Skilled Labor Series: Trucking with Larry Coons
*This episode is part of our new Skilled Labor Series hosted by MCJ partner, Yin Lu. This series is focused on amplifying the voices of folks from the skilled labor workforce, including electricians, farmers, ranchers, HVAC installers, and others who are on the front lines of rewiring our infrastructure.
Today, we are talking trucks with Larry Coons.
Transportation accounted for the largest portion of total U.S. greenhouse gas emissions in 2020, with 26% of those emissions coming from medium and heavy-duty trucks alone. Regulations on freight transportation are bound to have an impact, as the industry grapples with an aging workforce. But to understand exactly what it’s like to haul cargo on the road for 11 hours a day, or to adequately address concerns among truckers as new technology develops, you have to put yourself in the driver’s seat. Luckily, Larry has 10 years of experience on the road and also spent time as an automation truck tester with Uber Freight and Ike.
In this chat, Yin and Larry talk about how he got into trucking, the role the climate change narrative has on decision-making, and what it’s like to be a long-haul driver. Larry also sheds light on the aging workforce and the need for younger drivers who are more likely to adopt new technologies. They also cover some general frustrations and stressors of the job, Larry’s views on electric trucks, and his experience working on some self-driving programs.
Get connected:
Yin’s Twitter / LinkedIn
MCJ Podcast / Collective
*You can also reach us via email at info@mcjcollective.com, where we encourage you to share your feedback on episodes and suggestions for future topics or guests.
Episode recorded on September 1, 2022.
In this episode, we cover:
[1:56] How Larry got interested in trucking at a young age
[5:52] The education, training, and certification process to becoming a truck driver
[11:31] The trucker shortage and its impacts
[13:37] Issues with driver payments
[17:03] Deciding between the owner-operate route or working for a freight company
[19:46] Things we can do to inspire a younger and more diverse trucking fleet
[22:02] Role of technology
[25:09] Larry's thoughts and concerns on electric trucks
[28:09] A day in the life of a truck driver
[31:31] Larry's work with Uber Freight
[42:16] His future plans
-
Jason Jacobs (00:01):
Hello, everyone. This is Jason Jacobs.
Cody Simms (00:04):
And I'm Cody Simms.
Jason Jacobs (00:05):
Welcome to My Climate Journey. This show is a growing body of knowledge focused on climate change and potential solutions.
Cody Simms (00:15):
In this podcast, we traverse disciplines, industries, and opinions to better understand and make sense of the formidable problem of climate change and all the ways people like you and I can help.
Jason Jacobs (00:26):
We appreciate you tuning in, sharing this episode, and if you feel like it, leaving us a review to help more people find out about us so they can figure out where they fit in addressing the problem of climate change.
Yin Lu (00:40):
Today, we are talking trucks. Transportation accounted for the largest portion of total US greenhouse gas emissions In 2020. 26% of those emissions came from medium and heavy-duty trucks alone. I know very little about the trucking industry, so I wanted to learn and hear the perspectives from people who are on the front lines of it. So, today we're talking to Larry Coons, a truck driver with 10 years of experience on the road who also spent time as an automation truck tester with Uber Freight and Ike. In this chat, we talk about how Larry got into trucking, the role the climate change narrative has on his and his colleagues' decision-making. We learn about truckers' perception to new technology and what it's like to be on the road for 11 hours a day, sometimes 14 weeks on end. I learned a lot from Larry, and I hope you do too. With that, Larry, welcome to the show.
Larry Coons (01:32):
Well, thank you very much. Thank you for bringing me on.
Yin Lu (01:35):
I don't know very many truckers in my life. You are the first trucker that I've met and gotten to know, and I'm so excited to get to know you a bit more, get to know about your background and hear your perspectives on many things. But to start off, perhaps you can tell us a bit more about your background, your life, where you grew up, and how you got into the trucking business.
Larry Coons (01:56):
That's a great question, and it's not a question that is uncommon at all. A lot of people want to know, how did you end up being a truck driver? So, the way that I began becoming interested, of course, as just a small boy playing with Tonka trucks and stuff. So, any boy is fascinated with big machines nowadays, but as I grew up in Las Vegas, I lived on the not-so-rich side of town, and one of the neighborhood moms took in a lot of us kids, and the father of that family, his name was Mr. O., and Mr. O. was able to help a lot of young kids stay, pretty much, as much off the streets as we could be. There's no help in some of us, me included, but him being a truck driver and able to take care of everybody is somebody who was really the first major influenced by a truck driver in my life, and looking up to him, I always wanted to do the kinds of things he does.
