In 100 years, when the 2024 presidential election is in our grandkids’ grandkids’ history books, and everyone who actually lived through it is long gone, I’m not sure they’re going to believe it was real. There was an assassination attempt on one candidate, and the other candidate – the one who wasn’t shot at – is the one that dropped out? And just a few months before balloting takes place?
I barely believe it and I watched it happen.
You’ll likely never forget where you were when you heard the news because it was shocking, if not jarring. The wow factor has a way of staying with you. It’s the slow evolution of historical significance that sneaks up on you.
Truck drivers who kicked off their career in the 1970s and ’80s – and a recent survey conducted by CCJ suggests there are many of them out there – have witnessed many milestones from their driver’s seat. The demise of long haul cabovers; the removal of black smoke from the exhaust stack; and the march from 5 mpg to closer to 10 among them.
It’s fairly incredible to think that there is a truck driver out there somewhere in a model year 2023 or 2024 tractor – a truck flush with modern technology, comfort features and (probably) an automated transmission – that cut their OTR teeth on something like K100 or Chevy Titan, shucking manually through 13 speeds with an Igloo cooler sliding around on the floorboard.
If you could go back in time and show that 18 year old kid a picture of their 60 year old self in that new truck, they would be more likely to believe you’re a time traveler than the photo. It would be like explaining to your great-great-grandparents that you can type any question imaginable into your phone, and it will find you the answer. It really is quite remarkable.
You’d need more that 60 of today’s clean diesel trucks to produce the same level of emissions and one back then, and cleaner and newer engines are making just as much power but in smaller displacement.
“So, Mr. Spaceman, you’re trying to tell me there’s only 11 liters under that nose?”
Now try convincing them that 11 liter can make nearly 450 max horsepower, that we’ve seen production of some 16 liter engines end, and Caterpillar – a popular old trucking player when it came to making power – has left the market entirely.
Really want to blow the young’un’s mind? Show the squirt where the shifter isn’t. Automated manual transmissions are spec’d in more than 80% of all new truck orders at every North American truck OEM, and it’s 90%-plus at most of them.
Put a spec sheet for an International 9600 cabover next to a spec sheet for an International LH and it’s almost impossible to believe those trucks were built by the same manufacturer for the same continent, and the spec sheet for one might be 10-15 lines long while the other is several pages thanks to option content added over the last four decades.
If drivers born during the Lyndon Johnson administration will hold on just a few more years, they may get the chance to drive a battery electric truck and share the highway with a truck that doesn’t have a driver at all.
Trucking history is happening all around us.