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Panopticons of the Interstate

REVIEW ESSAY
Data Driven:
Truckers, Technology, and the New Workplace Surveillance
by Karen Levy
Princeton University Press, 2022, 240 pages

In the opening scenes of the classic 1977 film Smokey and the Bandit, Burt Reynolds’s character Bo “Bandit” Darville makes a proposal to his truck-driving friend and business partner Cledus “The Snowman” Snow:

“Now we have a chance, a big chance, to make a run for some big bucks, eighty thousand of ’em.”

“Oh really.”

“We’re just gonna run over to Texarkana and pick up four hundred cases of Coors and bring it back in twenty-eight hours.”

“What the hell we want to go to Texas for and haul beer back here?”

“For the good old American life. For the money, for the glory, and for the fun.”

In Data Driven: Truckers, Technology, and the New Workplace Surveillance, Cornell sociologist Karen Levy explains how a once highly regarded and well-paid job—which occupied such a place in the Ameri­can cultural consciousness that it was possible for a film like Smokey and the Bandit to become wildly successful—is now bereft of money, glory, or fun, and of characters like Bandit and Snowman. She shows that, to a large extent, this transformation of the industry, and of the people who populate it, has been accomplished through the imposition of surveillance technology, both by the state and by that cohort of our managerial caste who would never find themselves on the other side of the cameras.

Levy’s book has entered the zeitgeist at a time when truckers have spent the last three years bouncing through the contradictory states of Schrödinger’s cat. They have been worshipped as the most essential of essential workers during Covid lockdowns, condemned as terrorists warranting asset seizure and bank account freezing by Prime Minister Justin Trudeau of Canada, and treated as almost an economic afterthought by Elon Musk, whose new Tesla truck appears designed to be driven by crash test dummies. As a consequence of the latter, soon-to-be‑unemployed truckers are often a subject of rampant speculation by the commentariat, many of whom are in thrall to the utopian marketing copy put out by tech bros under the employ of autonomous truck developers like Waymo and Torc. Yet the commentariat themselves are now facing a downgrade to the status of precariat thanks to similar lines of digital code, which can’t quite yet drive those trucks.

Deregulation or Transferred Regulation?

Prior to Data Driven, I was already well acquainted with the work of two other academics who have studied America’s truckers, whom Levy cites throughout her book: Michael Belzer and Steve Viscelli. Belzer, a former trucker, Teamster, and now professor of economics at Wayne State University, wrote what may have been the first book-length treatment of trucking industry deregulation and of the drivers who keep it all moving. Sweatshops on Wheels, published in 2000, analyzed the effects of the Motor Carrier Act of 1980, a seminal piece of legislation in the age of deregulation, signed into law by Jimmy Carter.

Anyone who has taken a flight in America has benefited from the Airline Deregulation Act of 1978, a better-known piece of deregulation from this period. But the effects of the Motor Carrier Act are less visible, unless, like Belzer, you were a trucker before and after this law was passed. The title Sweatshops on Wheels illustrates what happened to truckers’ paychecks after the passage of the act.

In the course of deregulating the trucking market, and allowing virtually anyone to enter trucking, the law removed price controls for the rates which carriers set, and in so doing, enabled a new form of “market regulation,” especially where paying drivers is concerned. Under the new system, the lowest common denominator sets the rate floor, and wages for many drivers thereafter fell precipitously. Belzer and Viscelli explore the side effects of this deregulation and the collapse of drivers’ wages. These issues gave rise to the technologies which are the focus of Levy’s work.

Belzer describes “a new regulatory imperative, what political scien­tists call ‘social regulation’ or what most truckers like myself would call ‘dealing with the DOT.’” As drivers are mostly paid by the mile, and nearly everyone and everything one deals with on the road is an impedi­ment to making those miles, the incentives to flout the rules are baked into the cake, and occasionally that rule-flouting leads to an accident or a visit to the courthouse. Shane Hamilton, in Trucking Country: The Road to America’s Wal-Mart Economy (2014), explores this “dense web of weigh stations, ports of entry, reams of paperwork, layers of taxation, and contradictory regulations.” As Levy summarizes, “economic dereg­ulation has compelled an increase in ‘social regulation’—federal rules, structures, and bureaucracies that govern . . . issues like driver overwork and fatigue.” This social regulation stands in for the now defunct economic regulation, which, at least, ensured that truckers were spared from undue pressures in making deliveries.