(02:54):
He's kind of a cool dude, was down to earth and streetwise, and kind of rough around the edges, but definitely somebody who had a high set of standards and stuff that interest you as a kid. As an impressionable kid, he was an absolute idol in that area. So, Mr. O. is who I was wanting to follow into trucking, but if I wanted to go forward with that, when I did approach Mr. O., I was probably too young to be a truck driver anyways, he described something that wasn't as appealing. For instance, you had to be in the truck with a truck driver for a year before you would get your license back then, and then on top of that, he kind of discouraged me. He was like, "That's the stupidest thing I've ever heard, Larry. You should go back to school because you're a pretty smart kid and probably could make something out of yourself."
(03:44):
So, he actually discouraged me from doing it, and that's what I did. I went off to finish my high school, then went in to get degrees in different areas, eventually leading to some master's studies in business. But that longing for the road, a lot of times I tell people when I was a finance manager at one time, I was in an office that had no windows, so you felt so secluded, but you get all these guys who come in there, and girls and women, who would just show me their paycheck stubs, and they were making really good money and were able to travel the world for really good money, and they knew all this stuff about our country that I just didn't have any idea was actually to be known. But yeah, it was like I was in the back. The furniture store had trucks that would come, and they would deliver furniture to us that we would then sell to people and deliver out to the neighborhoods, but no.
(04:40):
Yeah, I was in the back office in a finance area, and when truckers would come looking for finance for furniture, they would talk to me and the lady who worked with me. So, we would get all of their financial information verified and everything, so we knew they were really actually making a pretty good living, but they also had a windshield for an office. They had a rolling window for an office. What a big deal. That was a pretty cool idea, and you got a comfortable seat, I figured, with the air ride seats that they have, and I wasn't really making a killing at being a finance manager. So, I went back to my childhood and thought about Mr. O. and thought maybe I'd be a little bit rebellious against the guy. He would probably punch me in the nose or something for not listening to him. So, then I went and did it. I went to a driving school and learned how to drive a truck, and then went with a lease company.
Yin Lu (05:37):
Got it. Can you tell us about the... What does the education path look like for going from not knowing how to drive a truck to being able to drive a giant truck? How long does it take? What type of on-the-road training does that look like? How many hours do you have to accrue? All of that.
Larry Coons (05:52):
Yeah. The things have changed since, I think, about 2019 or '20. There's a new policy out right now where you actually have to go to a certified school, so it's a little bit different, but it follows pretty much the same pathway, the path to success would be for a typical... In the job that I worked at where I became an instructor for the company, for people who did not have a truck driver's license at all, all they had was a trucker's permit, so they could go and they could operate as long as they had a licensed driver next to them supervising what they're doing. So, as a new student, you would go to... The company I worked for, you would go to be onboarded, and then they would take you out to... Eventually, once you went through all of your computer-based learning and simulator training and stuff like that, once you pass through all of that, you go out to a training pad area.
(06:46):
So, if you've ever been out to a large truck stop, you notice that the parking lot area is just a huge, immense blacktop tarmac, and out there you'll have some... If you can imagine some cones out there in different lines, stripes painted on the ground, along the side of that track, us instructors would stand there and watch the new students come out, and they would all come out there with one of the classroom instructors. Classroom instructors would walk them through how to do a pre-trip inspection, and then once they did that, they would maybe... The classroom instructor would show them some of the things they would do, and then they would be led off to all of us instructors, and they'd just walk up to us, and all of us instructors would have our own trucks. They'd come into our trucks.
(07:33):
I would basically take five of them into my truck at a time, and we would start off, the first thing I would start off with, since we already did the pre-trip instruction, we'd start off with just one of them in the driver's seat at a time in first gear, which is the hardest gear in a truck to drive in because it's a very powerful gear. It's the lower gear. If you ever heard somebody say, "Hey, we're going to drop it in some gear to get some more power to it," or whatever, that's what it is. This was just to get them the feel of the enormity of the truck. So, you've got this huge joystick right next to you, the shifter, and these are manual driven trucks, so you would have to learn how that big commercial size clutch does compared to, say, your private vehicle, which is completely different.
(08:17):
Just to get the feel of that, we would drive around for about an hour, and each of them would get a try at what that was like. Then we'd go up a gear, and then we'd go up maybe another, and once we were able to get them to shift into fifth gear and not run into anything, and that pretty much happened all the time. If there was something that was about to happen, all that'd have to do was just pop it into neutral and pull the brakes. If you've ever seen on those semi trucks, those yellow and red buttons, the big-
Yin Lu (08:45):
I can't say that I ever have.
