Counterpoint to some truckers' tech reticence: 'If you use a smartphone, you embrace it'

Of the ubiquitous smartphone, which led Overdrive’s State of Surveillance survey in both average costs and benefits, owner-operator Andy Freeman of Richland Center, Wisconsin, leased to Landstar, said that “if you’re doing this,” trucking business generally, “on a smartphone, you embrace technology” whether you say you do or not. “If you even own a flip phone -- if you’ve got anything other than a hard line, that means you’re embracing technology.”

Freeman’s formulation accounts for all but a scant 3% of Overdrive's State of Surveillance survey respondents, with 85% reporting they used a smartphone in the operation, another 12% a basic cell phone. “Some people are afraid of new technologies,” Freeman said, “but if you have a smartphone, you embrace technology. Just get over it.”

Owner-operator Andy FreemanIt's easy to see why so many have brought the computer-in-your-pocket devices into the cab. For Freeman, ease of communication enables him to easily prep for service in his home area, with his preferred shop, and double down on preventive maintenance. He sits his views on the reticence to other techs among some of his peers also in the realm of what truck OEMs have been forced to do by the Environmental Protection Agency -- those emissions systems with their DPFs, selective catalytic reduction and the use of diesel exhaust fluid and myriad sensors, prone to failure. 

Yet the OEMs, he feels, have “come a long, long way with the sensors,” he said. “If you listen to your equipment and monitor your equipment and what it’s telling you, your breakdown can be a scheduled breakdown.” 

Do the calculations, he says -- use the smartphone in your pocket. He tracks his DEF-use mileage just as he does his fuel mileage. Anytime he sees a spike in DEF use, it’s time to pick up the phone and schedule that breakdown, as it were, with his home shop. “It doesn’t matter who you are," he said, "even a company driver. If it’s 10 below, I’d rather go to a shop where it’s warm and fuzzy than be stuck on the side of the road and freezing my booty off” with a road call. 

Only road-facing dashcams scored a higher cost-benefit measure than smartphones among Overdrive Costs associated with smartphone use were rated by survey respondents higher than any other tech mentioned in the survey, at an average 6.6  of a possible 10, where 10 is costliest. Smartphones, however, were rated highest on the 1-10 benefits scale, too, at 8.9. Only road-facing cameras, at 8, came even close, and smartphones had among the highest cost-benefit ratio of all the surveyed techs, at 1.35.

[Related: Broker intrusions on rise with ubiquitous location tracking]