Latest / BREAK/FIX the Motorsports & Vehicle Enthusiast Variety Show / Behind the Wheel: Unveiling the Dark Side of Long Haul Trucking

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Behind the Wheel: Unveiling the Dark Side of Long Haul Trucking · BREAK/FIX the Motorsports & Vehicle Enthusiast Variety Show

0:00
John Summers is the motoring historian.
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He was a company car thrashing technology sales rep that turned into
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a fairly inept sports bike rider.
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Hailing from California, he collects cars and bikes built with plenty of
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cheap and fast, and not much reliable.
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On his show, he gets together with various co-hosts to talk about new
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and old cars, driving, motorbikes, motor racing, and motoring travel.
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Good day, good morning, good afternoon.
0:39
It's John Summers, the Motor Historian, coming at you from somewhere on
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Highway 40 in New Mexico today My topic for discussion today, or monologue
0:51
for today, is long haul trucking.
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Also this notion, are long haul truckers serial killers?
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'Cause this former FBI bloke has published a book saying that many are, and then
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sort of hangs some statistics on it.
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There are, like, 25 or 30 or that kind of horrific number of people in jail
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at the moment who are truckers who have killed more than one person, some dozens.
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But obviously there are many truckers who aren't.
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So after some hours of listening, I have parsed out that if you are the kind of
1:32
person with a predilection to wanting to kill a lot of people, being a truck
1:38
driver is pretty, uh, a pretty good lifestyle to have because of the absolute
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transiency of all of the connections that you make when you're on the road.
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And, and this is the serious point lying below a rather, I think, shameless
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attempt to sell a book by saying there's 450 serial killers roaming
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the highways of America in big rigs.
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See, he has worked with academics.
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I listened to a podcast that he did as well, so I've sort of, you
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know, I've got at least two sources that are backing me up with this.
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Frank Vallucci or something like that his name is.
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But you know, it's quite amusing in the podcast that he and the woman
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doing it there at pains to point out that most truckers are not
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like this, then they go on to talk about, you know, the worst examples.
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So as a historian and a storyteller, one of the things that I'm interested
2:36
in with this whole thing is behind the statistics, you know, where's the truth,
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I guess is, is, is what I'm saying.
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Because one of the things that I've noticed is every time they talk about
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it, they talk about this one particular guy who turned his sleeper cab into a
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torture chamber and really bad stuff.
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That's not why you're listening to the podcast.
3:00
You're listening to the podcast 'cause we're talking about this kind of culture
3:04
of over-the-road trucking and this kind of culture in America particularly.
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And I guess this is why I'm talking about it now while I was listening to
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it is, I mean, if you think about as an English person, if you think about
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motorway service areas in England, or if you think about motorway service areas
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if you're European in France or Germany or Italy, you know, these transient
3:27
places, but they don't have the quality of the place I stayed last night.
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I stayed in Santa Rosa, New Mexico last night, and the next big
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town is an hour down the road.
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That's the distances that, that we're talking about.
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especially in the West, the distances that, that-- but what
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this leads to is these communities are Almost like an airport, right?
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Where a population is constantly moving through, but it's not a
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ticketed or a monitored population.
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And I guess when a lot of these kind of serial killer truckers were on the
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rampage, it was, you know, in an era before there was lots of CCTV everywhere
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and, and there also was not so much scrutiny of what truckers were doing.
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So in other words, you know, if you pick up a prostitute at a truck stop, and you
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have your wicked way, and then you keep her chained up in the cab for a little bit
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whilst you're having your wicked way, and then some stage later you chuck her out.
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I, I know there's, there's like I'm trying to be flippant because
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it's such a horrific thing.
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But nowadays you're more likely to get hit by the CCTV or by, you
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know, the truck's own monitoring.
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So if you're an individual owner operator, you're still sort of off
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the clock a good deal of the time.
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And this guy's book, and this is what prompted me to do this, was that I needed
5:00
to listen to two to three hours before I realized that this guy sort of elided a
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number of things that were, were going on.
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He, he brought them together into something which hadn't quite gelled.
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So the first thread, and the thread that I arrived at it with, is this
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transient trucker culture and the culture of prostitution, which we now
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call sex trafficking, which before I listened to this, I wasn't happy with it.