Larry Coons (08:46):
Oh, okay. If you ever hear a truck stop, it makes a big hissing sound. It's like a... That's the air brakes releasing. So, there's these two little release valves in every cab. There's a yellow diamond and a red octagon, and so if something happened, I just had to pull those emergency brakes out to stop the truck, but we would only be going 15 miles an hour, so it wasn't like that happened very often, and then if it did, it wasn't that severe of an incident. But anyways, once they all got a chance at that, then the ones that seemed to have been able to catch on and figure out how to shift those lower gears, I'd have a little bit more confidence that they'd be able to get out on the street, and then the ones that worked would go out on the street, and whoever seemed to be able to be most responsible on the street, I would say, "Hey, this guy's ready to go on the road," or, "girl is ready to go on the road."
(09:38):
So, that would take about an eight-hour period of time, typically, sometimes a little bit longer, sometimes shorter. But then I'd stay in the truck with them for about two weeks, and they'd learn how to do the truck and what it's like on the truck life and what it feels like to be over the road, and they would do most of the driving during that time. Every once in a while, we would stop at different truck stops and we would practice backing up or other kinds of maneuvers I knew would help them out with their testing, because I also got a secret insight into where they would take them on the streets, the different routes the examiners would take them, so I would try to lead us into some of those scenarios so they would be practiced for them when the time came. So, we'd be out there for two weeks at a time, though, and then once we came back, we'd come back and practice a little bit and take a test. I hope I didn't ramble on about that.
Yin Lu (10:29):
It's all good. There's a lot for me to learn here. After you do the computer-based learning, the simulator, you're on the track, and then they spend two weeks with you. You had mentioned previously that there's then a year that you would have to spend as a trainee spending with a truck driver, almost like an apprenticeship to be able to then accrue hours? Is that right?
Larry Coons (10:47):
Okay. Now, that's the way it used to be done. By the time I started teaching, it was only a couple of weeks before they took their test, and so now by this time, because there had been such a great shortage in truckers, they shortened up that training period. Now, after the two weeks you got your license, and then when you have your license, you're able to now go to just a few months worth of training instead of a whole year. So, then you're paired up with a trainer, but that trainer's not going to teach you how to drive. They're going to teach you how to do the job, which is paperwork, how to maybe refine some of your backing up skills, maybe know how to have a truck unloaded or unload a truck, things like that, how to secure a load.
Yin Lu (11:31):
Can we talk about the trucker shortage? You mentioned that. I think it's an area that I think is worth diving into. Talk to us about why there's a trucker shortage. I read in some resources prior to prepping for talking with you that the trucking industry is just in general aging, and so people are getting older. I'm curious what you're seeing in terms of trends in the trucking industry and if there's anything that's changing those trends for the next 10 years.
Larry Coons (11:58):
Forecast-wise, it's an uncertain thing. What I am seeing is I'm seeing that they're shortening the time period for drivers to be trained. Also, they lowered the minimum age, I believe, for some truckers to be able to get a license and things like that. The reason they're doing all of that is because there's more freight out there to be hauled than what we have truckers for. The general consensus amongst, say, truck drivers is, "Hey, well, that's because they're not paying us enough," or things like that. I see the truck driving is... I mean, I don't hear about any truck drivers out there that say they get paid extremely, extremely low. They do point out how other truck drivers do get paid lower, but I think it's pretty much well a standard. But a lot of truck drivers will say that, "Well, they should pay more and they'll get more truck drivers," and that is a legitimate concern.
(12:52):
The real reason is, like you said, you mentioned that it's that the trucking, the group of people who drive trucks are getting older, so that demographic is an older male, typically, who is just simply aging out of the workforce. Because we're losing them by attrition and demand is increasing, it appears to me as though there's just simply more people in the world that need more freight, and there's not a lot of young people wanting to enter this workforce because it is a very strenuous job, and you have to be away from your family and friends for many, many months at a time. You don't get to lay down roots in a place. There's a lot of local truck driving jobs, but those really don't pay as much as over-the-road does, and the major freight comes over the road.
(13:37):
I mean, they'll haul something from Houston to Washington just because the ship lands there in a port, for instance, whereas they don't always drive a boat straight to a port to be delivered locally to that market. You know what I mean? Yeah, and it's also a very frustrating job. Once you get in, retention of truck drivers is very difficult because of the safety concerns, and also, there are some other issues with honesty, with you not getting paid what you should be paid, like you don't get paid for invoices sometimes, or you don't get paid for the time that they hold you somewhere while we're waiting to be unloaded. Some of those issues have been addressed, especially by our current administration, but they haven't been really heavily enforced. You know what I mean? They could be enforced more.
Yin Lu (14:22):
Speak more on that.
