Great films about trucking don’t come along too often. Steven Spielberg began his career with the film Duel, about an evil truck hunting down an innocent man. The French film Wages of Fear showed the perils of hauling hazmat.
But would you watch a new truck driver movie from the creator of Beavis and Butthead, King of the Hill, Office Space, and Silicon Valley?
Mike Judge and the Team
Mike Judge, the aforementioned writer, director, producer, and show creator, is set to direct the new trucking comedy.
He will be co-producing with Alec Berg, who also teamed up with Mike Judge on the show Silicon Valley, which aired on HBO and earned multiple Emmy nominations.
The script for the movie will be written by Rob Turbovsky and Matteo Borghese, both of whom wrote for Silicon Valley as well as the recent Only Murders in the Building.
Are you intrigued?
Automated Trucking
The name of the new film is Automated Trucking. According to Deadline, the plot is as follows:
“Automated Trucking follows two men, cramped into the cab of a truck together, in a race across the country in the tradition of great American trucker movies — except now with automation. Billy, a middle-aged trucker whose job is disappearing before his very eyes, sits next to Zander, a young programmer whose mission is to make it disappear… as fast as he can.”
Of course, the topic of automated trucking is a controversial one among actual truck drivers. But what is the truth of the matter?
Reality of Automated Trucking
In the view of Class A Drivers, this new film should probably be classified as fantasy or science fiction. Automated trucking, also known as autonomous trucking, is nowhere ready for primetime.
Accidents from automated vehicles have resulted in the deaths of people, and that’s not counting the fact that automated trucks would be expected to carry the same 80,000 pounds that semi-trucks do today.
It’s probably possible to program an automated truck to drive on a straight highway. The job of navigating other erratic vehicles, however, is a potential massive supply of lawsuits. When factoring in the significantly more complex routes of local driving or simply navigating to a shipper/receiver, it’s hard to believe automated trucking will be a reality any time soon.