Comments By Christian T.

I read through this and it makes no sense to me either. First off your stuck for the weekend, not forever. Fighting city hall today won’t get you anywhere. I think your best bet is to head home and as soon as you get there contact the safety folks at the closest terminal. They should be able to investigate the situation. At a minimum it sounds like someone was neglegent by letting so many CE’s pile up before addressing it. You need to own your parts as well. This is a snowball rolling down a steep hill at this point. No matter what, you need more resolution than this if you want to stay in this business. As an employer I can guarantee you if I saw a DAC with that on it I would be very cautious to say the least. I drove some older trucks with the safety stuff on them, however it’s been awhile ago so I’m not up on that stuff.

Yes. After we went home for our first week after 6 weeks out, we got back to the truck and my first correspondence was an email with a new DBL, essentially threatening to put me out of service if I did not very in contact with him. He had apparently sent messages and made attempted phone calls to me, which I never received, until that email and upon calling him I was issued the CTE. Our previous DBL had never contacted me about critical events and apparently had quit while we were on leave at home.

This is really bugging me, as I'm sure it also is Christian. Any triggered events have got to be reviewed, otherwise nobody learns anything from them. Is your DBL the final word on these reviews? Do you guys mean to tell me no one else looks into these matters before your Schneider DBL gives you the axe? That seems really strange, but so does this whole story.

I actually dont know how he got so many without talking to anyone else, I've had my fair share of events and I always talked to someone from safety face to face, and I even had to give a written statement on what I'll do to prevent the same mistakes in the future.

I'm doing good these days, but I made a lot of mistakes early on. So seems he's leaving some parts of the story out, unless they handle team drivers differently.

That’s what I thought as well? The situation does not make sense to me either. I don’t understand how we got from point A to point B and it’s the weekend so I was not able to talk to anyone else. I live in CT, and was lampooned at the OC in Phoenix and given a greyhound ticket departing today. I just cannot help but feel an immense amount of disrespect and disservice done to me in the period of literally 3 weeks after driving dutifully for 6 months, hence my negative opinion of Schneider.

So what if any steps can I take from here?

Christian, I for one, believe your story. There is obviously a problem with the computer system/ systems on your truck. I would very calmly and professionally take this up the Chain of Command within the Company. You may not be rehired, ( or want to continue your employment with Schneider), but, it is crucial to resolve this issue, with documentation, as to not hinder your future prospects. Hang in there. There are so many things to deal with as a rookie out here. To put this on top of an already stressful situation is tough. Whatever you do, keep calm, and don't let your emotions get in the way of resolving this.

Well I appreciate that sentiment. To the best of my understanding I am accurately representing what happened. I think you have a rookie DBL and a rookie driver in myself both maybe not handling the situation properly. I did not do my part in defending myself, and although I don’t expect to work for Schneider anymore it’s just hard to accept that I might have to suffer down the road for this. I was driving safely and responsibly to the best of my knowledge and ability and I wanted to stop getting those critical events, but I just couldn’t avoid it. The cruise control did not work on the truck initially, for example, and the company did not believe us and the techs found no issue with it until Freightliner sent out a notice to Schneider about it. This could be a similar issue but I cannot confirm that.

I've only had a few minor critical events in my career, but they were always dealt with by "safety personnel." If my driver manager was involved I didn't know of it.

Schneider handles it a bit differently, you'll talk to your DBL about these events and they'll take your statement and after you have had a few within 30 days, they'll bring you in for extra training and that's where you'll talk to someone from safety, usually have to watch some videos and driving or backing depending on what happened.

Your DBL usually gives you some information on how to prevent them from happening again, if you didn't know what happened. but it's a pretty straight forward process and it doesn't make any sense if he went from having all these events to being fired without ever going through some type of extra training.

Stability Control events are basically the worse you can get, and to get so many so close together is either your own fault or the truck is messed up. But chances are, you were probably doing something that could have triggered it. The new trucks have 2 additional sensors then older Schneider trucks so they are must more sensitive.

this is accurate. I just wasn’t brought in for additional training, the stability control events were being treated as very serious, although nothing was happening, and my understanding from my conversation with my DBL is that my driving was deemed too risky as a result to even be eligible for retraining or taking other steps.

If what you say is true about the sensors, this is where is where I feel blind sided. I was trained and drove on a system For which I was not triggering stability control events. upon getting the new truck, I began triggering these without changing my driving habits and just was not able to adapt. I’m not sure that I was given due process and did not deal with this properly, and now will have to pay for it. That’s a bitter pill to swallow.

Christian, of all the critical events registered by Schneider, how many would you say were false positives and how many would you say were your fault?

