Those Solera devices you’ve got are relatively common automotive IoT fleet trackers. They usually have gps antennas. They talk to the engine and transmission directly over canbus. Then they process that data and report what they see over a cell network. If they see nothing, they report that too with a heartbeat signal and various error codes.
Depending on the model, they sometimes have external cell antennas connected with a mini coaxial cable. Find it and unscrew it all the way, then re-screw it in by only 1 and a half rotations so it’ll hang on but barely. Then clip the nearest ziptie so the cable wobbles free. It’ll cause the nut on the coax to get a stress fracture in under a year. They will have to replace the gps/cell antenna module and those are like $300 a piece through Samsora. In the meantime you’ll get iffy signal responses. Don’t let them catch you cutting the zip tie on camera or you WILL lose your job.
Your truck will be in the maintenance shop relatively frequently at the request of whoever reads the reports for repair of that cell module. They won’t find anything wrong with it, scratch their butts, then just screw it back down and replace the ziptie.
Unscrew it and clip it again.
don’t let them catch you, you WILL lose your job
Hey director of IT for a trucking company here, i just want to reiterate this part!
Don’t fucking do this. Any of this advice. You WILL lose your job and we WILL blacklist you from the industry for this shit. Maybe if you drivers could actually mange your fucking log books and follow the safety regulations we wouldn’t need to have ELDs and camera and GPS and fucking canbus monitoring and annual inspections and all of the other “”“invasive nonsense”“” the government requires.
I dont want it either. Its all crazy expensive, annoying to manage, and I have to constantly deal with drivers complaining about it.
Sorry. I’m a little upset with this issue because its a constant issue i have at work. But no there is nothing you can do besides just get another job.
I just want to reiterate it again. Do NOT mess with the equipment your company has in your truck. At best you’ll just get fired but I’ve seen my company respond with legal measures in the past.
Who tf references a truck driver blacklist?
So, what I’m hearing is “don’t struggle or it’s gonna hurt more”. I think this advice is horrible.
No. It’s two things.
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Maybe truck drivers should have followed the rules better and drove safer. Drivers cooking their books have caused enormous amounts of harm and death, and that’s ignoring the huge loss of money when a driver crashes because they’ve been driving for 26hrs straight.
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Don’t fucking damage company property. This is actually my biggest sticking point for this whole thing. I dont care if you like it or not, the hardware is not fucking yours and the hardware being there is part of your employment agreement. Don’t like it? Tough shit buddy take it up with the DOT.
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Maybe if you drivers could actually mange your fucking log books and follow the safety regulations we wouldn’t need to have ELDs and camera and GPS and fucking canbus monitoring
Those companies would deploy this shit anyways even if the logs were perfect. Anything to blame the employee can and will be deployed.
Look I can tell you that no company wants to spend enormous amounts of money (we spend close to 7-figures per quarter for asset tracking) and pay an entire team of people to micromanage drivers. Plus companies and drivers make less money because they have to actually follow the rules now.
ELDs have been around for a really long time. It didn’t become standard until 2017.
Those companies would deploy this shit anyways even if the logs were perfect.
I want to say that businesses are famous for spending enormous amounts of money to fix a solved problem sarcastically but I’ve been working too long to believe it.
Still, so much of the problem isn’t with the monitoring but the annoying middle-management response of stack-ranking all the drivers. Rather than just playing your hand, big employers are constantly trying to reshuffle and “optimize” staff in order to squeeze out an extra ounce of profit. And the end result is everyone being immiserated in order to give someone with a marginal fluctuation in performance a raise.
Anything to blame the employee can and will be deployed.
Shit rolls downhill.
Trucking is so funny. There is an adversarial relationship between the drivers and the office, which you can see in this comment.
The industry is trying to solve safety issues caused by the nature of long haul driving and maintenance of profit in logistics by companies that use their services.
Trucking used to be a way a person could provide for their family, remain independent, and feel in control. Now, trucking is an industry where you are trapped in a moving computer designed primarily to reduce the insurance rates of the company that employs them, because their business practices and demands were so dangerous, individuals truckers had to drive more hours, get paid less for those hours, and literally drive themselves, and other motorists around them when they crashed, to death.
Then they blame the truckers as they race to bottom in hiring. Don’t even get me started on nafta. Your industry sucks for the employees who are necessary to keep the economy moving.
Trucking used to be a way a person could provide for their family, remain independent, and feel in control.
Still can. There are still owner-operators, and they have significant control over how they do their job, as long as they aren’t caught cooking their books (…which is what most drivers used to do before there were crackdowns, because you got paid per mile). They usually get paid a lot more than fleet drivers, because fleet drivers aren’t responsible for the maintenance of the truck.