Larry Coons (14:24):
Okay. So, what I'm talking about are different ways in which a truck driver gets paid. Sometimes a truck driver, say, goes over here to a warehouse in North Las Vegas where a lot of the warehouses are, and I'll deliver or I'll be there to deliver a truckload of water somewhere, let's say. Well, when I get to the shipper's or the receiver's location, they're going to say to me, "Oh, you know what? We're busy unloading the other 20 trucks here, so you're going to have to wait. We're going to have to detain you here, and while we detain you, if you wait past a certain number of hours, we'll start paying you by the hour a certain rate," and that's based off of a contract the broker has already made with whoever you're delivering to. So, you reluctantly do it because you know it's probably a low chance that they'll end up paying for that detention pay. But you do it, and then you sit there, you wait two hours, then it becomes three hours, and then you get unloaded.
(15:21):
Well, now, because there's a certain number of hours you have in your day in order to get your work done, you got 14 hours in a day in order to complete a certain number of driving hours, well, that might have moved past that. You won't be able to get to your next load in time, and so there's a little inefficiency there with how you're going to get paid. So, that's what I'm talking about, is that there's times when just... People say they're going to pay you for stuff, and they just don't pay you, and because you're over the road, you're not really sitting on the phone making collection phone calls or anything.
(15:50):
You're just hoping everybody pays right, and sometimes what you end up having to do is you have to sell those unpaid invoices to collection agencies, basically, or factoring agencies who will pay you, and then they'll go collect it on the backend for a certain percentage. But yeah, there's a lot of times when you've hauled a load for 1,000 miles or so, and you just simply get there, you deliver it, and you get proof of your delivery, and then you go down the road, and then a few days when the term's up on your invoice, it just never gets paid. It never shows up.
Yin Lu (16:23):
And it hits you, the truck driver?
Larry Coons (16:24):
Oh, yeah. Definitely, because you've spent the resources. I mean, if you're a company driver, I guess not because you're going to get paid a certain rate per mile, but if you're an owner-operator or if you're leasing your vehicle as a lease operator, you've spent the resources, the vehicle investment or the fuel is one of the biggest things right now, investment, or just simply the personal time to get something across country, and then if you've delivered it and they don't pay that bill, then yeah, it hits your bottom line pretty big because it takes a lot of money to get an 80,000-pound vehicle across the country, over mountains and stuff.
Yin Lu (17:03):
How does one go about choosing... Let's say you have your trucker's license. How does one go about choosing I want to lease a truck and basically operate as a personal business, or work for a freight company? How do people make those decisions?
Larry Coons (17:16):
Yeah, yeah. So, trucking companies can hire you as an employee if you want to be just a regular W-2 worker, and this is something that's been going on since the 1930s, the struggle between, hey, do you want to work for a shop or do you want to work on your own and be kind like a wildcat kind of guy? So, the decision basically has to come down to family, finance, and freedom. That's what I explain it. I don't know. Everybody's got their own way of deciding this. So, as an owner-operator or lease operator, you are under the impression that you'll have more freedom to come home whenever you want to. As long as you're in the area, you can drop by the house.
(17:58):
You're also paid a little bit more as an owner or lease operator because you get paid a percentage of the invoice as opposed to, say, a certain rate per mile. An employee would make a certain rate per mile almost in all cases. For instance, I think in some large retailers they make around 50 cents per mile, 55 cents per mile, whereas an owner-operator, they're going to take 71%, sometimes 85% of whatever the invoice is, and they'll bring that home that way, and then the broker gets whatever is left over after that. So, the finance angle plays a part, but also the freedom to make your own choices, drive your truck however you want.
(18:41):
Company person's most likely going to have some kind of safety system in there like a camera that faces you or faces forward, and you have to follow certain policies, do things, drive certain routes the way they want you to drive them, things like that, whereas the wildcat can go drive all the way to Minneapolis before he delivers something in Arizona. Just if he wants to spend the money, he can do that. So, those are the decisions that... Those are the main factors. Sure, there's 100 other ones, like you get cooler trucks if you're an owner-operator. So, that's what goes into that, I think. Yeah.
Yin Lu (19:16):
Okay, and I want to follow up on the previous topic we were talking about, just how we get more supply of truckers, knowing that the demand for things that need to be moved on land is becoming greater and greater, and that the current truck driving community might be getting older. There clearly is more male identifying versus female identifying truck drivers out there. What can we do to level the playing field a bit and get more younger, more diverse people in the mix?
Larry Coons (19:46):
Yeah. Well, acceptance is a very big key factor in that. So, I don't have an answer how we can address the cultural things that prevent people of different genders or races to join the national trucking fleet. I think it's already happening. I think we are seeing growth in that area. The two things are tied together. What are the decisions you make to get into trucking versus, and again, this is completely my opinion, what would help you do it? Well, number one, the more you pay truckers, the more lucrative the business is, but also, the more home time you get. So, there is a certain subculture of truckers that are female truckers, that are women truckers, but there's not young women truckers who might be family-oriented. A lot of women like to stay home or close to home, wherever their children are. If we opened up, and I'm not one to speak, but if we opened up more time for women to be able to spend more time with their family, that third stool of that leg I was talking about, it would make more sense.
