10 things you may not have known about trucking

When you’ve spent as many years on the road as we all have, it’s sometimes easy to think that we know it all. Experience does indeed make you rich, however while we’ve all been out learning our big lessons about the overall industry, there are more trivial facts we may not have bothered to learn along the way. For instance, what is the origin of the words “semi” and “semi-truck”? And on average, how many miles do American truckers drive each year? (Answer: It’s in the BILLIONS.) Also fascinating are the rules and regulations surrounding the trucking industry in other countries. For example, in Australia–with its grand, open spaces of the Outback–semi-trucks are allowed to hitch up to four trailers together in what is called a “road train,” which can weigh upward of 300,000 pounds. Another interesting statistic is that there are over 5.6 million registered tractor trailers in the United States alone, yet more than 90 percent of trucking and shipping companies own fewer than six trucks. And incredibly, one-third of the 1,900,000 semi-trucks on American roads are registered in California, Florida and Texas, while there are 3.2 million truck drivers in the United States. These fun and impressive facts prove to us that there is always more to learn about trucking. And at the very least, you can impress your cohorts on the next trucking-themed trivia night.