Trucking nostalgia: Whatever happened to …

December is the month for nostalgia. So today, we’re going to say goodbye to things trucking lost in 2023. Sort of.

OK, so there’s only one item here that disappeared this calendar year. The rest are things that vanished earlier, but they’re listed because 2023 is the year I realized they were gone.

Remember platooning?

Platooning involves two or more trucks following each other very closely to reduce wind drag and increase fuel mileage for the trucks behind the leader.

You might recall that in 2011, a Silicon Valley startup called Peloton Technologies claimed its system enabled close following by linking platooned trucks electronically. The trucks in the platoon would hold their following distances steady, and followers of the lead truck would better their fuel mileage by an average of 7% to 8%.

Peloton came on strong, issuing news releases, lobbying state governments to change following-distance laws and staging highway demonstrations. Truck platoons in commercial service would be whizzing up and down interstates in a couple of years, Peloton said.

A couple years later, the company explained it would take a couple more years and then a couple more after that.

Then in 2019, Daimler Trucks dumped its own platooning project. The fuel savings simply were not enough to make the effort worthwhile, Daimler said. And if the biggest truck builder in North America, the one that introduced the world’s first autonomous truck, believed platooning was a waste of time, Peloton didn’t stand a chance. Sure enough, Peloton sank slowly between the waves of commerce and disappeared.

It should have been over. But as Peloton was wheezing its last breath, another platooning company had arisen in Pittsburgh. It was called Locomation. Really. For some reason, the name makes me think of Road Runner cartoons.

Anyhow, the company blasted out press releases until February of this year. That’s when the Pittsburgh Post-Intelligencer reported that Locomation was closing its doors. The company immediately issued a statement declaring that in fact, it was not closing its doors.

And then, it closed its doors

Remember truck driver turnover?

Yeah, driver turnover is still with us, but the American Trucking Associations’ quarterly reports on it are not.

The big-time trucking club used to issue regular news releases announcing the driver turnover rate in the mega-fleets. It always quoted ATA economist Bob Costello explaining why last quarter’s 90% rate had climbed to 92% or dropped to 89% and then would refer ominously to the “driver shortage.”

You would think any reporter looking at those ghastly percentages would reason that of course there’s a shortage of drivers; you guys are using them all up! But no reporter did – except one with The New York Times, as we shall see.

Apparently in 2021, someone at ATA finally realized that advertising driver turnover in quarterly news releases was bad for trucking’s image, as truth can be in such circumstances. Now, the last driver turnover release you’ll find on the ATA website is from March 2021. But when I opened that release online last week, I was quickly redirected to another ATA release – this one dated one year later and headlined, “Many cite driver turnover rates, but few understand what they measure.”

This was the fanciful release ATA issued days after The New York Times ran a story headlined, “How Life as a Trucker Devolved into a Dystopian Nightmare.” Now, there’s a headline.

The Times reporter had cited driver turnover rates in her story, apparently pissing off ATA – which, as we know, had stopped reporting them a year earlier.

But you have to wonder what ATA was thinking when, in response to the Times, it wrote, “Turnover is not an indicator of people exiting the industry (we know, because ATA created and tabulated the metric).”

It looked like ATA just couldn’t help patting itself on the back for the metric it had pulled from public view a year earlier. Curious. But you have to forgive this, as putting a happy face on such an awful reality is a hard job. Apparently, it can make you goofy.

In any case, no more turnover releases from ATA. Too bad. I miss Bob Costello warning that if we don’t shovel even more warm bodies into big truckload’s gaping maw, the entire economy will seize up and implode. But I’m glad it’s at least one less thing poor Bob has to worry about.

Remember the Independent Owner-Operator Ambassadors?

If not, don’t worry. Neither does anyone else.

The acronym, IOOA, resembles OOIDA. But without a consonant, it sounds more like something you might yell when your parachute fails to open. Maybe that’s why ATA President and CEO Chris Spear referred to it simply as the Ambassadors when he announced its formation at the ATA Management Conference and Exhibition in October 2018.

I don’t recall why Chris was upset with OOIDA at the time, but he must have been mightily cheesed. He told the audience at ATA’s annual big bash in Austin, Texas, that year that “our foes continue to sow the seeds of distrust and mistruths, spreading their own narrative about our industry.”

Chris was going to control the narrative, he suggested, by forming a competing organization: IOOA. Owner-operators and drivers soon would be whistling ATA’s tune.

If IOOA ever was spoken of after that, I missed it. But we remember it here because, well, it’s nostalgia month.

Remember blockchain?

Blockchain hasn’t gone away entirely, of course. It still supports cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin. But five years ago, it was going to revolutionize logistics and replace all paper in transportation and warehousing, maybe even toilet paper. Everyone was talking about blockchain. And blockchain test projects were popping up everywhere.

Walmart tested blockchain and famously announced it had traced back to the source of a rotten kumquat or some such fruit in two seconds flat. Walmart’s news release explained that a rotten-kumquat search used to take a year or two. Okay, I’m exaggerating, but only a little.

Logistics experts predicted blockchain would change everything, even though they had no idea how it worked. But few pointed out that Walmart’s kumquat blockchain may have consumed more electricity and computing power than the kumquat farmer’s village used in a year. Not only that, but it might keep using at least some energy until the end of time or up to the statute of limitations on kumquat crime.

Walmart hasn’t issued any news releases on the subject lately. Though I emailed asking about it, the company did not respond. But Walmart may not need blockchain anymore, because now it knows where its kumquats come from. LL

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