(20:51):
We've kind of moved away from the hub-and-spoke type logistics network, I think. We've come to this more, from a standpoint, we've come to this more diversified way of delivering things, but not diversified way of handling people's needs. We could deliver from Pittsburgh to LA, and that's not hub-and-spoke, but if we had more hub-and-spoke like Pittsburgh to Cleveland and back again, that'd be a really, really short ride, but my point is that would be part of a spoke on another hub, or Pittsburgh to Chicago and back or something like that. We could set up our network that way. It's just that for some reason it's not very efficient. On the other hand, of course, we have to make our fleets more efficient. We have to take advantage of those assets and keep them drawing up more and more revenue per mile.
Yin Lu (21:42):
I think this is a good segue into just talking about the technologies within the trucking industry that you've seen happen in the decade that you've been in the industry. I'm curious about, what role can technology play in creating more of the hub-and-spoke model so that people can drive for less distances so they can be closer to a home hub? Talk to me about that.
Larry Coons (22:02):
Making every mile that a truck driver is on the road a paid mile is more efficiency to me because we're going to get more out of the resources we use. So, technology that's changed, and also, hub-and-spoke is just an idea, one of many ideas that could be out there. I'm sure there's many more. But as far as some of the technologies, to give you an idea of what things were like back in 2012, automatic trucks, so the ones that don't have the manual transmission with the clutch and all that where you have to move a stick around in order to get it in the correct gear, they were pretty much the newer, I guess, version of them, the one that actually works, pretty much a new thing and weren't very common just 10 years ago. Nowadays, they're becoming more and more accepted because there are much better technology involved in how you automate that shifting of the engine itself.
(22:58):
Truck drivers are very, very keen on how that truck shifts from one gear to the next. It makes your entire life different if you're coming downhill and you're not able to just pop it in a certain gear and keep the thing coming, downshifting in order to get yourself in the right gear. Some of the new technology out there like, for instance, Freightliner has this intelligent system where they know if you're going up a hill. It'll be in the correct gear, and if you go down the other side of the hill, it'll shift for you, things like that. Automated shift controllers come out. They've had automatic electronic braking. Back when I first started, that was something very new, and the system was kind of jenky. It would break when you went underneath the overpasses, and that puts in a lot of suspicion with truck drivers when new technology comes out. When new technology comes out and it does stuff like slams on the brake just because you went under an overpass, you're going to be suspicious of more technology that comes out, so it's very... Truck drivers are very slow to adopt things.
(24:02):
We have cameras that can detect collisions, things like that, company... There's a couple companies out there, Nauto and Lytics, as well as Netradyne. They handle fleet-size operations where they do... They can use AI to see what's in front of you, and if something runs out in front of you, then that message will be sent back to the safety manager who monitors that sort of thing. They can look at the camera on the truck and see what incident took place, like if you have a hard brake or something like that. We've had things for many years that would detect fuel usage, miles per gallon, how well you're driving the truck, but now everything is just instantaneously available whenever... You can look at a dashboard on your computer from the offices of any computer and see how the engine's performing, how the driver's shifting, and all that stuff, from thousands of miles away, and it's realtime data. That's a very important... There's so much out there, not to mention you also have things like automation and electric vehicles and things like that that are coming down the tubes.
Yin Lu (25:06):
Tell me what your perspective is on electric trucks.
Larry Coons (25:09):
So, one of the concerns I have about electric trucks right now is that they won't necessarily go the distance. The range on the current electric trucks don't necessarily allow for things like when I was trapped in Minnesota with a down battery or something like that. So, right now the range is around 250 miles, which could get you from San Jose to Reno, for instance. But if your battery goes down somewhere along the way, because there's no real infrastructure in place, you know might be stuck there with a truck that's down in severe snow on Donner Pass somewhere. So, I was hoping that we could see more development in the area of, one, being able to charge the electric vehicles faster, because that's going to save truck drivers money, and two, getting places for them to charge so that perhaps they could park there while they're getting charged.
(26:05):
I think that would probably get just a few truck drivers to do it, and once they had a proven track record, I think it would be easier for other truck drivers to buy in to the electric vehicle space. Do you know what I'm saying? Right now, I think because truck drivers are so reluctant to get into new technology, and electric vehicles are one technology, whatever technology there is out there, as long as you can go and do some kind of roadside assistance, it would be totally awesome. I think right now, the best technology we have available would be the EVs because it would save money for truck drivers, but also, you obviously put out far less climate-effecting chemicals.