University of Pennsylvania sociologist Steve Viscelli, in his book The Big Rig: Trucking and the Decline of the American Dream (2016), picks up on Belzer’s work and examines some of the methods by which trucking companies convince so many drivers to enter this now low-paying industry. For if the money is not as good as it used to be, who will sign up to do this job, and where will we find them? For Viscelli, answering this question took a decade and led him to obtain a commercial driver’s license (CDL) and become a long-haul trucker himself for about six months:

I did a trip plan for the load and realized I would be thirty miles outside Columbus that night. . . . I would be sitting unpaid for more than 42 hours. In the previous week I earned an average of more than $130 a day. For Monday’s driving I would earn a little under one hundred dollars. Tuesday I would earn nothing and Wednesday I would be lucky to earn fifty. . . .

And all while Viscelli was spending the July 4th weekend alone at a truck stop in Columbus, Ohio, away from his family in upstate New York.

The rest of his book investigates how trucking companies use various subsidies and grant programs to train new drivers, more often than not at their own in-house schools, or as my fellow professionals refer to them, “CDL mills.” When not getting money from local and state governments, or Uncle Sam, many trucking fleets operate their own credit companies, which loan potential drivers the money, often before they clear the barest of background or skills checks. These loans come with all of the predictable strings attached, including 25 percent or higher interest rates, and various penalties for failure to pay, or exclusivity contracts which require drivers to work long enough for the lending company to balance this particularly insidious set of scales. The striking reality of becoming a trucker in America today is that even before a newly minted trucker gets to enjoy the “freedom of the open road,” many a driver is made, in effect, an indentured servant to the company that employs him.

Deregulation, in short, should not be confused with expanding truck­er freedoms. On the contrary, truckers faced with increasing economic pressures have been met with the monitoring technologies examined in Data Driven.

Punching the Clock under the Eye of Sauron

On the first page, Levy goes to the heart of what is possibly the most contentious piece of existing workplace surveillance technology—the ELD, or Electronic Logging Device—a Department of Transportation–mandated device which monitors and records driving hours and exten­sive details of truck operation. She writes (emphasis added):

This book examines how truckers’ work is being affected by this proliferation of surveillance technologies. These technologies are part of an emerging regime of digital enforcement. . . . in trucking, digital enforcement confronts the existing social order of the industry: it upends the occupational autonomy truckers have traditionally held . . . alters how truckers and law enforcement interact. . . . The economic realities of trucking have long depend­ed on truckers’ discretion, including flexible record keeping rou­tines and the ability to direct their own work in the face of un­predictable and often inhospitable conditions. But digital enforce­ment doesn’t address these realities; it papers over them.

The ELD mandate, which came into effect in December 2017, has been the most invasive and harmful piece of surveillance technology to ever hit truckers. As Levy explains, “The range of information captured is quite extensive . . . a driver’s fuel efficiency and idling time, speed, geolocation and geofencing . . . lane departure and braking/acceleration patterns, freight status, tire inflation. . . . Other systems integrate with dashboard cameras—some that face outward to capture the footage of the road, and others that face inward, recording the driver and the cab.” It is no wonder that truckers feel treated like children or, more accurately, like convicted sexual predators fitted with an ankle bracelet: “The proprietary Omnitracs Driver Retention Model analyzes hours-of-service data in order to identify ‘drivers suspected of flight risk’—which it does by looking for ‘patterns and subtle changes in driver habits and work activities that serve as indicators of voluntary terminations.’”

Levy offers a history of the ELD, from early proposals dating back to 1988, to recent studies conducted in the years after the mandate came into effect. Levy demonstrates that none of the stated objectives of the mandate have been met. In fact, truck crashes, as well as speeding and other incidents of dangerous driving, have increased. The Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration (fmcsa) claims that installing these devices into trucks will improve safety for the drivers. Truck drivers have never seen it that way, and despite evidence proving that the mandate has done nothing to improve their lives, the mandate remains.

The Owner Operators and Independent Drivers Association (ooida) has been fighting the requirement for these systems every step of the way. A 2016 court challenge argued that these devices, installed in a long-haul truck in which the driver spends weeks and months of time, infringe on the Fourth Amendment rights of the drivers who basically live in their rigs; effectively, an ELD would be like inviting Uncle Sam into their living rooms. The Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals thought otherwise, citing the “pervasively regulated industries” exemption, which sounds an awful lot like circular reasoning—this industry is already regulated, so the fact that it is regulated means we can regulate it some more.