The safe way to fight back is through the trucking unions, which don’t seem interested in getting rid of this invasive software.
But if every trucker did this they couldn’t blacklist them all.
Unions aren’t interested in pushing back against the invasive software because they know drivers haven’t been following the rules.
Basically nobody in the industry wants this. It makes it harder to do our jobs, it’s more annoying, and it’s crazy expensive. But it’s what you gotta do when drivers run 2 or 3 log books.
Yeah, this is a problem of pushing compliance to a level above the operator in an area where the perfection demanded by policy relies on traffic behaving perfectly, and drivers never experiencing delays or problems, to operate. The only way this goes away is a scarcity of drivers.
Someone who believes they know how to drive will suggest automated trucks, but the accident lawsuits will probably bankrupt the first companies.
It would work if you made lanes for self driving trucks.
You could then tie a bunch of trucks together, and have them run on this special lane.
This is brilliant! You can even let the front truck pull all the others tied behind it so you need fewer working engines.
What if you added guide rails to the lane so the trucks didn’t have to steer?
I dunno, companies would start cutting costs by firing all but the front driver. Need strong unions in place before that.
And we could manage traffic stops when one is going to cross another street so it can save on fuel for not having to stop!
Yeah, and you assume other drivers won’t drive in the wrong lane
Well the whole bit about backing out the nut is to cause it to fail in a manner that looks more like a maintenance problem and not a driver problem. Even when stuff like that only happens on one cab, it’s not enough to point at a singular driver.
And yeah all of that advice comes with the rider that “you may be unemployable” afterwards.
Yeah I get that. But you aren’t clever and you aren’t the first one to think about that.
We will catch you
Eh, that’s never true. Some people will be caught. And the typical person who gets their CDL only works a few years before they realize the industry sucks for drivers and burnout.
I’m not going to claim a 100% catch rate, because that’s impractical.
But we absolutely do frequently fire drivers for tampering with their trackers. Theres about 15 layers of checks and balances preventing a driver from disconnecting or otherwise disabling it.
Lol I don’t care about OP getting caught. This isnt the r/goodlifeadvice
You know there’s plenty of control freaks micromanaging everything underneath them even if it pisses off their best people to the point of quitting.
Especially those 1 or 2 rungs higher up the chain who need to make up problems to solve so they can justify their existence and build their profile.
you’re confabulating
Or, conduct yourself with integrity. Advising someone to compromise their integrity is pretty shitty.
Eh. OP already told us they had no integrity. Ever met a truck driver? The overwhelming majority of them have no morals or integrity. There’s a reason why. It’s because they get to get paid for not being around people - it attracts people who suck. Not all truckers suck but the overwhelming majority of them do. I can’t post something that will suddenly make some of them read it and go “By gum… I should become a better person!” But I can post some shit that might make their boss’s job more difficult and possibly get OP fired which might be funny in a chaotic-evil kind of monday morning shitpost way.
None of that elaborate rationalization you just performed changes anything. You admit you counseled something unethical, but you want to insist that reflects on OP, not on you. So now it’s not just a failure of integrity, but it’s also sophistry.
I like that you think I care. Like I said. Chaotic-evil monday morning shitpost.
Are you paid by the hour or per delivery? If by hour, malicious compliance. Stay 5mph below speed limit because you don’t want to be flagged. AI doesn’t recognize the street as such? Take a long detour, it didn’t allow me to take that route. It complains about overtaking? Never overtake ever again someone was to close to the truck when you tried to back in? Never back in again unless the premises is completely clear of people. Oh and find a better employer. An employer that doesn’t trusts its employees is never worth it.
It’s usually per mile if its long haul, which is the root of all the problems because that incentivizes the driver to go faster and spend less time on other things. And it fucks the driver over because they don’t get paid if they’re not moving, even if they’re waiting on someone else.
This is the reason Unions exist.
Individually you have no power. As a group you do have power to force them to revoke these decisions.
Your choice is joining a Union or not.
Another comment said unions aren’t interested in getting rid of this.
Ok, but what can OP do now? I support joining a union. But if there is none, then forming one takes time.
Is there anything that OP can do now? Quit, maybe?
Also of you try to get your peers to unionize they “find a reason” to fire you for something totally unrelated
That’s why you vandalize the bathrooms at your workplace (in OP’s case, it’d be the “distribution center”) with pro-union messages 😏
Pretty much it. Unless there’s an infringement of labor law. I don’t know where they work or much about other countries labor laws.
They would probably need to hire a lawyer in this case. Unions usually also help in these cases.
Quit and work on a jobsite somewhere with a motley crew of blue collar misfits?
.