That’s the conundrum. It’s impossible to determine that, really, which is essentially why they had to term me, in their words. There were simply too many, whether or not I was responsible for all or any of them. If you consider that I drove for 6 months with only one critical event...I don’t know to what extent I can even be held responsible for suddenly accumulating 17 in 2 months. Considering that I was never even at once remotely at risk of a rollover, are any my fault? I need to reiterate that these events were often being triggered on straight roads. It was impossible for to rectify my “dangerous driving behavior” when it was never established what behaviors were triggering these events.

It’s hard for anyone here to understand this situation if you have the shared traditional experience with the ESC system and how it operates, because these events are not easy to trigger, which was also my experience before I got this 2019 Freightliner. My driving habits did not change, yet I suddenly got stability controls left and right, and I couldn’t adjust my driving because it was never clear what was triggering those events. if there was a clear pattern, I could have easily learned and adapted.

This video shows an example of many of the stability controls we received. Crucially, my team mate and did not have an issue with getting stability controls for our first 6 months of driving, information that Schneider would have been privy to and you would think would have had some bearing on how they proceeded with this.

Ok, I don't get this. For one, as Rainy pointed out, why didn't you ask the shop to take a look at it if you thought there was something wrong with the truck?

For two, DBL's don't fire people and they're not the authority in a situation like this. After all of those incidents you never once spoke with anyone from the safety department about it? You didn't get any warnings or anything? No phone calls or messages over the Qualcomm? Just suddenly out of the blue you were fired?

For three, the truck's GPS will record the exact location of the truck when these events occurred. If you were getting these events in areas and circumstances that were obviously not prone to this type of event, like travelling at highway speed on a straight highway, the company would be able to look this up and see there was a pattern with it.

Though I haven't heard of anyone getting a truck with a faulty sensor, it's entirely possible. But where was your head during all of this? If you believed the truck was the problem, why weren't you contacting the shop and having conversations with the safety department?

Once again I don't feel like we're getting even 25% of the honest, complete story here but I'd like to hear some answers to those questions.

This is a completely transparent account of events.

We did ask the shop. In fact, we brought the truck in twice before they actually fixed our adaptive cruise control, which was not working. They could not even diagnose that. The mechanics said nothing about the ESC and I don’t believe they even looked into it.

I never spoke to anyone besides my DBL. The first I spoke to him on the phone, he issued the CTE, which is a 30 day “probation” type thing. If performance did not improve, I was to be terminated. I explained that I wasn’t sure what was triggering these events but that was largely ignored. He continued to contact me after further critical events, up until he informed me I was to be terminated.

We were routed through our OC briefly and we sat with him and went through about 5 separate incidents, where we analyzed the exact GPS location. I personally felt that this largely exonerated us, and that he confirmed this with us, because those pinpointed images showed fairly straight roads.

This is my first company, and I had no idea how to proceed with this issue.I don’t know how I should have handled it, largely because I assumed that it was a hardware problem or that the company would work with me to find a solution or that there would be some type of escalation to remedial training prior to termination, but this was not the case. I can’t help but feel this wasn’t handled by Schneider appropriately.

Hello and welcome.

I wish you would.have come to us earlier.... like before you racked up a dozen critical events in one month. And an additional 5.more.

Honestly, that is an insane amount. And I had a truck that previously rolled so the rollover sensored was greatly increased in sensitivity. With that said, did you not question to have the shop.adjust the sensitivity? What recourse did you take to rectify your driving? Once you knew what triggered it, you could.simply avoid it.

Safety features on trucks are not BS. You took turns too fast for that truck and didnt take the time to learn what speed was safe.

Termination will show up on your DAC so getting hired may be a challenge but not impossible depending on the rest of your record. Accidents or tickets?

You got 17...how many did your teammate get?

I believe 9? More than half were occurring on straight aways or roads with no obvious curvature. I would like to point out that we never had a problem until getting this new truck and our driving style had not changed. We appealed to our DBL but he made it very clear that he did not care and dismissed any allegations of faulty equipment. I was completely blind sided by this.

Story: after 6 months of driving dedicated for Schneider, My teammate and I switched to OTR. We received a new Freightliner and shortly thereafter began registering frequent stability control critical events. Previously I had only 1 stability control event in 6 months. I registered approximately 12 in one month of driving in the new truck, during which time my DBL quit and the new DBL issued me a CTE. I registered 5 more thereafter and was just terminated, 3 weeks after the CTE was issued, without recourse. Part of me is relieved to be done with Schneider and their bull**** but my question is is there any appeal I can make to the company? And if not, how will this affect future employment prospects?