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I, I didn't understand why we needed to move from bum to
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homeless person to unhoused person.
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But now I'm seeing why the vocabulary needs to evolve because the evilness
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here is the pimp who controls these young women or young women, trans
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people as well, and provides a service.
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And there was, you know, there was one trucker who-- There's one trucker in jail
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at the moment for killing girls who admits to basically being a truck stop pimp.
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He was a trucker, but he pimped people from, uh… Gosh, I really
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did delve into the underbelly of our society with, with that intertwise.
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But this really, this all ties up with something that you probably had heard
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about, which is sex trafficking rings being around like the Super Bowl,
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there being like a boom in activity.
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And this is-- this has nothing to do with the truck.
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This is everything to do with seedy by the hour motels and people advertising
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on websites using euphemistic language, which if you're in the right dark corners
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of the internet and of urban life, you understand what this thing means and are
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able to procure these, uh, these services.
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Arguably the oldest service in the world, but, you know,
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nonetheless, uh, a solid one.
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So these two worlds coincide, and where they coincide leaves opportunity
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for people with bad intentions to do what they wanna do and get away with.
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So the question, are truckers serial killers?
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The answer is, you know, it suits the lifestyle.
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You know, it's like, uh, uh, it's a good job to have if,
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you know, y- you need to be.
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Yes.
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I had arrived at this strand by feeling just how grotesquely, alienatingly inhuman
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the rest stops are, the gas stations are.
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I was thinking about it particularly because in one, I don't know if it,
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the owner operators do it or if the managers are instructed to or if
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they wanna lead their employees at the front, but they always make a
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point of saying, "Welcome to Love's."
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That's the name of the chain of gas stations, and they
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tend to cater to truckers.
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They'll always have, like, diesel and they'll have, like, showers there.
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Although it's not dissimilar to a normal rest stop, it's
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very much aimed at truckers.
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I mean, most of the traffic is truckers, especially at night.
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So that's another element of the culture that I wanna talk about is…
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I meant to ask the AI before starting to record this, but I think you can drive for
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11 hours before you have to have a break.
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So it might be that if you drive for 11 hours and then you take
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a two or three-hour break, you can drive again another 11 hours.
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So if that's the case, that would explain why, you know, if you're stood in these
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places like Love's, you see guys picking up three 5-Hour Energys or Monster
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Energy, which by the way, the range of Monster energy is just unbelievable.
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I, I would say I had one and then like a coffee drink, a Monster coffee drink
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later in the day, and it was a bad mistake because the time of the day
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in the afternoon when I normally get tired, I was mentally still tired, like
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I wasn't able to think that I needed to rest, but I was still awake and able
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to pilot the vehicle down the highway.
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So to judge by the amount of this stuff on sale and the fact that,
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you know, you can get those three cans for six bucks or one for four.
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So what am I trying to say here?
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I'm saying that the roads seem to be full of truck drivers who, in order to earn
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the money they want to, are consuming massive amounts of these energy drinks
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and are probably in something of a kind of a zombie state I mean, if you think
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about it, all the days are the same.
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It doesn't matter whether it's day or night.
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The gas stations look the same wherever you are in the country.
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The food is universally terrible.
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Because you're away from home, the lifestyle, it, it makes
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family life almost impossible.
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So the distances and the time away, I don't have experience at doing it,
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but I've gotta believe that this makes it very different from what trucking
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is like in England or, or in Europe.
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Another big difference is the speed that the trucks move at.
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On an uphill, in places like Oklahoma where the speed limit's 80 miles an
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hour, 75 in some places, on an uphill they might run down to about, you
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know, 65 if they're fully loaded.
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But on the downhill, if you have the cruise set at 75, they are
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passing you at least 10 miles an hour faster than you're going.
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And at night when there's a lot of them and they're all moving
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around, oh, it's a bit scary.
11:01
So I'm at the Studebaker Museum and I'm talking to a, an employee
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of the Studebaker Museum.
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She's telling me about her partner.
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The phrase that she said that's stuck in my mind, 'cause we
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were talking about big trucks.
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This is how the conversation started.
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I think we were talking about my class, and we were talking about the icebreaker
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exercise that we do where we say, "What's your favorite car of the moment?"
