We have a long-haul problem and Hirschbach proved it

The American trucking industry has been telling itself a story for thirty years. The story goes like this: we are running out of truck drivers. The shelves will go empty. The supply chain will collapse. We need to lower the age to drive interstate. We need heavier trucks. We need immigration reform. We need autonomous vehicles.

That story isn’t true and the announcement last week that Hirschbach Motor Lines, a major refrigerated carrier based in Iowa, signed a non-binding memorandum of understanding to deploy 500 Aurora Driver-equipped autonomous trucks starting in 2027 tells you almost everything you need to know about which part of the story, if any of it, is actually real.

There isn’t a driver shortage. There is a long-haul problem. There is a skilled driver problem. Those are completely different things, and the industry has spent decades conflating them for reasons that aren’t always in the public interest.

In October 2024, the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine published a landmark study commissioned by FMCSA and mandated by Congress in the 2021 Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act. The title was clinical, “Pay and Working Conditions in the Long-Distance Truck and Bus Industries”, but the conclusion was anything but.

The study concluded that the truckload sector’s long-asserted driver shortage cannot be supported. Labor economists maintain that when demand for workers in an occupation increases, the normal response is to increase wages.

Based on average wages from 2006 to 2024, the study found trends not indicative of the wage premium one would expect for long-distance employees if they were truly working in an occupation experiencing a chronic labor shortage. If drivers were actually scarce, their wages would have risen dramatically and consistently. They didn’t. The market corrected.

It always does. Operating authority for motor carriers grew by 45% from July 2019 to August 2023, while truckload demand was only up about 11% during the same period. The current difficult conditions in trucking are a result of too much capacity chasing too little freight. So why does the shortage narrative persist?

The American Trucking Associations has been criticized for using the driver shortage narrative to push agendas such as heavier trucks, younger drivers, and other regulatory changes.

Despite repeated public challenges to defend their data, the ATA declined to participate in a debate even when FreightWaves offered to donate $50,000 to a charity of their choice. That tells you something. Here is the real number. The average annualized turnover rate from Q3 of 1996 through Q1 of 2023 was 92.

7% for large truckload carriers (those with $30 million or more in annual revenue) and 77. 6% for small truckload carriers. Nearly a hundred percent annual turnover. Not at one company. Across the entire large-fleet sector, consistently, for nearly thirty years. That is not a shortage.

That is an industry that has consciously or unconsciously decided that replacing drivers is cheaper than keeping them. In the 1990s, J. B. Hunt experimented with increasing driver pay by 35%, resulting in reduced turnover and accident rates.

The practice was abandoned, revealing an industry preference for replacing drivers rather than addressing underlying retention issues. The contrast with other segments is stark. LTL carriers reported an average turnover rate of just 11. 8% from Q4 2000 through Q1 2022.

For private fleets, the National Private Truck Council reported annualized turnover rates of only 15% from 2005 through 2022. The difference between a 92% turnover rate and a 15% turnover rate isn’t the drivers. It’s the job. The driver persona has changed fundamentally in the last decade in ways that the industry’s workforce models have been slow to absorb.

I was that old driver persona. Before ELDs, before electronic logging, before any of it, I was running LA to Atlanta, stopping only for fuel and a few hours of sleep, swapping trailers on the dock, then turning right back around to the Central Valley before the sun came up again.

When I ran seafood for Shackelford Seafood out of Virginia, hitting Miami, then Hunts Point in New York, or the Boston Fish Pier the next day, there were runs when I genuinely never slept. It was a toothpick-soaking, mile-chasing, dollar-hunting survivor’s mindset.

Shackelford had so many hours of service violations that we had to start uploading our paper logs directly to the FMCSA. You measured your worth by how far you ran and how fast you turned. Broke didn’t mean what it means now. Hustle didn’t mean what it means now. Running didn’t mean what it means now.

That driver wasn’t just willing to be gone for weeks; this was and is a source of pride. We were killers. We, like many blue-collar old-school real workers, wore the exhaustion like a badge. ELDs and HOS reform hamstrung that world, and rightfully so; those logs were fiction, and those schedules were dangerous.

Nights I’d be awakened by the “S” I was making between the lanes, and I realized it was time to stop. Somewhere in the process of making the roads safer, we also removed the last cultural permission structure that made the long-haul OTR life feel like an identity worth having. The modern driver didn’t just stop chasing those miles. He stopped wanting to.

The driver who was willing to be gone for three weeks at a stretch, sleep in his cab, run 700 miles a day, and measure his success in annual mileage still exists, but he is increasingly rare and increasingly old. The median age of a commercial truck driver in the United States is now 46.

The drivers entering the industry today grew up in a fundamentally different cultural context around work-life balance, mental health, time with family, and the definition of a good job. OTR home time is the biggest reason drivers leave the segment. Most regional drivers get home every weekend.

OTR drivers are out for 2 to 3 weeks at a time, and this is the primary reason experienced OTR drivers transition to regional. That migration is accelerating. Experienced drivers with options are choosing regional. New drivers with options are choosing local.

The pool of drivers genuinely willing to haul coast to coast for weeks at a time is shrinking, not because fewer people have CDLs, but because fewer people want that life.

The operational consequence of that shift is simple: if a driver used to be willing to run 700 miles a day and a modern driver is comfortable with 350 to 400, you now need roughly two drivers to cover the ground that one used to cover. That’s not a driver shortage. That’s a doubling of the driver requirement per mile of freight moved.

The math looks like a shortage. It isn’t one. The shift to regional and local preferences has coincided with the structural reality that a significant portion of the country’s most time-sensitive, temperature-sensitive freight cannot be transported by rail. California’s Central Valley is the salad bowl of the country.

