- ATS Blog, August 2019. A big part of training at any CDL school centers around one of the basic trucker skills—shifting gears. That’s getting a lot easier, both in training and out on the road, because of the increasing move to automatic transmissions for 18-wheelers. This is helping the industry become more attractive to women, and it’s catching on for other reasons as well:
- Manual shifting consumes more fuel than today’s computerized automatics.
- Automatics relieve the driver of having to use gears to control the vehicle and can make it easier to handle steep up and downgrades.
- The relative ease of use of automatics makes the overall job less tiring. It also helps reduce driver fatigue, stress, and mistakes.
Thus, automatic transmission is the future. Over the next eight years or so, we’ll reach a point where the only place you’ll see a manual transmission on a truck is in a mine or special load.
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