Modern lorries

Is the current standard of driving amongst lorry drivers a direct result of lorry design?

I am constantly bemused by the standard of driving of the current generation; it’s horrendous.
There appears to be a total lack of anticipation, a total lack of any road reading ability, a total lack of anything that resembles finesse, a total lack of anything that might pass for mechanical sympathy and everything to do with the ‘I’m bigger than you so [zb] off’ attitude.

Now before you all start screaming… I certainly do not mean that all drivers are like that but, I would argue, they are certainly becoming increasingly prevalent and those traits are a very modern thing which seem to have risen to the surface in modern times – and as lorries have ‘improved’. (Part of the responsibility lies with Lorry Training Groups; any moron with the money can get to class 1 in 10 working days (God help us). But that does not mean that they can drive – it means that they can point the lorry in the required direction and not hit anything for an hour. But that’s a separate argument)

In the ‘old days’ – you had to be able to actually drive before you were given a license; how many of the current generation could drive something with a crash box… none. How many of the current generation could drive something fitted with an Eaton Twin-Splitter? I suspect you could count the numbers on one hand with fingers left over.

But (unfortunately?) they don’t have to. We can all slate the DAF auto box but given the choice between that or a crash box… and all lorries are Auto these days (Yes, I know you can spec’ a ‘Gearbox’ but they are options - not standard). We even had a newbie on here a few months ago bemoaning that he’d been given a lorry with a stick coming out the floor and didn’t know what to do with it ffs!

By the same token, lorries these days can actually stop. Remember the days of hydraulic brakes? Oh boy, you learned (very quickly) to read the road and anticipate because stopping was not always guaranteed in the distance you could see! These days if you have occasion to ‘stand on the middle pedal’ even a fully laden 44 will stop in fairly short order.

…… and then there’s the power. The first Artic I drove was a Thorneycroft Antar. About 100 ton fully laden with a rice pudding skinning 250 (ish) horse. I was in an RDC last week listening to a steering wheel jockey boasting that his boss had got him a 500 horse because his 420 horse old lorry wasn’t powerful enough. No prizes for guessing what I was thinking when I heard that.

We would all like the standard of driving among lorry drivers to be higher. Current lorries preclude that so how do you go about raising the standard?

Do we dig out the tooling and build a couple of hundred old lorries so the youngsters of today have to actually learn to drive before they are let loose? ‘B’ Series ERF anyone?

Over to you Juddian/RobRoy et al

Given that the average age of HGV drivers is 40+ it almost certain that a large proportion of these people that constantly face criticism on here are in fact ‘old school’ drivers who always think they know best because blah blah blah…

I’m almost 40 myself but are still amused at how SOME of the old timers won’t let go of the fact that times and technology have moved on and whilst your possibly right that some newer drivers can’t operate a crash box this is solely because they,unlike you haven’t had training on it,much like the older technophobic drivers who won’t use a sat nav or think cruise control will send them to hurtling to their death so don’t use it.

One thing is for sure,all this old school stuff that constantly gets dragged up on here is history now,it’ll never be brought back so the fact that newer drivers can’t operate it is completely irrelevant…they don’t need to be able to do so!!!

Just because you were around to see it doesn’t make you a better driver for it,learn to accept that not all newbies are inferior to you.

xichrisxi:
Given that the average age of HGV drivers is 40+ it almost certain that a large proportion of these people that constantly face criticism on here are in fact ‘old school’ drivers who always think they know best because blah blah blah…

I’m almost 40 myself but are still amused at how all the old timers won’t let go of the fact that times and technology have moved on and whilst your possibly right that some newer drivers can’t operate a crash box this is solely because they,unlike you haven’t had training on it,much like the older technophobic drivers who won’t use a sat nav or think cruise control will send them to hurtling to their death so don’t use it.

One thing is for sure,all this old school stuff that constantly gets dragged up on here is history now,it’ll never be brought back so the fact that newer drivers can’t operate it is completely irrelevant…they don’t need to be able to do so!!!

Just because you were around to see it doesn’t make you a better driver for it,learn to accept that not all newbies are inferior to you.

You sir, is my hero… well said

It’s not just lorries it’s the whole of driving and it’s only going to get worse .
As more and more driver aids are added the standard of driving gets lower and lower .
I work in and out of the classic car scene and many newer owners cannot drive their own cars properly and bring them in complaining of faults that are their inability to drive .

