Perspectives: Tyrel Sulzer from CVTA Member TransTech Examines the Human Side of Trucking’s Technological Future

JPMorgan's Jamie Dimon went off-script at an investor cocktail in late January. Talking AI displacement, he zeroed in on the trucking labor force. "You can't lay off 2 million truckers tomorrow. If you do, you will have civil unrest."

The most powerful banker on Wall Street, in front of a room full of people who fund the autonomous trucking startups, told them out loud what training operators have been quietly saying since the first Aurora demo lap.

We train drivers every week. A Class B regional guy walks in, three kids, a mortgage, ten years of clean MVR. He's at TransTech because he wants the Class A bump and the at-home miles a tanker route gives him. The "automate and retrain" pitch from the AV decks doesn't survive five minutes with that guy.

Here's the part of Dimon's comment the AV PR shops aren't quoting. Even if the technology gets there, the displacement math doesn't work without a ten or fifteen year glide path. The fleets hiring our graduates run 30-year-old equipment alongside brand-new Cascadias. That's how trucking actually rolls out new tech. Slowly. Mixed. With a trainer in the right seat.

A few takeaways for member-school operators:

1. The labor argument has new air cover from a name nobody can dismiss. Use it in your state lobbying conversations.

2. We've never argued against building AV trucks. We've argued against shipping the workforce out the back door of the economy on a press release timeline.

3. Carrier partners need to hear the framing from us. Hirschbach announced 500 Aurora trucks on April 30. They still need humans for everything Aurora isn't doing yet, which is most freight on most lanes.

Next week we'll look at Hirschbach specifically. What they're actually deploying, what they're not, and what the deal means for member-school placement pipelines.

— Tyrel

TransTech CDL Training / Commercial Driver Services