Ever wonder how your breakfast cereal gets to the store? Today I sketched a highway legend, the Semi Truck, while sharing wild facts about diesel, freight, and the open road.
Sketch & Coffee, Live! is streamed daily at 5:30am, Texas Time, at the YouTubes
Breaker breaker one nine, we got to move this convoy. It is 5:30 in the morning on a Friday, and today’s random object is a semi-truck. First thing I had to look up was why they call it a semi. It is called a semi because without the trailer it is only half of the deal, and the trailer does not have front axles. It is a tractor trailer combination, and each is only half of the combination. Today I learned that.
My grandfather was a truck driver, drove for Transcon for 30-some-odd years. My dad drove big trucks in the army. I did a bit of truck driving, but not in a semi, I was in gooseneck trucks. Back home the farmers once hauled crops to a busy train station. As trucking got cheaper and easier, the station moved to the next larger town, and the town I grew up in withered. In the 1950s big trucks started taking over the road. We built a highway system with national defense in mind, inspired by the Autobahn, even talking about stretches that could serve as landing strips. The easier it got for trucking companies, the more trucks were on the road. The more trucks on the road, the more conveniences they put in to support trucking. That’s a self-licking ice cream.
Kids love trucks. When I was little, they were big, loud, symbols of freedom, and the drivers would honk for us when we pumped our arms out of the car window at passing trucks. Pop culture put it all on screen, from Convoy to Duel to Maximum Overdrive to Optimus Prime. These rigs haul up to 80,000 pounds, and about eight miles to the gallon is really very fuel efficient for that load. Some trucks are electric now. I am a proponent of electric vehicles because you cannot have combustion engines on the moon or Mars, and in places where fuel logistics are expensive, electric could cut costs. Kelp farming too. I’m not a fan of mandates, however, as I believe that stifles innovation.
Self-driving trucks are a bit unnerving. Looking up at a big truck with no driver is an odd feeling. It is coming, and it would reduce some costs and fatigue limits, but I like to see someone in control of the vehicle. In the U.S. there are three million trucks registered, over a million on the road at any given moment, moving about 10 billion tons every year. That is about seven billion hippos annually!
Click here to watch this episode of Sketch & Coffee
Also, if you, or a teacher friend, would like a 20-30 minute lesson plan about semi trucks, feel free to download and share this one:
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