Yin Lu (26:44):
We're going to take a quick break so you can hear me talk more about the MCJ membership option. Hey, folks, Yin here, a partner at MCJ Collective. I want to take a quick minute to tell you about our MCJ membership community, which was borne out of a collective thirst for peer-to-peer learning and doing that goes beyond just listening to the podcast. We started in 2019, have since then grown to 2,000 members globally. Each week, we're inspired by people who join with different backgrounds and perspectives, and while those perspectives are different, what we all share in common is a deep curiosity to learn and bias to action around ways to accelerate solutions to climate change.
(27:19):
Some awesome initiatives have come out of the community. A number of founding teams have met. Nonprofits have been established. A bunch of hiring has been done. Many early-stage investments have been made, as well as ongoing events and programming like monthly Women in Climate meetups, idea jam sessions for early-stage founders, Climate Book Club, art workshops, and more. So, whether you've been in climate for a while or just embarking on your journey, having a community to support you is important. If you want to learn more, head over to mcjcollective.com and click on the members tab at the top. Thanks, and enjoy the rest of the show. All right, let's get back to the show.
(27:53):
I realize that haven't really asked you about what it is actually like to be in a truck for many hours a day driving, and just doing the job. What I also want to know, given the nature of this podcast, is how climate change has impacted you as a truck driver in the day-to-day, but also maybe at a meta level. I think you can offer a really unique perspective because not only were you a truck driver, you also worked at Uber helping with Uber Freight, and then you also worked at Ike, so two companies trying to figure out how to do autonomous truck vehicle driving. I would just love to know your perspective on the job as well as your perspective on climate as it pertains to the industry.
Larry Coons (28:34):
Well, what is it like to be in a truck for 11 hours driving a day that spans a 14-hour period? It's a very unique skill to be able to develop. So, when you're in the cities, it's a lifetime of stress and anxiety because of the traffic around you. You have to keep an eye on everybody all the time. You also have to be able to have an awareness of things besides other drivers, like signs. You won't want to go under a bridge that says 12-foot if your truck is 13-and-a-half-foot tall. The number one thing a driver has to do is make sure they see absolutely every sign they pass because it could be a little bitty, tiny six-inch-by-nine-inch sign that says no trucks allowed, and if you go down that road, you might find yourself in quite a predicament.
(29:28):
But also, just the way people speed around, slam on the brakes in front of you, cut in in front of you, that's a big one, is where you cut in in front of large trucks, or just how people are on their phones all the time, and if you're in traffic, it's just everything's happening at once. You pretty much live your life in stress environment. So, that wears on you. Once you're out on the open road and you're able to chill for a little bit, you get to see beautiful things like the countryside. You get to see horizons with blue mountains. People don't understand why I love Nevada so much, but when I go across I-80 and I can look on either side of me when I go through somewhere like Elko or Battle Mountain, and there's just blue mountains, or maybe there's a little sky or something to look at, or you are constantly looking for wild animals. In Pennsylvania, one time I saw a black bear just running down the road in front of me, so I had to follow him down the road to make sure he didn't get hit by something.
(30:24):
So, you see, you're looking for animals and scenery and stuff. It's a wonderful time, but over the day when you do that for five-and-a-half hours straight or eight hours straight, which is the max you can go with before you take a 30-minute break, you sit in a chair for eight hours a day and you're looking out one direction, it can become pretty mundane and tiring. So, you suffer from a lot of fatigue, and so you want to try to take shortcuts, maybe speed up a little bit or things like that, try to make your day a little bit shorter, or you just get frustrated in traffic, you want to follow too closely when you're in the towns or whatever. So, it's just either you're going to be stressed out because there's way too much going on, or you're going to be stressed out because of the fatigue of nothing happening around you, and you're just taking in the sights and sounds.
(31:13):
But you had asked about the work that I did with Uber and with the self-driving technology that they have out there, or the automated trucking. So, one of the main reasons I originally wanted to go into work at Uber, a company named Ottomotto was purchased by Uber and was hired, I guess, or bought to do their self-driving program, and I was really impressed with the technology that went in there, and also with some of the leaders for that company. So, really, it was the people involved in that that led me into it, but also, there's a little bit of interest in wanting to make freight more, again, more efficient for drivers so that they're not stuck waiting on a load in some truck stop somewhere.