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Now, we say of the moment because if you've just been to the Auburn
11:31
Cord Duesenberg Museum, likely as it is that it might be something
11:35
from that if you're a car guy.
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Whereas if you're not a car guy, the whole notion of having a favorite
11:41
car is gonna seem similar to the notion of having a favorite window
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or, you know, a favorite McDonald's.
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It never occurred to you before, so when you're asked the question, "Favorite
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car, favorite car at the moment?" You're strapped, and quite often will
12:00
answer with your Camry or, you know, the Prius you had when your mum was
12:05
growing up or that kind of thing.
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And I don't want to suggest that that's a trite recollection at all.
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Not everybody has to be into cars.
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It does show point of our class, and it shows how much cars enter everybody's
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consciousness, whether they're enthusiastic about the machine themselves,
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fetishize the device in the way that I do, or, or not Now, I do admit I fully
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fetishize 18-wheeler trucks, and when the question was turned on me, "Well,
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what's your favorite car at the moment?"
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I said, "Uh, I don't really know." And then I said, "Do you know what?
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I've just driven thousands of miles across the country looking at all these
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18-wheelers, realizing that Freightliner, and Volvo to a degree, but Freightliner
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and Volvo, they own the US heavy hauler market." And I love Freightliner, and I
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kind of love Freightliner, you know, well, I've always loved the styling of them.
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But Freightliner are part of the Daimler Chrysler empire, so it means
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basically it's Mercedes engineering.
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As I was thinking about doing this pod and thinking about why do I love Freightliner,
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I was thinking about one of the bus drivers that I had when I did tours for
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NETC, that travel company, and he was, I mean, whether we had the tour in Italy or
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in France or in Spain, the drivers always worked for the same firm from Naples.
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I mean, one day, right, we're driving, and the guy's on the phone to his wife, and
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I can't understand a word of his Italian.
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At that time, my Italian was okay.
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You know, conversational, okay.
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He came off the phone, and I said to him, "I couldn't understand a word you were
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saying." He went, "I know." Well, one day, I got talking to him about buses, right?
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And it, we were in a particularly difficult part of Spain.
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We weren't on the plain.
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We were on the hilly bit, and the bus was, I wouldn't have said struggling,
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but I, he huffed and puffed a little.
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So I asked him about the buses and learned that while the Setra that we had at the
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moment was considered okay, really the thing that you wanted was the Mercedes.
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So at that time, I connected Mercedes and Daimler as being
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really strong in commercial.
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And of course, you know, the three-pointed star is by land, sea, and, and air.
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So, uh, I said to, uh, to Maria the, the museum there, "A Freightliner
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18-wheeler probably." She said, "Oh, my partner's got a Kenworth.
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I grew up around these things."
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And I'm like, "That is so cool."
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So I think in another pod I mentioned this obsession that I had with
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Freightliners, and I even included a picture of the kind of Freightliner
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that I, uh, that I particularly like.
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Art Gammy, who often partners me on these feed calls, when I mentioned
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the Freightliner that had done, like, 1.8 million miles that I was looking
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at, he went, "Yeah, 1.8 million miles, so God knows how many drivers
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just jerked off Lord knows how many times in the back of that truck."
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Gross, yeah, but probably true.
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So this is what I'm passing out through this pod, aren't I?
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It's that the machines themselves are so cool, but the way that highway hauling
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has, it just becomes so impersonal.
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I mean, in, in another one of these pods recently I mentioned the Humphrey Bogart
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movie They Drive by Night, I think the Route 66 one, and it's an old movie.
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It's before the Eisenhower Highway infrastructure, and it might
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just be a plot device, but he knows the people in the cafe.
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You know, all the scenes take… Some scenes take place in the cab of
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the truck, but a lot of the scenes take place at the cafe or at the
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depot I just feel like years ago it didn't used to be so impersonal.
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Now, this is the point when, you know, there's always somebody
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who knows more than you.
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In this case, the person who definitely knows more than me is
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Tim Donnelly, who used to write for Hemmings Classic Car, and he had a
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column all about classic trucking.
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And I learned an awful lot about classic trucking from that.
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But one of the reasons why the story stuck in my mind was that it was so hardcore.
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It was so tough.