The court’s acknowledgement that trucking is a pervasively regulat­ed industry, however, only highlights the deeper ironies of “deregula­tion,” and the fact that economic liberalization laid the foundations for an increasingly intrusive surveillance apparatus. Levy, to her credit, brings us back (again) to Michael Belzer’s observation about the transfer of regulation: “Another key concern that truckers brought to the fore was that the ELD addressed the wrong problem . . . focusing on truckers’ log fudging treated a symptom of the problem, not its root cause. Truckers weren’t tired because they were able to falsify their logbooks; they were tired because the industry is set up in ways that necessitated them breaking the rules.”

But it is not just government regulators who have eagerly embraced surveillance technology. Levy also discusses the employers who are only too willing to double down on the ELD mandate and entrench the use of surveillance tech for their own purposes. Indeed, “The legal mandate . . . provides a business rationale for firms to monitor driver behaviors not covered by the law; since they will be required to install ELD hardware in their trucks anyways, the marginal expense of monitoring a swath of other behaviors using the same technological system is greatly reduced.”

Before the ELD mandate, trucking companies large and small had already been using satellite communications equipment to varying de­grees. I remember riding with my father one summer in 1993 and being pressed into service as his navigator, reading and typing out messages for him via the Qualcomm system installed in the Freightliner he was driving at the time. Qualcomm was one of the first companies to offer this type of tracking and communication equipment to fleets and remains an industry leader to this day. It is one thing to have what amounts to a truck-mounted laptop, used to send dispatch information, or directions to the driver behind the wheel; it’s another for this technology to monitor nearly everything about the operations of the truck at such a granular level that the driver’s autonomy is reduced to an afterthought.

Most of us have heard about Amazon employees being prevented from taking bathroom breaks, and railroad employees’ recent fights over scheduling and sick leave. Truckers have now fallen victim to the same trend of blue-collar workers being subjected to the most intimate and invasive forms of workplace control—even though they work alone and on the road, physically distant from their employer. The fact that truckers are often enticed with a sign-on bonus only makes this arrangement more deceptive and dystopian.1

When the ELD mandate was first being discussed, a selling point that the government and large fleets made to drivers was that all of the data collected would be used to solve other problems in the industry. These supposed benefits included having real-time data on detention at customer facilities, predicting traffic patterns, and locating new parking facilities, which have been, and increasingly are, difficult for drivers to come by. Of course, these were all falsehoods: truck parking, or lack thereof, is still a major concern for truckers, and truck detention times have only become worse; drivers are almost never compensated for these delays. In fact, detention delays are so bad that, on average, about 40 percent of America’s trucking capacity is being held up at customer facilities.2 One would think that the “interoperable” nature of surveillance technology, as described by Levy, might be used as advertised—for safety, for efficiency, and for other benefits—but as the experience of most truckers in America today proves, none of this is true. Government regulators and private sector employers are concerned enough to surveil truckers more and more intrusively, but they are not concerned enough to fix the financial incentives that push them to drive in an unsafe manner, or pay them for delays resulting from forces beyond their control, such as dispatch mistakes, poor facility management, and other inefficiencies. Truckers find themselves at the bottom of the pile.

In late 2018, after the ELD mandate was implemented over the objections of nearly all of America’s truckers, a proposed House resolution called for the congressional Transportation and Infrastructure Committee to “conduct a study to determine how many ‘employees’ who must comply with the electronic logging device requirement . . . have ceased being operators of a commercial vehicle . . . as a result of such requirement.” Unfortunately, this resolution died in committee when the 2018 midterms rolled around, but the regulatory scrambling continued in the wake of the predictable consequences of the ELD mandate. Fmcsa set up a series of listening sessions to hear from those affected by the mandate. In September 2020, hours of service rules, which the ELDs are meant to monitor, were overhauled again, as the de­vice—a veritable (and no less intimidating) miniature “Eye of Sauron”—made it impossible for drivers to get anything done, over and above the chaos already being caused by Covid.

This episode underscores the open secret behind all regulatory re­gimes: perfect compliance with all regulations would soon cause society to seize up like a slack adjuster that hadn’t been greased in many months. As Levy notes, offering examples ranging from jaywalking laws in New York City to “work to rule” labor actions, the “‘wiggle-room’ around rules is a site for strategic negotiation, for economic functioning, for relationship management—for both good and ill. So when we decide to more strictly enforce rules using technology, without accounting for what has been happening in the gap, we may well disrupt the social order of a particular context in important and unforeseen ways.”

