles can be met with skepticism. 

While Aurora and other companies developing driverless systems argue that their technology isn’t designed to replace truckers entirely, their value proposition is that the technology can do things no human driver can or would do. Their autonomous drivers, they say, can operate continuously at a consistent speed and without breaks. They don’t fatigue as humans do. They don’t worry or become distracted by things like a child’s birthday or a parent’s illness. Their girlfriends and wives don’t call. They never get drunk or high before getting behind the wheel. And years of testing, the companies contend, suggest that their technology is safer for other motorists out on the road. Meanwhile, they say, their technology will create “better” jobs. Long-haul trucking is a brutal gig, after all. 

“These are people that, for long-haul drivers,” Aurora Innovations CEO Chris Urmson told Marketplace in a 2023 interview, “they don’t get to stay at home every night, they’re off on the road, perhaps weeks, months at a time.” Driving a truck is a dangerous job, Urmson said, a job that comes with all kinds of health problems. “Turns out if you’re a truck driver, you’re 10 times as likely to die on the job as the average American,” he continued. “And so while this is a really important, critical job … we can improve safety, and we can help them have better, high-quality jobs.” 

Once a pathway to the middle class for workers with a high school diploma, the truck driving industry has seen a decline in wages, hours, and working conditions over the last 40 years. A complex web of policy choices is partially to blame. In 1980, President Jimmy Carter signed the Motor Carrier Act into law, substantially reducing government control of the trucking industry and eliminating some restrictions placed on regulated carriers. Increased competition among trucking firms resulted in lower wages and longer working hours for drivers. Meanwhile, immigration and labor policy has led to an influx of new and inexperienced drivers willing to work for rock-bottom wages, at least for a little while. The overall driver turnover rate has skyrocketed to 90%. 

“What drivers want,” Magill says, “is not for their jobs to be eliminated. It’s for their concerns about quality of life and safety to be addressed. A lot of these guys are experienced drivers with hundreds of thousands of miles under their belts. They want to do what they’re trained to do, and they want to be treated like professionals, not as the lowest common denominator.”

Across the hall, at another booth, National Association of Small Trucking Companies President David Owen is counseling small-firm owners about their business operations. Asked about driverless trucks, Owen says the idea that an autonomous vehicle can do what a truck driver does is “offensive.” “There is lots of chatter about on-road safety,” Owen says, “and the unspoken reality is that our professional CDL holders save tens of thousands of lives every day in situations where other motorists are at error. There’s no machine that’s ever going to be able to do that.” Though companies such as Aurora claim that their driverless trucks are the safest option, the vehicles have been involved in collisions, even with human safety drivers present. In those cases, the companies claim, other drivers on the road, not their systems, have been at fault. 

While there are virtually no federal regulations governing the commercial use of autonomous vehicles on public roads, a patchwork of state laws governing the industry has begun to emerge. Meanwhile, the Teamsters union, whose membership includes a small percentage of truckers, is now pushing state legislatures to require human drivers to be present in vehicles to monitor systems. 

THE DANGER BIG TRUCKS POSE TO PEDESTRIANS IS JUST ANOTHER INVENTED PANIC

On the final day of MATS, as the show winds down, families line the outskirts of the parking lot to see off the drivers in a kind of makeshift parade. There are people waving at the truckers and taking videos on their phones. A company driver, a guy in his 30s wearing a white pearl snap shirt, blue jeans, and work boots, asks a question. “Do you think it’s too cynical not to want to introduce a little boy to this?” There are children everywhere, wide-eyed and slack-jawed, gawking at the steel and chrome machines. “My brother, he just had a son in September. I’d love to show him this, but I don’t want to do that if it’s all going to go away. I want to know that it’s still out there.”

“It takes a special breed to be a truck-driving man,” Haggard hums over the waves, “and a steady hand to pull that load behind.”

Farahn Morgan is a contributing writer at Country Highway and a freelance writer living and working in the Blue Ridge Mountains.