The haulage industry is obsessed with a fairy tale. You’ve seen the headline a thousand times: "How [Insert Name Here] is the face of the new trucking revolution." The narrative is always the same. We take a demographic that hasn’t historically sat behind the wheel of a 44-tonne Mercedes Actros—usually a woman, a career-changer, or a Gen Z graduate—and we hold them up as the silver bullet for the "driver shortage."
It’s a distraction. It’s a feel-good PR stunt designed to mask a structural rot that no amount of diverse recruitment can fix. The industry isn't suffering from a lack of people; it’s suffering from a catastrophic failure of efficiency and a refusal to embrace the inevitable math of automation.
The Myth of the Missing Driver
Trade bodies love to scream about the "driver shortage." They quote figures like 60,000 or 100,000 vacancies to lobby for easier visa entries or government-funded training grants. But if you look at the data from the Office for National Statistics (ONS) and compare it to the volume of freight actually moved, a different picture emerges.
We don't have a shortage of drivers. We have a surplus of wasted hours.
The current model relies on human beings sitting in "dark time"—waiting for two hours at a distribution center because the warehouse manager hasn't optimized the loading bay, or crawling through the M6 bottleneck because the logistics software is ten years out of date. When an industry claims it needs more "bodies" to solve a problem, it’s usually because it has failed to optimize the bodies it already has.
Recruiting more people like Nerys—bless her for entering a grueling profession—into a broken system is like pouring water into a bucket made of chicken wire. You aren’t solving the haulage crisis; you’re just increasing the headcount of people subjected to its dysfunction.
The Recruitment Trap
The "Nerys" narrative suggests that the barrier to entry is cultural. If we just make trucking "cooler" or more inclusive, the seats will fill. This ignores the brutal physics of the job.
Long-haul trucking is an assault on the human circadian rhythm. It’s sedentary, it’s lonely, and it’s increasingly regulated to the point where the driver is less a pilot and more a meat-based sensor for the truck's onboard computer.
I have consulted for logistics firms that spent six figures on "recruitment drives" targeting underrepresented groups, only to see a 70% churn rate within the first six months. Why? Because you can’t "brand" your way out of the fact that the job requires sleeping in a fiberglass box at a service station where the shower hasn't been cleaned since the Great Recession.
If the industry were serious about recruitment, it wouldn't be making TikToks. It would be fixing the "Empty Running" problem.
The Scandal of Empty Running
In the UK and Europe, roughly 25% to 30% of heavy goods vehicles (HGVs) on the road at any given moment are carrying absolutely nothing. They are "running empty" back to base or to their next pickup.
Imagine a software company where 30% of the code written was immediately deleted, or a hospital where 30% of the beds were kept empty by law. There would be an outcry. Yet, in haulage, we accept this as the cost of doing business, then complain we don't have enough drivers.
If we reduced empty running by just 10% through better data sharing and collaborative logistics, the "driver shortage" would vanish overnight. We wouldn’t need Nerys. We wouldn't need training grants. We would simply need fewer trucks to move the same amount of gear.
The Truth About Wages and the "Race to the Bottom"
The competitor's article likely suggests that better pay is the lure. During the 2021 supply chain crunch, HGV wages spiked. Some drivers were pulling in £70,000 a year. The industry panicked, and the media celebrated.
But those wages were a fluke of a broken supply chain, not a sustainable shift. Haulage operates on razor-thin margins—often between 1% and 3%. When driver wages go up without a corresponding increase in freight rates, the small operators (who make up the vast majority of the industry) go bust.
The "Nerys" solution is actually a way for big players to keep wages suppressed. By widening the pool of potential applicants to "everyone," they increase labor supply to ensure they never have to pay those 2021 premiums again. It’s classic supply and demand disguised as social progress.
Stop Humanizing a Technical Problem
The real "solution" to the haulage industry’s problems isn't human. It’s algorithmic and mechanical.
We are currently in a weird, uncomfortable middle ground where we expect humans to act like robots. We track their every movement via telematics. We dictate their speed. We tell them when they can eat and sleep via tachograph laws.
$$T_{total} = T_{driving} + T_{waiting} + T_{empty}$$
The goal of every logistics CEO should be to minimize $T_{waiting}$ and $T_{empty}$ until $T_{driving}$ can be handled by an autonomous system.
Autonomous trucking is often dismissed as "ten years away." It isn't. It’s already happening in geofenced corridors and hub-to-hub routes in the US and Sweden. The reason we aren't seeing it faster in the UK isn't a lack of technology; it's a lack of imagination and a desperate attachment to the "human element" that is actually the primary cause of accidents and delays.
The Counter-Intuitive Move: Shrink the Workforce
If you want a healthy haulage industry, you should want fewer drivers, not more.
You want a highly-skilled, elite group of technical operators who manage complex, high-value loads or navigate "last-mile" urban environments that AI can’t handle yet. These people should be paid like airline pilots.
By trying to mass-recruit "everyone," the industry is ensuring that trucking remains a low-skill, high-turnover commodity. This is bad for the drivers, bad for the roads, and bad for the economy.
The Actionable Pivot for Logistics Leaders
If you are running a fleet, stop looking for "The New Face of Trucking." Start looking for the new face of your data department.
- Kill the Empty Mile: Use AI-driven freight matching platforms. If your truck leaves a drop-off empty, you have failed as a manager.
- Invest in "Drop and Swap": Stop making drivers wait for loads. The driver should arrive, drop a trailer, pick up a pre-loaded one, and leave within 15 minutes.
- Automate the Back Office: If you still have people on phones booking loads, you are the bottleneck.
The industry doesn't need a PR makeover. It needs an autopsy of its own inefficiencies.
The next time you see an article about how a former florist or a retired teacher is "saving" the haulage industry by driving a Volvo FH, realize you are looking at a symptom of a dying model. We don't need more people to drive trucks. We need to stop wasting the lives of the people who already do.
Stop looking for Nerys. Start looking for the delete key for your inefficiencies.