Digitized Cats and Mice

The fifth and sixth chapters of Data Driven examine what Levy calls “sites of contestation,” where drivers and roadside enforcement officials must each contend with new ELD technology. Levy outlines the various methods drivers use to either game the system to their own advantage, as they always have, or to reduce the effect of these systems on their work.

Levy documents how, when ELDs were first rolled out, inspection officers lost a previous advantage they had over drivers. Under the old paper-log regime, an inspector could take a driver’s logbook and other documentation, and comb through it on his or her own time, on their own turf, while making the driver wait. As ELDs are hardwired to the truck, however, a logbook inspection requires the officer to be inside the cab, on the driver’s turf. In addition, with the wide variety of ELDs on the market, some officers do not know how to navigate these systems and simply give a cursory, shallow look at the ELD, not bothering with a thorough investigation. In these cases, the advantage is thrown to the driver. As a result, many truckers put decals on the door or cab of their truck, indicating that an ELD is being used—even when this is not the case—thus dissuading some officers from even bothering to ask.

Another phenomenon Levy found in her research was the cooperation engendered between drivers and inspection officers, who would normally be engaged in an adversarial interaction. The ELD, being a new and not always easily navigated piece of equipment, often requires the driver to take part in the inspection. “The ELD could serve as almost a third party in the enforcement interaction: a convenient common enemy for the driver and the officer, against which they may be temporarily united in frustration and lack of understanding.”

Levy goes on to describe the myriad methods of mechanical inter­ference that drivers have employed on these technologies over the years—though in the end, this probably resulted in more than a few of them simply being fired. There are some instances, however, when trucking companies are on the side of the driver. They are, despite all of the regulatory interference, still in the business of making money, and will work with drivers to fight the surveillance, when it suits them. From having a back door available to “edit” log entries after the fact, to encouraging drivers to use “personal conveyance” exemptions, or idling at very low speed around customer facilities, trucking companies can and do assist drivers in circumventing the ELD. Whether or not these same managers and dispatchers have drivers’ interests in mind when fiddling with the ELD is an entirely separate question, however. The number of drivers who have had to go into “violation” to get home on a weekend is probably very high, and the threat of an after-the-fact violation being issued from a DOT audit is always present. The powers that be never forget, and are not too concerned about the last time a driver saw his or her family.

The Human Element

Levy includes a discussion of what she calls “self-exploitation”—or what Belzer and Viscelli call “self-sweating”—in the context of resisting surveillance even when that resistance leads to drivers having to work harder than they already do. It’s an important question, but she addresses it too narrowly, only in terms of the driver making more money or “negotiating networked relationships.” Sometimes, it is done simply to get home sooner, to make an appointment or a date with a loved one, or to assert the agency truckers once had before the imposition of these technologies. In a job that has moved away from the freedoms embodied in Smokey and the Bandit toward the “self-sweating” examined in Sweatshops on Wheels, and on to today’s situation, in which truckers are among the most surveilled workers in America, it should be no surprise that some of us are going to keep resisting the impositions of Big Brother on principle alone.

Levy has a certain appreciation for this trucking legacy. She quotes a number of sayings and expressions that feature in the vernacular of the business: “if you got it, a truck brought it”; “if the wheels ain’t turnin’, you ain’t earnin’”; or “it takes a special breed to be a truck drivin’ man.” But some of the clichés and markers of earlier eras of trucking may be fading away. At one point, Levy writes:

[T]rucking is a physically and mentally grueling line of work. . . . Truckers have a very difficult time eating nutritiously at truck stops or getting regular exercise; they regularly face severe health consequences caused or exacerbated by living on the road, ranging from exhaustion to addiction . . . from risky sexual behaviors to post traumatic stress disorders after witnessing gruesome acci­dents.

These observations are still mostly true. But as a friend and fellow trucker recently noted, due to the ELD mandate severely regimenting driver time, and the general downward trajectory of drivers’ salaries, engaging the services of what the infamous Canadian TV series Trailer Park Boys referred to as “friends of the road” may no longer be as widespread a phenomenon as once thought.

