Trucks and Trucking are in a State of Flux

With all of the new technology appearing, which is transforming the whole trucking industry and the equipment we use, the fact that trucks and trucking are in a state of flux may be an opportunity to get some new blood into the industry.

The fact of the matter is that for most people in society, the image of trucking is some quite old fashioned technologies, handling goods, delivering them, usually by hand and with the whole system having very little feel of the modern world about it.

However, in actual fact, the case is that the trucking industry is embracing vast swathes of highly sophisticated new technologies. The rate of change is accelerating as the trucking industry catches up with the twenty-first century and drives on through to a zero emission future.

We have been seeing new technology appearing in warehousing for quite a while and even though the trucks don’t look that much different than they were 20 years ago, the level of sophistication and technology within them has risen spectacularly over that time.

However, it’s the data inputting and processing which has really caught fire in the last ten years or so. As has the driver safety and monitoring processes, all of which depend on state of the art technology.

Now, the one thing about all of this new technology is it needs smart young people to work it, develop it and understand it. These are the kinds of opportunities the truck and the trucking industry should be offering to young people.

We need to get a new generation of young people, interested in the highly sophisticated technology of our industry. It’s not all sledgehammers, welding bottles, tarps, ropes and changing tyres at the side of the road, anymore.

In fact, much of our technology work, maintenance and development is actually done at a computer screen. This is because the most important element of the system, which we need to work with, is, in fact, software. Every year and with every new development, software becomes a bigger and bigger part of every process in which we are involved. 

Every year, every day our industry is in an ongoing position of having to get over to young people the message about how different we are and how much has changed since those outdated images of our industry were originally formed.