Strawberries from Watsonville, stone fruit from the San Joaquin, romaine from Salinas, tomatoes, grapes, almonds, pistachios, all of it has to move on a truck and most of it has a shelf life measured in days, not weeks. A load of fresh strawberries from Salinas to the distribution centers outside Washington, D. C. is 2,800 miles.

It has to arrive in roughly 72 hours. Rail can’t reliably do that. The driver who wants to be home by Friday isn’t doing that run. The same is true of live livestock hauls. Medical supply chains. Pharmaceutical cold chain. Temperature-controlled LTL consolidation.

These are the loads that need somebody willing to drive far, fast, and for days at a stretch, and the universe of drivers who want to do exactly that is contracting in real time. This is the actual driver problem. Not a shortage of CDL holders. A shortage of willingness to haul the runs that modern drivers find least desirable. Perishable long-haul.

Overnight transcon. The loads that can’t be handed off to a regional relay because the freight doesn’t have time for the handoff. Hirschbach Motor Lines is expanding its partnership with autonomous truck developer Aurora Innovation, aiming to have the fleet own 500 Aurora Driver-equipped trucks, with deliveries beginning in 2027.

Hirschbach will subscribe to Aurora’s Driver-as-a-Service model. The 500 trucks will be deployed across Aurora’s network with a focus on high-volume routes between customer facilities in the Sun Belt and beyond. The CEO of Hirschbach, Richard Stocking, was unusually direct about exactly why.

“Autonomy isn’t just a business move, it’s a quality-of-life investment for our people. The Aurora Driver will handle the longer, less desirable routes, giving our drivers greater flexibility. It’s a win-win.”

Hirschbach’s expansion strategy envisions a hybrid network where autonomous trucks handle long-haul routes, allowing traditional drivers to focus on shorter hauls that get them home daily. The CEO of a major refrigerated carrier explicitly says that long-haul routes are less desirable. That his human drivers don’t want them.

That autonomous trucks are the solution, not because humans can’t do the job, but because humans increasingly won’t. Aurora had already demonstrated the capability on exactly the kind of run that matters here.

Aurora began running freight between Dallas and Houston and has completed over 1,200 miles in a single self-driving truck without a driver, with plans to expand to El Paso and Phoenix by the end of 2025. The Fort Worth to Phoenix corridor, one of Hirschbach’s key lanes, is 1,000 miles of Sun Belt highway that connects the coasts through the Southwest.

Hirschbach is already leveraging Aurora’s full network to maximize value for its operations, with loads traveling from Houston to Dallas, El Paso, and on to Phoenix. Aurora’s own SEC filings are unambiguous about what they believe the technology solves.

“The Aurora Driver addresses major challenges the freight industry faces, including the structural driver shortage, persistently high turnover, and asset underutilization. We offer a solution that provides a scalable, stable driver supply, which we expect will nearly double truck utilization.”

The Hirschbach-Aurora deal is not the only response to the long-haul preference problem.

Another answer that doesn’t require autonomous technology is the relay model, dividing long runs into human-manageable segments, swapping drivers at strategically located handoff points, and getting the load to the destination without requiring any single driver to be away from home more than a night or two.

Several carriers have been building relay networks quietly for years. The concept isn’t new; team driving is essentially a manual relay, but the modern version uses terminals, drop lots, and hub-and-spoke coordination to chain together regional drivers who each handle their home region before handing off to the next link. The freight keeps moving.

The drivers go home. The practical limitation is infrastructure. You need enough terminal density to make handoffs efficient. You need coordination technology to sequence the relays without losing time.

And you need the freight economics to work, which adds cost through handling and coordination overhead, which has to be weighed against the premium the shipper is willing to pay to get a time-sensitive load moved without disruption. For perishable reefer freight moving from California to the East Coast, that premium is often worth paying.

A load of strawberries that costs $800 extra to move in a relay model still costs less than the load being rejected at the destination because it arrived warm after a detention delay. The Montgomery v.

Caribe Transport case, pending before the Supreme Court and expected to produce a decision on broker and shipper liability in carrier selection this summer, is landing in an industry in the midst of a transition.

Shippers and brokers selecting carriers for long-haul perishable and temperature-sensitive freight are about to face elevated legal scrutiny on the adequacy of their carrier vetting.

The question of whether a carrier had the driver capacity, the equipment integrity, and the safety record to reliably complete a transcontinental run without incident is going to be harder to wave away as irrelevant.

A shipper who puts a load of produce on a carrier whose drivers are demoralized, undertrained, and cycling through at 92% annual turnover because nobody wants to run the transcon anymore is not making a neutral business decision. After Montgomery, that decision may carry a verdict. The industry is being honest with itself, slowly.

Hirschbach’s announcement isn’t an aberration.

It’s a signal that major carriers have accepted a structural reality: there is a category of freight movement that the modern driver workforce is not positioned to cover at scale, and the options are autonomous trucks, relay models, intermodal expansion where it’s viable, or just accepting that the loads don’t move on time.

The ATA’s shortage narrative has been useful for lobbying, but it has obscured the real problem for thirty years. The problem was never headcount. It was always the job description.

Weeks away from home, sleeping in a truck, chasing miles across four time zones, bouncing around like a pinball from shipper to consignee across a random geography, fewer people want that life than used to, and the ones who did it for years are aging out.

Hirschbach’s most seasoned professional drivers, who collectively represent over 75 years of on-road experience, evaluated Aurora’s system and were, as the company reported, “blown away by the Aurora Driver’s performance.” I flew home for every one of my children’s births and flew back out.

The people who know exactly what that job costs them were the first to say the machine can have it. The post We have a long-haul problem and Hirschbach proved it appeared first on FreightWaves.