20 years ago truckers were offended by GPS tracking
Its understandable though. Even though its also understandable the company would want to know where the trucks are, its also telling the drivers that they dont really trust them to do their job without surveillance. It should be enough that the freight gets delivered within agreed time and not too much fuel is used up in the process.
Personally i would compare the gps to office having sensors that record constantly which room you are occupying. With the ai its like having a camera constantly monitor exactly what are you doing at every given moment. And if you do anything company doesn’t like you will be punished. Not only is it insulting, its exhausting having to ceaselessly consider is everything you are doing acceptable to whatever sensible or insensible rules the corporate executives have decided.
People who want to be truckers most likely are kind of people who like working by themselves and not having to answer for every single thing they do at every moment and now even that is being taken away from them.
Of COURSE they don’t 100% trust fallible human beings with their multi million dollar assets and consignments. It’s not insulting unless you are all up in your ego, any more than having to sign something saying that you’ve inspected the cargo is.
And if you do anything company doesn’t like you will be punished.
Doesn’t change anything. You don’t have to swim faster than the shark, you just have to swim faster than the worst trucker on staff. Just means that they have better data to make the same decisions they were already making. It’s all zero-sum and if it’s bad for one trucker, it’s good for another who was until now going without recognition.
Quit. Let them know why you quit. You are a truck driver and can get another job within a week.
Try to find the fuse which powers the device.
You’re looking for anything related to radio or telemetry.
Push the fuse back in when you’re done working for the day.
If they ask what was wrong, pretend you don’t know what they mean. It’s not your truck. Maybe they should have their technician look into it, everything seemed fine on your end.
This works until they swap his truck so he can keep working while it goes back into the shop.
Keep doing it. Do it to every truck. If they put a camera in, unplug that too.
Hi. 3F Copenhagen member here. I believe the scaffolders club are organising something over a similar situation that is, however, less intrusive than yours. Your situation is like a horror story version of what the scaffolders are getting (GPS tracking, logging of their company vehicles. They don’t have AI… Yet…).
Do you have a union you can turn to?
You seem kinda despairing and dismissive of the obvious answer… talking to your union.
You have no power over your employer, but your union does.
Additionally, and this is kinda wild but, have you spoken to your supervisor? What did they say? Did you explain what it is about it that’s so annoying?
I’ve worked as a consultant for companies that use this type of thing and most disable the verbal warnings and stuff because they’re not helpful in any way.
Not all of us have Unions… Just saying
Whats wrong with joining a union? Some 50 yrs ago, over 80% of factory workers were unionized, today its more like 30% iirc. Its not because unions dont work, its because they do and companies spend copius anounts to get them discredited.
JOIN A UNION.
I love how people talk about joining a union like it’s making an order on Amazon.
If it was that easy bro probably wouldn’t be asking for help.
The reality is in a lot of cases the easier thing to do is quit and fuck everyone else.
Unions do very little to make it easier to create a new one if you are not part of one already, and even if you have the will, you also need the network, people skills, patience, money and contacts to make it work.
Yeah, talk to your union about this.
I know most of the comments here are from ignorant disinterested observers who aren’t really thinking through what they are saying, but man. If the first thing you think of is fraud and sabotage when your employer acts within the boundaries of your contract, you’re a bad person.
Line up a new job. Then get in the passenger side of the truck and let the AI drive today.
Then enjoy your new job knowing you made the world a better place.
Could try a wifi cell jammer. Ai don’t do shit without internet
That’s going to be incredibly illegal to use outdoors. Make sure you know what the regulations are before engaging in any kind of jamming, you might block someone else’s emergency transmissions.
Until he drops off the truck at the office and it uploads everything at once.
Yes this problem likely won’t be solved without someone taking apart the telemetry software. Spoofing the sensor data is an option if you understand how the data is collected but hardly a good option for someone without a specific skillset
better to find the antenna and short it out. jammers are at best illegal and at worst you end up leaving it on and fuck up someone’s 911 call.
Probably true, couldn’t think of another solution that doesn’t damage the vehicle
Weird, what does your union has to say about it?
You form a union and bargain with your employer. Thats about it though
Let me explain why companies are doing things like this. They’ll make unreasonable demands and when you make mistakes as a result, the AI will capture it and they’ll use that in court to blame you as the employee and try to hold you personally liable. This is their way of saying you’re nothing more than a liability to them. Fuck this system. I’d start demanding a new employment agreement to protect yourself.
Or seek greener non-ai-infested pastures
Yea give up to A.I. that’s the only choice.
Pretty sure literally nobody here said that
that’s what your company wants you to believe
I think you misunderstand what a union does.
Try to fight your company without organisation and you will be giving up your job. Look up the laws wherever you are and form a union. Be smart about it though and dont get caught in the act of forming it.
Nope, refuse.
