Note: the following are just comments, not a rant, just talking although it is all true and something to think of in some places.
My dad told me that when he was young and driving trucks around Scandinavia (in the late 50s and thrue the 60s) he could cook some sausages by wrapping them up and lying them on the engine and then drive some more and then they'd be cooked a little later, but that was safe unlike that there. I told my brother who also drove a truck some time in the 80s (he's from '64) and he was as shocked as me, it was simply insane. He also told me that in Denmark road-workers find bottles thrown out from truckers full of... guess what. That's how stressed they are and it began in the mid-90s when our dad had a blod-clog near the heart the day after my 16th birthday and had to quit working after barely having 1 sick-day per year as long as I remember, and my brother lost his trucker-job and never got a new one since the stress was simply inhuman. My dad was lucky btw due to his natural calm spirit (which I'm happy I inhearited) because other people at that place had dropped dead of a heart-attack etc.
Police in Germany use a small mobile-home sitting up in the front part over the van-cab so they can look into truck-cabs and film with a video-camera and they've filmed (and shown on tv) truckers driving a truck with the head bent down reading a book on the steeringwheel, resting the left leg all the way up in the dashboard (making it very hard to reach the clutch fast, and a lot of cars cut right in front of them when overtaking and being tailgated) and sevaral times the trucker took almost a minute to notice a big white vehicle right next to his window matching his speed instead of overtaking
They're making streetcars with distance-measuring and adaptive cruise-controls, they should put that on trucks and road-trains with ESP instead. Trucks do have ABS and such now but I don't think they got quite as much control-equipment as passenger-cars and in all respect then due to the nature of road-trains then I think they need it a lot more than passenger-cars, both due to their handling, and due to the wreckage they can create when crashing.
Frank
