When trucking almost went to the dogs

The story that follows never really happened, and its anonymous writer never really existed. Probably.

Hi. I once worked on a top-secret, driver-shortage (wink, wink) project for Big Truckload and signed a nondisclosure agreement when it ended, so I can’t tell you my name. But here’s my story.

Back in the ’90s, driver turnover was at an all-time high, and no one had heard of self-driving trucks yet. So, Big Truckload was trying to recruit women, minorities, ex-military, ex-cons, ex-mental patients, disbarred attorneys, couch potatoes, aliens and teenagers – anything to keep the new-driver pipeline full and driver pay down – much as it does to this day.

Then someone had an idea (There is no record of who it was, and you will soon understand why).

We’ve all seen photos of somebody’s dog at the steering wheel of a big truck, right? Rover in the seat with his paws on the wheel? You can Google it. Anyhow, this creative fellow looked at one of those pictures and asked – why not for real?

That’s when Big Truckload funded a covert group, the top-secret Clandestine Canine Cabal – the CCC. I was one of the original researchers when we began our highly classified work. We would train dogs to drive trucks.

It turned out some dogs were pretty good truck drivers, of course, but it did take two of them to drive: one to steer and one to work the pedals.

It was best to have a bigger dog at the wheel – say, a boxer or a Lab. And a smaller dog below – a beagle, for example. We thought of them as team drivers.

Some participating carriers chose goofy, lovable Labs for the top dogs because they didn’t intimidate the guard-shack guys or toll-takers. Other carriers liked Rottweilers and Dobermans, who scared everybody. Even state troopers would wave them through inspections. Security departments loved them.

The CCC didn’t limit its research exclusively to dogs. Some carriers wanted to recruit chimpanzees. They were smart and had those opposable thumbs. It seemed like a natural fit, but it just didn’t work out.

Like dogs, chimpanzees were too short to reach the pedals and had to be deployed in pairs. But chimps were harder to come by than dogs, so two per truck was a problem. Why replace a driver shortage (wink, wink) with a chimp shortage – especially when the chimp shortage was real?

That was only one concern. For another, chimps always turned the mirrors to look at themselves instead of the road. You didn’t want to be close by when a chimp changed lanes, believe me. And chimps hated to wait to load and unload. After 20 minutes or so, they would trash the sleeper and rip out the headliner.

But it was something else that finally ruled out chimp-drivers: They just wouldn’t stop spitting at the inward-facing cameras.

At one point, someone suggested that the paws of tree-dwelling sloths were much like hands and their claws like fingers. Maybe they could use a standard steering wheel, just like the chimps. More importantly, they would be much mellower than chimps. So we tried them out.

The sloths were mellow, all right. They never lost their temper and never damaged a cab interior, but no matter what we tried, they wouldn’t drive more than 10 mph.

Some carriers thought chimps or sloths would require fewer truck modifications, but that turned out to be untrue. Dogs were housebroken; chimps and sloths were not. Chimp- and sloth-driven trucks required extensive plumbing in the cab.

After realizing that, the CCC concentrated exclusively on dog drivers. We modified trucks to make them easier for dogs to drive. We created steering wheels to accommodate dog paws and reconfigured the pedals, which had been too stiff for a beagle – and even for a bulldog or basset hound.

But the most important modification was the treat distribution system. To keep driver dogs engaged, you had to keep those treats coming.

For a while there, it looked like dogs could solve the driver shortage (wink, wink). But then, what we thought was an advantage turned out to be a liability.

Driver dogs were always patient, no matter how long they had to wait for, say, a load to be ready. They simply curled up and went to sleep. That seemed great until we got into secret discussions with the Bureau of Motor Carrier Safety about driver-dog regulation.

See, dogs sleep all the time, sometimes 12 or more hours a day. Fulfilling hours of service was going to be a real problem for them. Since our driver dogs couldn’t stay awake at the wheel, we had to abandon the project. But it was just as well, as they couldn’t maintain log books, either.

It was about then that some of the people who knew about our work began talking about how incredibly stupid it was. The more people thought about it, the stupider it seemed. And so the CCC was disbanded.

Big Truckload was so embarrassed it had bankrolled us in the first place that it paid even more to have the CCC and its work erased from history. It paid off us researchers, and we all signed lifetime nondisclosure agreements.

When the U.S. Department of Transportation learned that its Bureau of Motor Carrier Safety had actually discussed the stupid scheme with the CCC, it was embarrassed, too – so embarrassed that it destroyed all records of those driver-dog discussions and changed the agency’s name to the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration.

So, you see, it’s as though it never happened. LL

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