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Even comparatively recently, you know, when, if you watch the Kris
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Kristofferson movie Convoy, or even Maximum Overdrive, the one where the
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trucks take over the town and the soundtrack's by AC/DC, those trucks
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were still stick shift at that time with
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a clutch.
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A lot of the stuff not power-assisted.
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So you needed to be a pretty diesel kind of a person to wheel that thing
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down the road, especially in, you know, it's… I've got the air on, I'm
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comfy, but it is 91 degrees outside.
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And I don't think the rubber duck
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Mack had air con, did it?
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I seem to remember him driving with the window down all the time.
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So I did do a little bit of surfing last night on what happened to
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Kenworth, Mack, and Peterbilt, the three sort of traditional American marks.
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Kenworth and Peterbilt are, of course, one, so have owned by Paccar, is the name
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of the corporation that owns both of them.
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I didn't read too much about them because you still see them, but they
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specialize in the parts of the market that Freightliner and Volvo don't do.
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So what have Freightliner and Volvo done so well?
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They have
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really captured the holistic ownership experience for a
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giant fleet like Walmart or CRST
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or one of these kind of guys who are buying thousands of trucks.
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That's how they've really catered to that very smoothly.
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There's an awesome spares network.
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At the local truck stop, there's gonna be the part that you need if you break down.
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So that's why they've achieved the market penetration they have.
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That was the question that I asked.
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So the follow-up is, well, Kenworth and Peterbilt, if you're an
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owner-operator, the sort of what the AI called the, quote, "luxury truck
19:02
market," that's why you still see Kenworths and Peterbilts out there.
19:08
You know, and there's other players like Sterling and so on as well
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that I've not mentioned up to now.
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Not to forget Mack.
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Mack do dump trucks and garbage trucks and fit specialized niches.
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You will see Macks as, you know, oversized haulers.
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You will see them working where it's all a dirt road, and the
19:32
thing's gonna get smashed to pieces.
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So they fit those kind of niches, whereas the Freightliners and Volvos are optimized
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for this kind of highway hauling.
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Now, having learned that, I was quite pleased that I have always stuck with
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Freightliners as the market, as if I instinctively knew that Freightliners
19:55
were the kings of highway hauling.
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Now, why do I want to talk about it and sort of historicize it?
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Well, because I think it's gonna go away.
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You know, I think we can see how it's gonna go away, 'cause as soon as the
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autonomous whatever is able to prove that it's gonna crash less than the trucker
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and is cheaper than the trucker, the trucker's gonna be replaced, isn't he?
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Maybe he's just gonna be on autopilot, but I can't see that lasting
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very long with him in the truck.
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I think trucks are gonna be designed without people in, and I think, uh,
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they're gonna be controlled remotely.
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So I do think the age of piloted, albeit now supervised, but the age of the piloted
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over-the-road truck is coming to a close.
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Is that why now, even in my 50s, I still feel like I'd quite like
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to have a career as a trucker?
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Even though I've talked about the alienation, even though I've talked about
21:04
how if you wanna be a serial killer, this is a great profession to have,
21:08
is it because… Here's what it is.
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You know sometimes you'll see stray ants?
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I used to be like, "Where's that ant come from?" when I was
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10, 11, 12, that kind of age.
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Where did the ant come from?
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And you'd be like, "Well, you know, some nest. He's got lost from some
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nest." I would just be like, "Well, what if he's not got lost? What if
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he's just, like, exploring?" And of course, kind of he is, right?
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He, he's looking for a source of food, and then he has to, you know, he has to
21:35
find Livingstone, then he has to find his way back, and then the ant, the whole
21:40
colony can exploit the food source, right?
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I mean, my wife says they're gross, and she's right, they are, but I still
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think there's something kind of awesome about the way that they do that, right?
21:52
But we've been talking about the individual ant, right?
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We've not been talking about all those ones swarming in the nest,
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all of them serving the queen.
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But what if the queen was money and the nest was a city?
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I can't get that thought out of my mind.
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I, I'm not that kind of person.
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I'm Livingstone ant, out on his own exploring.
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I'm
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not the ant swarming in the anthill.
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Of course, there are truck sales places and truck graveyards all
22:27
along the side of Highway 40.
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And whilst I've resisted the temptation to stop and look at rusty, derelict cars
22:35
at the side of the road, because I've got enough of those myself, I'm able to be
22:38
like, "You can't buy, so why would you look and decide that you wanted to buy?
