Do driverless trucks signal the end of an American era?

Trucker culture is dying with automation – and with it millions of jobs. Christian Borys and his team travelled to California to meet the Americans who might be affected.

Video by Christian Borys, Quinn Gundersen, and Jack Crosbie

Editing by Tatiana Avery, Emily Okuda-Overhoff, and Monica Rodriguez

The American open road offers a mystique: long desert freeways, Art Deco diners, big skies and a seemingly unending vastness.

A huge part of that portrait of Americana is the 3.5 million people who drive up and down that continent-spanning quilt of roads everyday: truck drivers. But this job – an indelible image of US culture – could be faced with big changes, as leaps in automation and heaps of startups scramble to make these big 16-wheeled vehicles humanless and self-driving.

What effect could this have on the industry, and the US in general – and will it be bad, or good? BBC Future travelled to the highways of California to find out.

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