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Iam 40 ,I drive a Foden every day it’s an Eaton box although it’s the 16 speed it changes as nice with out the clutch as with ,I also have a lorry with a twin splitter ,I’ve driven other Erfs with them ,I also have a lorry I’ve used in anger with a crash box and 2 speed axle ,I navigate by maps ,Google Earth and odd times a car say nav I’ve had since 2000 , I carry a spare wheel ,I rope n sheet ,I also wear a cowboy hat ,also guilty of other crimes

Its not just trucks, its every category out there where standards have dropped. Re gearboxes imo driving schools should have trucks with full manual gearboxes. Pass your car driving test in an auto and thats all you can drive. Its a whole different ball game with three pedals and a stick. Give a new driver a Volvo (for instance) 16 speed range change/splitter box and theye’d be lost. Ref power though, over the decades thats always be on the increase, drive a relatively high power truck which is more than capable at 44t and it wont be long before you take it for granted and want more, thats something here to stay…

I put it down to modern vehicles isolating the driver from what the vehicle is actually doing.
Automatic ‘boxes in trucks imo has dumbed the game down which has allowed some very average (at best) car drivers get their hgv licences.

Who cares? Manual boxes in trucks are out of the window, if you want them you have to specify them and pay more money to have them. I drove Leyland Roadtrains with crash boxes, I drove ERFs with Eaton Twin Splitters, Mercs with EPS, I’ve driven trucks with 6/8/10/12/16 speed gearboxes with every single combination of gearchange you can think of. In town, rush hour congestion and driving through roadworks give me a full auto box any day of the week.

Auto boxes haven’t dumbed the job down at all. Being able to change gears in a manual box doesn’t make you a good or better driver. Passing a HGV driving test and getting your license is actually HARDER now than it was when I took my test in the early 90s. You’re expected to know a lot more, you have a 45 minute theory test that includes drivers hours which never even got tested when I took mine. You then have to show basic skills like how to secure a load, do walk round checks etc, all of which never used to exist. You could get in a truck when I started without even knowing what a tacho was, let alone what the drivers hours rules were. There are a fair amount of “old school” truck drivers today who wouldn’t pass a test because they’d fail the theory.

I have no idea what it is with the obsession of wanting to go BACKWARDS in this job. Some people won’t be happy until you’re having to turn up to work an hour or so before setting off to light a fire in the boiler and build up enough steam to set off on your journey.

The problem is that modern vehicles (and cars are just the same) not only insulate the driver to what is going on, but also increasingly step in to take control when the physical forces the driver has unleashed have built up to such an extent that the vehicle is likely to go out of control.
I personally believe things have gone a little too far already in this direction, but can’t see how things could be rowed back even a little.

In some ways drivers should have that scare most of us have had when everything has gone light and getting it back under control can be an arse twitching time , instead of which they don’t even know half the time when traction control has cut in to prevent wheelspin, so they don’t suddenly find themselves accelerating up that damp hill sideways, or leaving that roundabout with the whole vehicle in a sideways rush because the electronics are now so good.
It might seem odd that i’d like drivers to experience those heart stopping moments, but unless you do you don’t learn to respect just how little grip is available on some surfaces in some conditions.

It all went wrong imho when the gearstick was replaced by a switch, that alone allowed a whole swathe of people to get behind the wheel who wouldn’t have wanted to before, and maybe shouldn’t be there now.

That was the first large scale dumbing down, it was done to reduce driver abuse of engines and drivetrains and to help improve fuel economy of those to whom driving wasn’t a natural or who had not the faintest idea nor interest how to make efficient progress on the road.
At one time this vehicle abuse thing policed itself, because there were knowledgeable people in charge, and enough good drivers looking for jobs that vehicle wreckers soon got shifted on…plus you got given the old banger when you first started on a job and had to prove yourself before you got given a decent lorry.

As things went along drivers lost the feel for what was actually happening at the point of contact with the road, some had no idea if the tyres were on the point of losing grip or a jack-knife was on the cards, they increasingly had little idea about using the brakes effectively without just stamping on them which used to induce massive wheel lock ups where anything could happen and often did.
So ABS came along, and because some hadn’t a clue about cornering forces including grip, we then got stability electronics and traction controls.

Some couldn’t help tailgating nor steer the thing in a straight line, so we’ve ended up with various forms of cruise/distance control and lane departure warnings…how long till the vehicle takes control of the steering when lane departure kicks off (this happens on some Volvo cars already apparently), not to mention automatic emergency braking.

All this might sound like i’m against progress, i’m not, i like my new lorry a lot, even the auto box has been massively improved so i no longer drive the thing in manual, only interfering with manual input a few times a day.
I like the superb brakes too, the quiet comfort serious sound system and much smoother ride than older stuff.
I am not against the improvements at all, but without doubt we’ve lost seat of the pants skills along the way.