22:43
Why would you do that?" So I'm able to avoid it with the cars, but with the
22:47
trucks, I'm just too fascinated by it.
22:51
I, I stopped at one place called J&G Trucking yesterday.
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They have new stuff.
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They have used stuff.
22:59
They have wrecked stuff that they're taking parts off.
23:03
According to the AI, five grand is a, a bottom price.
23:08
If the truck is, is five grand, that's scrap market money.
23:12
It will likely need an engine or a transmission or both.
23:17
If they sit, they likely need air lines.
23:20
Unless you're a diesel mechanic, there's no economic way of bringing them back.
23:24
All of which just feels like a challenge to me.
23:26
I'd also need to get a CDL license as well.
23:30
Just the tractor unit is almost heavier than the 26,000 pounds.
23:38
So I think I could drive just the tractor unit on its own, but I couldn't use it
23:42
to tow anything without getting a CDL.
23:45
That's a thought, isn't it?
23:46
That it means that I could get one, get it running, drive it around, get
23:52
used to it a little bit before doing a CDL course and then towing stuff.
23:58
Further research on this revealed that, in fact, despite the weight
24:03
being less, you still need a CDL to operate the kind of Freightliner
24:09
that I would want in California.
24:11
There was a way that you could do it through a classic policy that I
24:16
investigated some years ago, but that loophole, A, seemed dodgy to explain to
24:23
a cop at the side of the road, and B, it may even be that it's closed up now.
24:28
So I guess if you're thinking of doing what I'm doing, absurd as it may seem,
24:34
you are likely to need to get a CDL to operate anything resembling the kind of
24:41
truck that you might want To be clear here, I don't wanna be an over-the-road
24:48
trucker living on somebody else's timetable, but I am interested in weather
24:57
in this Dodge and Livingstone act.
24:59
I am interested in the fact that these people are between the cities, and
25:06
what they see is the real America.
25:08
I'm looking at it now, winding through this beautiful valley.
25:12
You know, that's what they see, and, and I think they're right to feel that the
25:16
real America is this out here, not what people see in the anthill every day.
25:23
The concerns of the anthill are not the concerns of Highway 40 at whatever time
25:32
of day or night, day of the week or year.
25:36
The other thing that just to sort of… I guess I'm jumping around, but I always do.
25:41
On the theme of alienation, you're sitting down all the
25:45
time not really doing anything.
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It's not like you can…
25:48
If you're in a car on your own, you can drive to a national park to have
25:52
a hike, but you can't do that if you're towing, if you're hauling.
25:57
If you look, most cities particularly are incredibly hostile to big vehicles.
26:05
So you are stuck on the outskirts of big cities, you can't, you can't go into them.
26:11
So that sort of cements this sort of outsider, literally,
26:17
kind of status, doesn't it?
26:19
Now, something I didn't touch on, but should, is why there's such
26:22
high turnover in the profession.
26:25
According to the back of one of the trucks, and you'd know if you've driven
26:28
in the States, there's so much advertising drivel that's on the back of trucks.
26:33
You know, there's one of the ads I saw yesterday reckoned you could make
26:37
190 grand a year as an over-the-road trucker, which seems pretty good, and
26:43
that certainly seems to sit at odds with everything I've heard about it
26:48
being, you know, very frustrating.
26:52
Well, what I just talked about, there being no parking for you, there's, like,
26:55
no provision given to truckers, and not in the warehousing processing either.
27:02
So this may be wrong, but my understanding is, is, you know, if you're not able
27:06
to get to the warehouse by when it closes at 5:30 on a Friday night, you
27:10
might be hanging around in that city until the warehouse opens on Monday
27:14
morning, and you can drop the load off.
27:17
You know, so there's a lot of stuff that wouldn't correlate with
27:21
the six-figure salaries for me.
27:24
I was thinking, you know, could I… Would I drive for those guys reliable to move
27:29
the cars from Pebble Beach all the time?
27:32
Those guys, that's the job done very thoroughly, isn't it?
27:36
And something that I was thinking about as well is that hazmat drivers are much
27:43
more highly trained than Well, these folk that have been in the newspapers
27:49
recently who have, uh, obtained CDL and, and driver's licenses somehow without
27:57
being able to speak English properly.