(32:03):
If you have an automated system, and I don't know if this is the way things will happen, but I assume what will happen is that eventually, let's say 20 or 30 years down the road, a truck will drive itself from, say, I'll pick a town that's not going to happen at any time soon, but let's say Wichita to Denver, the truck will carry from Wichita to Denver, and then a driver who lives in Denver will take it over that hill, over into Utah, and then turn around with another load that has been brought up from California and drive it back to Denver for the day, kind of like that kind of hub-and-spoke type of arrangement where the human drivers will take over the more difficult tasks, and the machines will do the more mundane and boring tasks.
(32:48):
Well, what does that do? What that does is that means on either side there'll be a load waiting for a driver, so the driver's personal time is more efficiently used with automation. So, while I was working at Uber, I got the great chance to work with all of the developers and people who work with the Uber Freight system, and what I felt like their initial mission was was to try to get loads to drivers more efficiently. So, a lot of times when you're in trucking, you'll take a $5,000 load into LA, but you don't have a load waiting there for you to come back out, and you'd be willing to take one for even less just to get you back out of there so you can get to another load. So, I felt like Uber Freight was trying to fulfill some of that efficiency as well, and that kind of interested me more into that angle of things. So, I believed in their mission, and I believe that's still what they're doing today, and I think they're doing a great job. They're a very successful company.
Yin Lu (33:43):
Your role with them was to be in the truck and drive and test out the systems to [inaudible 00:33:48]?
Larry Coons (33:48):
For the self-driving Uber.
Yin Lu (33:49):
Yeah.
Larry Coons (33:50):
Yeah. So, Uber was the self-driving, but Uber Freight was kind of like a different part of that company. So, with Uber Freight I was just helping them understand what truckers wanted to know. But with Uber, my job was to sit there in the front seat and oversee how the computer would drive the truck, and I would be at the controls, and if anything seemed to not be normal, I would disengage the system or intervene and take it over and make it drive the way it was supposed to, me along with a lot of other folks too. One time for one company, I was driving down on an interstate highway, and all of a sudden the computer decided, hey, we should be going the other direction. So, my job was to... Once it happened, it turned the steering wheel really quickly. I was already on top of that steering wheel, ready and waiting to take it over. So, I was able to grab it quick enough to not cause something from happening.
(34:48):
Even before the guy was able to say, "Hey, wait. Something's going wrong with the computer," I was able to sense that the truck was about to go a different direction, and I was able to take over, and that's exactly what we do as a... Then we also do that kind of stuff, say, on tracks in a controlled environment when new software was being published to the truck to make sure that it would work properly. So, when we were on some kind of software sprint where we were designing new things for the truck, we would be able to give some kind of feedback to the engineers and developers so they'd know how to develop that system maybe better, sometimes not. But it's exciting to be a part of the automated industry, but it can also be a little hard, and it's a little bit risky because you're still driving a simulated load somewhere, and it might cause some trouble somewhere.
Yin Lu (35:41):
I'm curious to learn about your motivation for working with Uber, Uber Freight, and other automation companies. How much of that came from the desire to help with just trucking efficiency and network efficiency? I wonder, how much of it was driven by your desire to help the trucking industry get better at dealing with all the impacts of emissions and how much GHGs are being spewed up into the atmosphere? Maybe that's a leading question, but I'm going to ask it anyway.
Larry Coons (36:09):
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Objection, leading. No, there are some factors to any decision. The number one factor for me was the people. I was impressed by the people who were working on the product. So, another factor was efficiency for drivers. I was looking to make people like me have a better... After discovering of a truck driver how truck drivers would sit around for a long time and not get paid, I was like, "Something has to be done about that." Once automation became a possibility for me, that's one of the reasons I made my decisions, after considering it based off of the people. Yeah, climate, as far as efficiency for drivers, that's kind of like a benefit to drivers that could also help the climate here more efficiently. That's more of an afterthought, to be honest. I'm not going to sit here and say that I'm a climatologist, so I don't know what is spewing out, but everybody should at least by now... I think the general population pretty much agrees that there's something going on with the climate, and it's better to save or try to do better than it is to not.
(37:17):
But I could be wrong about that. There's a lot of people out there who feel like the climate policy or regulations or something, that's imposed on people too much. So, I just feel like it's a better decision to be more efficient than less efficient, and I think that helps justify why you would automate as well. Automated vehicles will reduce the amount of energy used because they'll be programmed to do certain things, I would assume. I don't know. Efficiency does help the climate, and you can see the kind of results that the climate has had on truckers physically. Whether you agree to it ideologically or not, you can look at how many potholes have come up. When there's worse ice or winter, more extreme weather in the northern part of the country, well, you can see that the roads deteriorate faster. Again, that could be attributed to less roadwork being done. But on the other hand, it could also be attributed to more extreme weather causing roads to be less durable, for instance.
