Pete's Blog&Grille: Where the future of Trucking Gets Unveiled

The biggest trucking company in Canada is TransForce.

That’s the Montreal-based outfit that keeps buying littler enterprises, integrating them into its own operations, and painting a giant red swoosh on the trucks and trailers just to let the world know that TransForce, like Zorro, has struck again.

TransForce owns oil-field carriers, local couriers and long-haul truckers. TransForce owns garbage trucks, reefer units and dry van haulers. (Through their personnel companies, they even kind of truck people!)

So it’s only a matter of time, I figure, before TransForce’s very convincing boss Alain Bedard calls the top banana at Hawthorne, California-based SpaceX to ask if that innovative American carrier wants to join the TransForce stable. 

You might have heard of SpaceX.

Most recently, SpaceX delivered supplies to the International Space Station and, according to the Toronto Sun, the back haul will be a load of other science stuff, like astronaut urine and blood samples. Click here to get a great look at the company's site.  

The first delivery was unmanned but later trips will have drivers on board. And it made me think that SpaceX represents the future of trucking.

I am predicting here for the first time that before you and I are dead and gone, other carriers from around the world will be submitting RFQs and killing each other on rates, just like they do here on earth.  So if I were Bedard, I’d be 411’ing SpaceX as we speak.

Of course questions will arise:

How will they deal with the ongoing astronaut shortage?

Will they have to start hiring astronauts from developing countries?

Will they run compliant? Will they even understand hours-of-service rules?

Will they be subject to CSA measuring?

How long will it take before a competitor comes up with a comparable, even longer rocket?

Would that rocket pass California’s stringent emission control standards? Will it need urea?

But all these mysteries pale in comparison to the biggie, which is, since trucking has now officially entered the space age, can we add David Bowie’s awesome “Ground Control To Major Tom” or whatever it’s called to our list of 50 Greatest Trucking Songs of all time? These are important questions of our time and they must be answered... or not.

PS. Did you know that the hands-down best version of Bowie’s song was performed by a bunch of grade-school students in Langley-B.C., in the mid-70s? Even Bowie himself loved it. Check it out here! And let me know what you think.