27:59
Don't wanna make this political, but there are a lot of signs that actually
28:06
require you to be able to read English.
28:10
I'm passing one now, engine brake use prohibited.
28:15
So there's a perfect example of something where if a trucker is not
28:19
able to read English, he's not able to follow the rules of the road properly.
28:24
So it seems to me an impossible argument to argue that it's okay for truckers not
28:29
to be able to speak English properly, yet there are a lot of them on the
28:32
road, it would seem, according to, you know, right-wing media outlets
28:36
who obviously have nothing to gain by hammering a story, uh, such as that.
28:46
So they said that one of the other things that Freightliner have got
28:49
worked out, this AI said this, was the Aero, really effectively Volvo too.
28:55
And while Peterbilt and Kenworth have Aero models, and I'm sure, you know, as
29:02
you drive on the highway you'll see Aero models with the swoopy noses versus, you
29:07
know, the old-fashioned high square noses.
29:10
Well, this, this really has an impact on gas mileage, and obviously if you're
29:16
like Costco or Swift Transportation or Walmart, the difference between
29:23
five and a half MPG and six MPG for you is quite a lot of money.
29:28
So this is why you see a lot of Freightliners and, and Volvos.
29:34
The owner/operator thing, you know, where you own the truck, that seems romantic,
29:39
but I was looking at this truck paper.
29:42
Holly was like, "Why has it got loads of pictures of the same Freightliners?
29:45
Like, I don't understand." It's like an old-fashioned auto trade, you know,
29:49
but that's what, that's what it is.
29:52
And a lot of them, they'll do you like 0% down, so if you like
29:56
drive for a particular fleet.
29:58
I mean, that's indentured servitude, isn't it?
30:01
You own the truck, you're responsible for the truck, and it is depreciating
30:06
as you use it, y- so you have to work to pay it off, right?
30:11
It's, it's already depreciated from the moment you take it out, so you have
30:14
to work for them to pay the truck off.
30:16
What rip-off that is.
30:18
All right, this one, Cargo Solutions Express, hiring drivers 50 cents per
30:29
mile, excellent benefits, 909 somewhere.
30:34
50 cents per mile.
30:36
So let's say you drive 600 miles a day, it'd be less, doing the thing that they
30:42
do where you drive through the night.
30:45
600 miles a day, $300 a day, do four times.
30:50
So if you work a five-day week, $1,500 a week.
30:55
I mean, I guess it depends what your lifestyle is away from the trucking,
30:59
because this is what the FBI, this Frank Pellucci fella was saying, is
31:03
that, you know, a lot of truckers, uh, they maybe don't have very much away
31:09
from, you know, the truck and the job.
31:12
In other words, they might not have a house or a home, they might just be living
31:17
in scuzzy by-the-hour motels themselves.
31:21
I was thinking that because in these Love's truck stops, they sell
31:24
T-shirts, like every truck stop.
31:27
They, they… It's not like one or two.
31:28
It's not like they're like a clothing stop, it's just like, you know,
31:32
alongside the oil and the jerky you are likely to need a T-shirt
31:40
Special deals on the America's 250th.
31:43
I know it's in the place I was in yesterday and I
31:45
was tempted to, to indulge.
31:48
So the assumption is, again, you're, you're on the road, you are never…
31:53
And literally if you're, if you own the truck and you're paying for it, any
31:58
time you're not driving it and earning money, it's costing you money, isn't it?
32:04
So what a bind, like, yeah, no wonder people get mad.
32:11
I mean, just to illustrate how if, when you spend a lot of time out
32:15
on the road, how absurd cities are.
32:18
When you drive through them, as you come into them, the
32:21
speed limit's always come down.
32:23
But what happens is if you drive at the speed limit, you're the
32:27
slowest person on the road.
32:28
You're just swamped by the traffic.
32:31
Immediately you've come from a place where everyone drives at the same speed
32:37
limit, and it's a high speed limit, and we all get down the road in a sensible
32:41
way, to people zipping around doing 100 miles an hour, others doing 70, others
32:48
doing 65, and the speed limit being 55.
32:52
And that was my experience in St.
32:55
Louis, for example.
32:56
Thank you, Drive Thru.
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