It’s not actually the fault of the drivers themselves that the job has been increasingly automated, and many drivers welcome the improvements, however what has happened is that the driving force has been deskilled in that very few learn to drive their vehicles without electronic controls, and fewer still have bothered to work out when those electronics need to be switched off and take back control because they are either preventing progress (ie in slippery or maneuvering conditions) or might actually cause an accident (ie aebs causing a severe braking event for no good reason).

The other issue now is that so many drivers take no pride whatsoever in their craft, with each new driver aid that comes along the viscious circle turns once more and and an even less competent minority (and it is a minority) find themselves behind the wheel of ever bigger heavier lorries.

The thing is lorries stand out so much, if 20 car or van drivers behave like utter morons it blends into the maelstrom of traffic, but when a shiny high image liveried lorry is driven badly its there for the world to see, and the rest of us get tarred with the crappy brush as a result of a tiny handful of the incompetent/bullies.

Yes the training industry does have a part to play in this.
Firstly an auto pass should as in a car only give you an auto lorry licence, the fact you passed in a manual car means bugger all.

But the biggie for me with the industry is that they teach people to drive lorries like cars, with too much emphasis on brakes to slow gears to go, and we’ve all see the results (tragic beyond words) of the folly of this method.
A lorry is a lorry it is not and never will be a large car, there should be a serious review by the training industry of its practices here, so drivers get taught to actually control that lorry to give them a chance to stay in control when the crap hits the fan.
Proof that a lorry is still a lorry is that lorry makers go to great expense to fit auxilliary braking systems so the main brakes can be saved for when they are needed.

However, all this is just waffle, automation is going to increase and the job is going to be further deskilled.
Whether things will improve for the driver as time goes by i’m not sure, unless incompetent behaviour behind the wheel improves, it won’t, the poor drivers will be just as they always have been their own worst enemy, and increasingly legislation will be brought in to stop the worse actions.

As always those who try to drive and behave properly will be the ones to suffer, because one size fits all and lowest common denominator are the two rules about running lorry drivers on too many outfits now, where those who don’t need to be led by the nose get swept up with the dregs.
The dregs then leave, because they weren’t lorry drivers anyway and had no interest or pride in the job and the good guys are left having to suffer the results of the long gone dreg’s actions, as per bloody usual.
And another cycle in the race to the bottom is completed, rinse and repeat.

If you want to remind yourselves of just how much better you drove when you had to ‘plan your drive’ on approach to hazards like roundabouts and lights, just drive your car as if it were a B-series ERF and progressively double de-clutch your way down the box . It’s a sobering reminder!

By the way there’s a lot of bandying about of the phrase ‘crash box’ on this thread: they went out in the '30s - you mean constant-mesh box .

Robert

Just as many rubbish older drivers,as there are younger ones…if not more.

I’m 23 and just passed my class 1 yesterday morning in a daf xf auto. When I did my class 2 I had the choice of auto or 4over4 and I purposely chose 4over4 so I could learn it and it would prepare me some what for trucks Id drive in the future.

I have no idea what a constant mesh or eaton box is

HOP 2 IT:
I’m 23 and just passed my class 1 yesterday morning in a daf xf auto. When I did my class 2 I had the choice of auto or 4over4 and I purposely chose 4over4 so I could learn it and it would prepare me some what for trucks Id drive in the future.

I have no idea what a constant mesh or eaton box is

You dont want to thats something that needs left in the olden days.

Yawn yawn!!

How many times have we read all this before?

sorry to doubt the op, but as an old school, i learnt my trade by driving many makes, with different types of gearbox, and i am experienced to call my self the dogs dooh dah…why, well as an old school i never took a test, which only teaches you how to pass a test…not how to drive…you learn that later…i also have loaded many types of product, all shapes and sizes, roped,chained , strapped, sheeted, double sheeted and fly sheeted…dollys and double dollys, and sometimes a triple, roped evenly where there was no hooks, as other have done before me, yet the today driver hasnt that experience, i have pulled low loaders, flats, boxes, fridges, tilts, tauts,and tankers, all over europe and down to the middle east, so i have earned my place, and i am better than many…i drive to the road conditions and have respect for all drivers, more so in this industry, i drive to the speed of the road, much to the annoyance of others…but whats changed…well the vehicles are modern, the ride is far superior to what we had, we have gearboxes we cant play a tune on anymore, most loads go into an already sheeted trailer…and theres not much roping to do these days, but, whatever trailer i am hooked up to, i still drive with courtesy, and manners and for the majority around me…i have experience of every aspect of the transport industry, even drove buses and coaches too, and had a spell in the office…but guess what…i wouldnt change a thing, and am very proud of the industry i chose as a career, and at aged 72, i am still at it, even though times have changed, the industry no longer has crash, eatons, or old fashioned lorries, but if offered one, i could at least drive it…any fool can drive an auto eh !!