In this same vein, Levy repeatedly references truckers’ “masculine self-conceptions,” and at one point feels compelled to clarify, in a footnote, “Readers may notice . . . I frequently refer to truckers using he/him pronouns. I do this in recognition of the heavily skewed demo­graphic makeup of the trucking population as well as the centrality of masculinity to trucker culture.” Setting aside whether this note is an honest explanation of a cultural phenomenon, or a signaling device to her fellow academics that she hasn’t caught the dreaded “misogyny” by hanging out with truckers during her research, most of Levy’s book actually disproves that masculinity is central to anything about trucking anymore.

There is no exemption to the ELD mandate based on the gender or identity of the driver (a government program committed to equity!), nor for the rest of the suite of technologies imposed on drivers for similar purposes. A traditional defining feature of masculinity is the ideal of independence: a man should expect to have agency in his decisions and respect accorded his experience and skill. Yet whatever is left of this independence in the industry is thrown out the window by the corporate culture of those who impose the surveillance technologies Levy describes.

The Slope

In the seventh chapter, Levy tackles the question simmering below the surface of wider discussions around technology in the trucking industry: what is going to happen to the drivers on their way to being pulled from the truck completely as automation improves? Setting aside any argu­ment about the fantastic utopianism displayed by the tech bros promot­ing these new trucks, this question is legitimate, and Levy’s description of this interregnum as a “slope” is perfect. “As former Google Engineer Anthony Levandowski envisioned it in 2016,” writes Levy, “drivers would still be required in the short term, but ’long down the road, none of the new trucks will have a cab on them.”

Those paying close attention to industry news may have noticed that some of the promises made by automated-vehicle boosters remain out of reach. A recent article in Bloomberg highlights growing pessimism with­in the industry, and captures an about-face by Levandowski himself:

“It’s a scam,” says George Hotz, whose company Comma.ai Inc. makes a driver-assistance system similar to Tesla Inc.’s Autopilot. “These companies have squandered tens of billions of dollars.” . . . Our driverless future is starting to look so distant that even some of its most fervent believers have turned apostate. Chief among them is Anthony Levandowski, the engineer who more or less created the model for self-driving research. . . . “You’d be hard-pressed to find another industry that’s invested so many dollars in R&D and that has delivered so little,” Levandowski says in an interview. “Forget about profits—what’s the combined revenue of all the robo-taxi, robo-truck, robo-whatever companies? Is it a million dollars? Maybe. I think it’s more like zero.”3

Nevertheless, the Bloomberg article focuses mostly on automated cars, and here a very important economic consideration must be examined to help us understand the rest of “the slope” and its consequences. The automated vehicle industry appears to have paused in its quest to automate cars, but continues to move forward with trucks. An article from Transport Topics showcases fourteen automated truck com­panies, which would indicate that there is still serious interest from investors in trucking automation.4 What explains this persistent interest? At bottom, the 35 percent of operating cost incurred by paying the guy behind the wheel of the truck. Automated cars do not have this incentive and, in fact, have to fight the opposite battle: convincing consumers, most of whom actually enjoy driving, that they should pay even more for cars, already steadily increasing in retail sticker price, for code installed in them that would take away that enjoyment.5

Returning to a point Levy made earlier in the book, she raises the question of automated vehicles learning when to break the rules: “Ma­chines are increasingly better at learning the rules—but have a hard time knowing when rules should not be followed, or how to balance among competing demands in safety-critical situations. . . . driving requires fluidity, attention to local custom, and communication with surrounding drivers and pedestrians.”

Again, there is a special irony to machines being brought in to replace humans, partly over “safety” concerns around drivers not always hew­ing to “the rules,” and then having those same drivers teach the machine when to break said rules. On our way to this utopian future of self-driving trucks, Levy describes areas of “the slope” where this cold hard code will have to team up with the still essential human drivers, and describes the Society of Automotive Engineers’ levels of automation, with all but one requiring some element of human assistance.

There are nevertheless many questions surrounding the ability of a human to take over in the event of an emergency, where a level 3 or 4 autonomous truck is incapable of responding, and it is within the realm of possibility that the human driver has dozed off. Levy highlights a study from the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration which showed that it can take a human up to seventeen seconds to regain control of a vehicle in an emergency; Levy then cites another paper describing “skill atrophy” and “cognitive slowdown,” all of which is summed up in this passage: “The plans for the San Francisco Metro BART called for the trains to be fully automated but to carry a conductor in case of emergencies. It was pointed out that the kind of person who would be happy to ride back and forth without doing anything for nine years would be precisely the person least capable of dealing with an emergency in the tenth.”

