Profile For Brett Aquila

If you're trying to figure out how to get your right arm as tan as your left!

Had they put them in the training trucks first and basically said "These cameras will babysit your students so you can sleep" then 60% of the fleet would have been more willing to get them. They would have seen the cameras aren't that bad.

That would be an excellent way to introduce cameras to the fleet.

Most other companies are getting them. Hirsbach who already had inward for awhile are now getting the AI cameras also.

I think every major carrier will have them before long. Right now it's a tug of war between the safety improvements you get with cameras versus the money you lose in recruiting because people are against them. As the cameras become more commonplace, the hysteria against them will go away.

I remember everyone said the world would end when they implemented electronic logbooks. Every driver was going to quit because they couldn't make a living, no new drivers would come into the industry, the economy would collapse, and the government would be forced to rescind the rule.

Well, what actually happened was nothing. People switched, life went on.

The experience with cameras will come down to how strictly they're enforced by each company. Companies will have to determine where that tipping point is where drivers won't tolerate a certain level of intrusion. It's one thing to tell a driver he's drifted onto the shoulder, but quite another to tell him he's one inch to the left of center in his lane.

Trying to be helpful can become a dangerous distraction if implemented the wrong way or at the wrong time.

Ultimately our job as an instructor is teach the students to be their own sensors, to interpret what they are feeling and adjust accordingly. Always though, a qualified instructor that can recognize all those factors above and has a talent for identifying how you need to move is required periodically.

There is a human element, a hunch, a gut level institution that needs to be developed, and honed over time. That is what makes a high performing individual. No computer can replicate it.

Absolutely.

The key to the sensors with skiing is that it allows you to feel the difference between making a technically excellent turn versus a sloppy turn. Once you know which elements you need to work on and learn what it feels like to make a precise turn, you can learn to "become your own sensor."

An endurance athlete can do that with their heart rate. I always used a heart rate monitor for all of my endurance training. I always monitored it closely. After a while, I knew what it felt like to be in the right zone. But without the accuracy of the heart rate monitor telling me exactly where I stood at all times in the beginning, there would be no way to learn what it feels like to be in the right zone. You can't become your own sensor until you know the feeling you're trying to replicate.

The sensors are also incredibly accurate. They can sense if you have a small variance in your angles or weight distribution. Most importantly, they help you develop consistency from turn to turn.

Often when we're learning something we're making different mistakes each time. My first turn I didn't have enough weight on the outside edge. My second turn I entered the turn too late. The third turn my weight was too far on my heels. The sensors give you real-time feedback in each turn, so you know what it feels like each time you do a certain thing the wrong way. Then, when you nail a turn with precision, you learn how that feels as well.

Josh Allen, the Buffalo Bills quarterback, was highly inaccurate throughout his college and early pro career. After his 2nd or 3rd season, they put him with a new coach who completely changed his technique. The improvement was dramatic. From that point on he was far more accurate.

You wouldn't think a guy could get a $150 million contract as a professional without knowing how to throw a football properly, but he did.

There's plenty of opportunity for both technology and humans to contribute to a person's development. Both have their strengths and weaknesses.

What I find interesting is that experienced truck drivers always feel like they know what they need to know and no further instruction is necessary. Yet, when you look at high performers in most areas of life, the higher up you go the more coaching you receive.

In football you might have two coaches for your little league team, three coaches for junior varsity, five coaches for varsity, twenty coaches in college, and forty coaches in the NFL. You would think a person would need less coaching as they got better at something, yet the opposite is true. The greater you want to perform, the more coaching and practice it takes.

The same is true in business. Examine the lives of the people at higher levels and they tend to have more coaches, counselors, courses, and advisors than people at lower levels.

In trucking, how many experienced drivers are eager to pursue more coaching? How many want to see how accurately they can make a turn, back up, or predict the movement of drivers ahead? What if the safety department offered free, voluntary training for experienced drivers? How many drivers would show up to see if they can improve? I'd be curious to see.

The gamification term is not very welcome as people don't see safety as a game.

When you say they don't see safety as a game, I know you mean they take it safety seriously. I think everyone does. Turning it into a type of video game is meant to make it more appealing and engaging, based on the natural human tendency to want to know where you stand in a group.

In the end, it's a driver monitoring system no matter how you decorate it. Unfortunately, most of the technology they're using in hopes of making people safer drivers is rather limited. I'm sure some of it helps newer drivers, and some may be helpful to more experienced drivers, but much of it is either unhelpful or even potentially dangerous.

