‘Driver shortage’ myth can lead to big problems

If you ask the American Trucking Associations, it will tell you there’s a “driver shortage.” The Owner-Operator Independent Drivers Association will quickly debunk that myth by pointing to piles of research. The real problem, OOIDA says, is about driver turnover.

To an outsider, this could come off like an argument over semantics or someone debating the correct pronunciation of tomato.

However, allowing ATA to tell everyone that the trucking industry has a perpetual shortage of truck drivers that can’t be fixed without outside assistance can lead to big problems.

Most recently, the claim has been used to support the adoption of driverless trucks.

As of press time, Aurora Innovation planned to deploy driverless commercial motor vehicles in April along a dedicated route between Dallas and Houston.

During a presentation at the Cantor Global Technology Conference on March 11, Aurora Chief Financial Officer David Maday suggested that a truck driver shortage is part of the reason the company has focused on driverless trucks instead of driverless passenger vehicles.

“It’s a huge market, and there are driver shortages,” Maday said. “So, you don’t need to create this unnatural demand of more people taking rides in, say, the robotaxi space to succeed in the marketplace. The second thing is that when you just look at the raw economics, driver wages for a CDL compared to a gig economy driver is three times as high.”

But is there a driver shortage?

The American Trucking Associations has claimed for decades that the trucking industry has been plagued by a driver shortage. As recently as 2023, ATA said that trucking had a shortage of 60,000 drivers.

However, multiple studies conducted in recent years have debunked those claims. The most recent report refuting ATA’s driver shortage claims can be found in the 2024 National Academies of Science’s driver pay study.

Assertions of a driver shortage conflict with the basic economic principles of supply and demand, the study said.

In 2023, economics professor Stephen V. Burks and colleagues published a study showing that there is not a driver shortage. A few years before that, the U.S. Department of Labor also published a study that found there wasn’t a shortage. Instead, the department said that any issues in the labor supply could be corrected by increasing wages.

Additionally, the trucking industry has been in a freight recession since 2022 and has been suffering from a persistent overcapacity issue.

Maday’s reference to driver wages appears to be a much larger motivation for motor carriers.

“Our first product introduction will be in trucking,” Maday said. “Why trucking? Well, first off, the market is massive. It’s a trillion-dollar market. There’s over 200 billion vehicle miles traveled every year. And the second thing is that we can provide incredible value right at the start, whether it be increased revenue through higher utilization per truck asset or lower total cost of ownership (through) fuel efficiency, driver wages, insurance costs, etc. And, of course, paramount to everything is the safety we can provide to the industry.”

Maday later referenced not having to pay a human driver and not “having to deal with all of the challenges of a human-driven fleet” as some of autonomous technology’s benefits to carriers.

Those pesky human drivers with their crazy demands of fair wages and respectable working conditions certainly have created their share of problems for large fleets. Many of those humans actually have the audacity to leave because their pay wasn’t worth being away from their families for weeks at a time.

That’s why so many of the mega carriers have turnover rates of 90% or even higher.

But this is also why it is so important to label the problem correctly. If you let ATA call it a driver shortage, then the issue will be “fixed” by bringing in driverless trucks or lowering the interstate driving age to 18. However, if you correctly phrase it as a driver turnover problem, then it’s up to the fleets to offer competitive wages and to improve the working conditions. LL