To assure the motoring public that this contingency has been planned for, a range of body-augmenting technologies have been introduced, the effect of which has been to turn drivers into what Levy calls the “RoboTrucker.” As she explains:

[T]here are two kinds of technologies that turn truckers into RoboTruckers. The first are wearables, which monitor elements of the trucker’s internal bodily state and use them as metrics for management. . . . The SmartCap is a baseball cap that detects fatigue by monitoring a driver’s brainwaves. . . . Optalert . . . a pair of glasses that monitors the speed and duration of a trucker’s blinks in order to give him a real-time fatigue score. . . . Maven Machines’ Co-Pilot Headset detects head movement that suggests the driver is distracted . . . or tired.

Meanwhile, there is increasing pressure to install cameras pointed at the driver. Driver-facing cameras are already a bone of contention for many drivers, and have proven such a problem that some trucking com­panies have had to take them out of their rigs, given how many drivers would quit or not even apply if this blatant invasion of their privacy is a condition of employment. But they’re working on that, too. “Some industry insiders believe it’s only a matter of time before trucker wearables and driver-facing camera systems become standard—or even legally required, following the path of the ELD before them.”

Truckers have been on the leading edge of surveillance technology implementation in the workplace, and by leading edge, I mean being treated like lab rats. One would think labor advocates and unions would be fighting this tooth and nail, but as truckers are only 5 percent unionized, not many besides Levy are sounding the alarm: “there’s something viscerally offensive about the micromanagement enabled by these technologies. The privacy intrusions brought about by the introduction of the ELD pale in comparison.”

A Warning

A warning to other types of workers emerges between the lines of Levy’s book, not only about surveillance technologies but also the bureaucratic and economic imperatives which drive them. How much surveillance is too much surveillance? At what point do these impositions push workers away, and will they be pushed away before the robots can be counted on to replace them? How much money is really being saved, given the massive expenses incurred in these technologies’ development? Given that ELDs have delivered on exactly none of their promised safety increases, can any of this other tech be counted on to deliver on its promises? What of older human solutions, like treating people better, such that they do not constantly leave the industry, neces­sitating the continuous recruitment of less experienced and less safe drivers?6 What are the implications of all this for other industries, whose managers are also considering turning the “Eye of Sauron” on their employees?

The trends covered in Data Driven should give any worker cause for alarm: if they could get away with doing this to America’s 3.5 million truckers, they’re going to come for you, too. And “they” should also read this book and ask themselves: will turning our employees into serfs of surveillance bring about a smashing of the looms? Four decades of the neoliberal project have exported much of “worker pride” to other countries while decimating wages, leaving one to wonder about straws and camels’ backs. Trudeau’s vaccine mandates proved to be that straw for Canada’s supply-chain-moving camels; what will that straw be in America?

Workers, managers, policymakers, and everyday citizens all have reason to be skeptical of the kinds of sweeping technological solutions promoted by the powers that be, especially when, as Levy demonstrates, they are implemented in such inhumane and unpleasant ways. Needless to say, American truckers are a long way off from recovering anything close to the economic security or even the cultural prestige that had been theirs in the golden age. But, at the very least, they might still be allowed to carve out a measure of dignity and autonomy after decades of declining wages and work-life quality. Loosening the cold, dehumanizing grip of technology is one sure way to do that.

This article originally appeared in American Affairs Volume VII, Number 1 (Spring 2023): 64–77.

Notes
1 What CDL Drivers Need to Know about Sign-On Bonuses,” Redbone Trucking, April 12, 2022.

2 David Correll, “Is There a Truck Driver Shortage or a Utilization Crisis,” MIT CTL, October 21, 2019.

3 Max Chafkin, “Even after $100 Billion, Self-Driving Cars Are Going Nowhere,” Bloomberg, October 6, 2022.

4 Seth Clevenger, “Who’s Who in Self-Driving Truck Development,” Transport Topics, November 23, 2022.

5 Here, I would recommend those interested in the dichotomy between “tech bros” and the driving consumer to check out Matthew B. Crawford, Why We Drive: Toward a Philosophy of the Open Road (New York: William Morrow, 2020).

6 Stephane Babcock, “Virginia Tech Study: Experience More Important than Age in Driver Safety,” HDT Truckinginfo, July 27, 2020.


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