In July i ranked 10 out of 426 drivers using them

That's a small percentage of the trucks you guys have. Is this a pilot program? Or is that how many they've installed so far?

Some think they want to have "gotcha" moments to fire us.

They do. That wouldn't be the main reason they're doing it, and it doesn't mean they'll use those moments, but I'm sure they feel it's nice to have them if they need them.

The nice thing about the cameras is that they're trying to prevent accidents, not just reacting to them. Imagine if our healthcare and food system incentives were based on preventing illness instead of treating it. We'd be far more healthy.

In July i ranked 10 out of 426 drivers using them

They call what they're doing "gamification" of a system. They make it like a video game, hoping that people enjoy the competition and look at it more like a fun game of self-improvement instead of the more serious-sounding driver monitoring system.

As both a tech guy and someone who makes every effort to be a high performer in life, I can see where they're getting their ideas from. Scoring yourself and using every available technology to gain an edge is what high-performing people often do.

There's a saying that what gets measured gets improved. If they simply say, "drive safer," it doesn't give enough specifics to know what you should work on. By giving you exact scores for various things, they give you specifics to work on.

I'm a skier, and I have these sensors that go in your boots. They measure a long list of variables like turn radius, edge angles, parallelism, weight distribution on your feet, etc. It actually reads out your scores in real-time while you're skiing (if you want it to) so you know how you're doing and what to improve at all times.

I love it. It improved my skiing dramatically in a very short time. It made me realize I had issues I could have never recognized without an accurate system of measurement.

So the truck cameras and gamification of safety can lead to big improvements, but there's are massive differences between my ski experience and trucking. Not only is no one looking over my shoulder to see if I'm "good enough to remain on the team," but there are no privacy concerns.

So from a pure performance standpoint, what they're doing makes sense on the one hand. But on the other hand, they're creating an incredible amount of pressure on drivers and they're also creating privacy concerns for those who sleep in their truck or are doing things unrelated to safe driving. Not to mention, it makes you feel like a child when someone is babysitting you and literally watching every move you make.

Even as a former driver, I have to side with the trucking companies putting cameras in the trucks because of the liability involved. If we were delivering newspapers on a bicycle, it would be hard to justify that level of monitoring and scrutiny. But knowing that one or two seconds of inattention could lead to a massive catastrophe, it's hard to justify putting privacy before safety.

If it were up to me, I would consider the possibility of reducing monitoring with experience. For instance, the first year with the company you have a driver-facing camera. If you prove yourself to be safe and reliable, you earn the right to have the camera removed.

That's awesome news! Huge day for ya!

I don't know the actual figures, but I'll bet more than half the people who begin truck driving school never get to the point in their career that they're driving a truck solo. They either fail to get their CDL or never make it through on-the-road training and go solo.

Just getting to this point is a big win. Getting to that one-year mark would make you more successful than probably 75% of the people who take a shot at this industry, and I'm probably being conservative with that estimate.

When you're both nervous and excited you know you're living right. A life worth living will require taking risks to achieve goals that are far from certain.

Best of luck and keep us updated!

A wireless noise-cancelling mic is a great idea.

Yeah, even a Lavalier mic that pins on your shirt with a tiny windscreen for when you're outside might help a lot. There are many options, and you don't have to spend much at all. But it's worth doing a little research into different mics and picking up one or two mid-range quality ones.

The other thing I would recommend is keeping the videos fairly short and focused on a certain topic. People like having a selection of 10-minute videos, each focused on a particular subject. What they normally don't want is 45 minutes of rambling from subject to subject.

If you have good audio and good information that's easy to sift through, people will be happy. But even the most knowledgeable person will find a small audience if the audio is annoying or people can't find the subjects they're interested in.

Hey, that's very cool man! I dig it!

You're right, no one cares too much about the production quality of a video, as long as it has good information and it isn't blatantly annoying or difficult to listen to. Just make sure you have the best audio quality you can get at the time. Try to avoid echoes or constant noise, like a lot of engine noise.

You might consider a noise-cancelling mic.

Many people, myself included, do a lot more listening to videos than watching.

Very cool!

It seems like most of the time 75% of the posts on here are about getting fired, needing another job or trying to get into trucking

Well, that's what we do. We help people get started in trucking and develop their career.

What kind of topics did you want to discuss that you would like to see a separate category for?