(38:26):
On the other hand, if you think about the severity of hurricanes, I've just been doing this for 10 years and I've already run relief loads, I think, for three separate major hurricane events, so when we're having billions of dollars, maybe this is attributed again to more people moving to the south, but then again, it could also be that the hurricanes are more stronger and are doing worse damage. So, whether you think it's a human-caused event or not, it is going to be better to conserve resources than not, and also, whether you believe there is climate change to begin with, you have to at least acknowledge weather is getting worse, road conditions are getting worse. There's always some kind of severe weather out there. There's always some kind of severe crash related to weather. So, there's ways that it impacts you.
(39:20):
One time that I remember specifically is that I was in Minneapolis, and again, I have not spent much time in Minneapolis other than truck driving, but I was in my truck, and all of our trucks have to run our engines at night in order to keep the batteries charged, and also, along with that, to keep the inside of the cab warm so that we could sleep at a truck stop somewhere. On one particular occasion, the heater element in my truck went out, so the only option I had... I had a generator on the back, so I could run the generator to keep the batteries charged, but without the heater working, I had to actually turn on my engine. Nowadays, there are some shutoffs and things like that, so it became quite a problem.
(40:06):
But the reason I had to do that when my heater went out is because it was 30-below that night, and that right there tells you how often in our history, in climate history, has it been 30-below in wintertime in Minneapolis. I don't know the answer to that, but I know that if there is climate change, and that night was caused by climate change, I had to sleep without a heater in 30-below weather. All I had was a sleeping bag. I mean, I remember how very frigid it was. It was super cold, so cold that I couldn't even get out to go inside somewhere because I was already cold. I was just hoping to make it to daybreak. I've never had that experience in Las Vegas. So, maybe I'm a little biased because I come from a warmer climate or I've spent a lot of my life in a warmer climate, but cold weather, severe weather, tornadoes, tornadoes also come more frequently, I think.
(41:01):
We had the 2011 incident, as well as since then, we've had nothing but a lot of tornadic events in the Tornado Alley. So, there's just different ways that it impacts you. All of that impacts trucking, causes you to be... You have to wait for the storm to go by sometimes. One of the most common things is when you come over Donner Pass out of California into Nevada, well, you're going to have to chain up on the side of the road sometimes. If truck drivers are chaining up more often, well, then that tells you that the weather is getting more difficult. I think in recent years, even when I first started, I never chained up, but now this last year where I was working at before, I'd had to chain up two or three times. It was very different than what I started with.
Yin Lu (41:50):
It's a cycle, right? I mean, the chains make the roads more weak and it leads to... Yeah, yeah, yeah. Gotcha. It's very interesting to hear what you're seeing as one truck driver and what you're experiencing in terms of just natural disaster events and just the frequency that they're happening just in the past 10 years and how it seems to have increased. What does the next five years look like for Larry Coons as a truck driver slash autonomous truck tester?
Larry Coons (42:16):
I think I'll keep on trying to work in the trucking technology area. The economy's not looking so great right now, so who knows what the future holds, but I've got some things on the table right now that I'll try to consider if they come my way. But I'll just continue to do that for the next five-year plan. I've learned not to come up with five-year plans, though, because I can always just... Everything changes every two or three years, it seems nowadays.
Yin Lu (42:42):
Yeah. Well, if the last three years have taught us anything, it's that there's not predictability in a lot of things.
Larry Coons (42:50):
Yeah. I don't know what's going to happen tomorrow. Got to watch the headlines. But I could always... One thing I do I like about trucking is I could always go into trucking. The future for technology, though, that I see, and I don't know if it matters or not, but I see that truckers will, as we do get younger people, I think that's the key to adopting new technologies out there. So, I hope that I can work with more younger people in the future.
Yin Lu (43:19):
I feel like a very good place for us to end. This was amazing, Larry. Thank you for coming onto the show. I know that this was your day off, and you still spent the time to chat with us, so really, really appreciate you sharing your journey and all your insights with us and making us all a little bit smarter on the trucking industry.
Larry Coons (43:38):
Okay. Well, thank you. We'll holler at you later.
Jason Jacobs (43:41):
Thanks again for joining us on the My Climate Journey podcast.
Cody Simms (43:45):
At MCJ Collective, we're all about powering collective innovation for climate solutions by breaking down silos and unleashing problem-solving capacity. To do this, we focus on three main pillars, content like this podcast and our weekly newsletter, capital to fund companies that are working to address climate change, and our member community to bring people together, as Yin described earlier.
Jason Jacobs (44:07):
If you'd like to learn more about MCJ Collective, visit us at www.mcjcollective.com, and if you have guest suggestions, feel free to let us know on Twitter @MCJPod.
Cody Simms (44:22):
Thanks, and see you next episode.