You are quite right truckyboy, any fool can drive an auto but there are plenty fools driving manuals as well. I am old school but am certainly not biased. There are good and bad in all age categories however standards of driving are simply appalling these days especially amongst us so called professionals.
Nothing to do with the vehicles, you can’t blame the vehicles , it’s attitudes of people that seems to have changed the last couple of decades. I used to love going to truckstops and having a friendly chat but that seems harder to do now. Drivers are not so friendly and the ones you do strike up a conversation either moan or tell you how good they are and how much they can earn! Me Me Me types.
There is very little courteousy on the roads and everyone is in such a hurry. Yes so am I sometimes but I don’t drive aggressively towards others because of it. I despise the way some of these idiots drive and years ago I was proud to tell others what I did. Now I keep my mouth shut because I am embarrassed to be associated with the morons in the job now.

Oh yeah and anyone who cannot rope and sheet a load correctly , reverse on to a bay fully loaded without power steering , or use a twin splitter should be castrated at birth.

We used to turd into a hole in the ground. It was functional and the end result was achieved.

Should we rip out our bathrooms because that’s how it was done in the olden days or do we move with progress?

xichrisxi:
Given that the average age of HGV drivers is 40+ it almost certain that a large proportion of these people that constantly face criticism on here are in fact ‘old school’ drivers who always think they know best because blah blah blah…

I’m almost 40 myself but are still amused at how SOME of the old timers won’t let go of the fact that times and technology have moved on and whilst your possibly right that some newer drivers can’t operate a crash box this is solely because they,unlike you haven’t had training on it,much like the older technophobic drivers who won’t use a sat nav or think cruise control will send them to hurtling to their death so don’t use it.

One thing is for sure,all this old school stuff that constantly gets dragged up on here is history now,it’ll never be brought back so the fact that newer drivers can’t operate it is completely irrelevant…they don’t need to be able to do so!!!

Just because you were around to see it doesn’t make you a better driver for it,learn to accept that not all newbies are inferior to you.

Just because a driver might be over 40 doesn’t mean that they aren’t a career changer with no more link with old school driving requirements than a new generation one.On that note 60-65 mph running speeds and constant mesh boxes by necessity mean’t more anticipation required just to stay alive and enforced a much better approach to hazards than modern day dumbed down 50 mph running and a brake and go novice car driver type driving requirement.While all the bs chip on the shoulder new generation protests won’t change that fact.Most of those protests being based on a justified inferiority complex because they know that the ability to drive a proper truck properly isn’t something that they will ever be able to prove themselves with.Because the job has been deliberately dumbed down to suit the lowest denominator of car drivers and it shows.Almost 40 not really fitting the definition of old school bearing mind that means never having driven a truck before around 2000 when old school vehicles, as we knew them in the 1970’s/80’s,were already effectively history.

Same old same old, a lorry at a previous job was older then me, I found that amusing as the gear stick was worn out so it took a bit of guess work and crunching to get down the road in that.

Call me a fairy compared to old ME drivers but I thought it was rubbish in last years summer in Europe before work had an air con pod fitted to my unit

jakethesnake:
You are quite right truckyboy, any fool can drive an auto but there are plenty fools driving manuals as well. I am old school but am certainly not biased. There are good and bad in all age categories however standards of driving are simply appalling these days especially amongst us so called professionals.
Nothing to do with the vehicles, you can’t blame the vehicles , it’s attitudes of people that seems to have changed the last couple of decades. I used to love going to truckstops and having a friendly chat but that seems harder to do now. Drivers are not so friendly and the ones you do strike up a conversation either moan or tell you how good they are and how much they can earn! Me Me Me types.
There is very little courteousy on the roads and everyone is in such a hurry. Yes so am I sometimes but I don’t drive aggressively towards others because of it. I despise the way some of these idiots drive and years ago I was proud to tell others what I did. Now I keep my mouth shut because I am embarrassed to be associated with the morons in the job now.

Oh yeah and anyone who cannot rope and sheet a load correctly , reverse on to a bay fully loaded without power steering , or use a twin splitter should be castrated at birth.

I so wanted to pick holes in this ^^^ but find I can’t as it’s imo spot on and certainly saved me typing it all out.