I see the trucks every morning on Highway 13, rolling south out of the sand counties toward the distribution hubs in Madison and Milwaukee — reefers and dry vans and flatbeds, the owner-operator rigs with the faded lettering you can only read when the light hits them at the right angle, the big-fleet Cascadias with their governed cruise-control and the decal from the logistics company that bought the company that bought the company. The drivers stop at the Kwik Trip on the south end of Adams for coffee and a roller-grill breakfast sandwich, and if you’re in line behind them at quarter to six you can hear the dispatcher on the Bluetooth giving them the day’s run.
Those drivers are the nervous system of a county like this one. Trucking is the last occupation in Adams County that a man without a college degree can walk into and clear $70,000 a year, maybe $90,000 if he runs the long-haul lanes and doesn’t see his kids for three weeks at a stretch — which is itself a separate indictment, the family cost of that paycheck, but it is still a paycheck, still a living wage, still a job that is not at the Dollar General.
PepsiCo is already running 35 driverless trucks on Arizona roads, moving Cheetos and Gatorade between warehouses without a human hand on the wheel. That is not a pilot project. That is a deployed freight operation, the first large-scale consumer-goods rollout of autonomous trucks, on public highways, right now. FedEx Freight’s CEO says the technology is ready and regulation is all that’s holding it back. And on Wednesday a Swedish autonomous-truck company called Einride began trading on Nasdaq after merging with a blank-check firm, valued at $1.35 billion before the SPAC deal, with $113 million in fresh backing from Stockholm-based EQT Ventures to scale its self-driving freight platform across three continents. The blank-check firm that carried Einride to Nasdaq, Legato Merger Corp. III, assigned the startup a $1.35 billion equity value — more than twenty thousand times what a man pays for a paid-off 2018 Freightliner that still has to earn its keep every Monday morning. The money is in the pipe. The technology works. The only question left is how fast the truckers get replaced.
The technology isn’t the breakthrough. The breakthrough is figuring out how to run a man ragged enough that he’ll quit before the robot gets there. It’s the independent owner-operators priced out by fleets who run the wheels until they scream. It’s detention time — unpaid hours waiting at loading docks while the clock bleeds a driver’s weekly wage. It’s electronic logging devices that treat sleep like theft. The fleets rolled out mandatory driver-facing cameras to dock pay for every yawn and reclassified seasoned haulers as independent contractors to strip away overtime. The carriers broke the job, and now they’re asking the public markets to pay for the machine that finishes the job they started.
You do not need a spreadsheet to see what happens next. The long-haul lanes get automated first — the interstate runs between distribution centers, the miles where the road is straight and the weather is predictable and the load is sealed. The owner-operator who runs a Detroit-to-Dallas round-trip in that paid-off 2018 Freightliner is competing against a machine that does not stop to sleep, does not draw a paycheck, does not demand health insurance, and does not file a workers’ comp claim when its back gives out. The machine wins.
What is left for the driver is the local delivery, the last-mile freight, the backhaul into the county where the truck has to navigate a Main Street intersection built before the interstate system existed. That work pays less, requires more stops, and burns more diesel per mile. The long-haul lanes cross-subsidized the local work. Take away the long-haul lanes and what you have is a driver working harder for less money — the self-exploitation model that already runs every small business in a county like this one, the farmer who loses money on every hundredweight but stays in the barn because the barn is who he is.
Wendell Berry wrote in The Unsettling of America that an extractive economy treats a place as a mine rather than a home — that a community’s economy is its membership, and extraction destroys the membership before it destroys the economy. Eric Schlosser’s Fast Food Nation documented exactly how consolidation applied that logic to the people on the line. Einride’s pitch is the same story at the steering wheel: the human is the unreliable component, and the solution is a $1.35 billion Nasdaq listing to remove him from the system entirely.
A truck-driving job that pays a mortgage on a house in Friendship, that buys school supplies at the same Family Dollar where the driver’s wife works part-time, that keeps a diesel shop like mine in business when the truck breaks down on County Z — that job is membership. When it disappears, the membership breaks. The driver sells the house. The shop sells fewer parts. The school loses enrollment. The Family Dollar loses a customer. The extraction spreads outward in concentric circles, and by the time you notice it the extraction has hollowed out another county and left a gas station, a Dollar General, and a Kwik Trip with a driverless-truck-charging-station on the site where the driver used to park his rig.
The companies will tell you it’s about safety and efficiency, that the driverless truck never gets tired or distracted. But the $1.35 billion valuation and the $113 million in backing did not come from a safety study; they came from margin models that subtract a driver’s wages, subtract his health insurance, subtract his existence. Those arguments are the corporate version of what the logging companies told the Upper Peninsula in 1980 — the automation is inevitable, the jobs are obsolete, get on board with the future. The future, when it arrived, left behind towns with empty storefronts and counties where a quarter of the children live in poverty, and the efficiency was never shared with the people who lost the work. The safety of a driverless truck is a real question. The destination of the wealth it generates is not.
I am under no illusion that a column from a small-engine shop in central Wisconsin will stop a $1.35 billion Nasdaq listing. The money is already moving. The technology is already on the road. PepsiCo is already running freight without a driver. What is within reach, what is still possible, is to name what is happening while it is happening — to put on the record, in plain English, that the autonomous-truck rollout is a wealth transfer from the working-class men who drive trucks to the investors who own the software. The transfer will not show up in the Bureau of Labor Statistics for another five years, by which point the truckers will have retrained, moved, or just disappeared from the data. By then the headline will be about the efficiency gains in logistics and the declining cost of consumer goods, and no one will be standing in a Kwik Trip at quarter to six noticing the drivers are gone.
The lake freezes later than it did a generation ago, the deer bed down later, the membership grows thinner. The truckers who stop at the Kwik Trip on Highway 13 are the membership. They are what is left. If we want a county that still has a county in twenty years, we might start by noticing who is being driven off the road.