About

A CDL course made by somebody who drives for a living

Trucking Tutor is the classroom half of getting a commercial licence, published free, in order, one lesson a day for a year. It is made by a working driver, not by a school with seats to fill.

Don

He started in 1996, hauling flatbed and lumber. In 1999 he moved to triple trailer freight, which is most of what he has done since. Idaho first, then the Pacific Northwest, where he still runs today.

Along the way he has been a dock supervisor, a dispatcher, a fuel hauler and a crane operator, and he spent years as a driver trainer taking people from no experience at all to a licence. That last part is why this course exists. He already knows where beginners get stuck, because he has watched a lot of them get stuck in the same places.

He has also seen what this job does when it goes wrong. Crashes, fuel spills, life flights, months in a hospital, people killed, including people who were not in a truck. Hundreds of serious incidents over thirty years. That is where the one rule this whole course is built on comes from: respect the risk, and never lose focus. It is not a slogan, and it is the reason the lessons refuse to hand wave anything.

Where his experience stops

In his own words: he does not know every part of driving a truck, and he has no experience in a lot of trucking jobs.

So one career does not get stretched to cover all of them. Reefer, oversize, tanker, owner operator, and every other lane he has not run is taught from sourced material and from other drivers, and it says so. What he speaks to directly is what he has done.

The alternative is a channel where one man’s habits get taught as though they were the rule everywhere, which is most of the problem this course was made to fix.

How a lesson gets made

Sourced first, written second

The course is built on a research corpus rather than on recollection: the federal regulations, the model commercial driver licence manual most states adapt, all fifty state manuals and their differences, thirty years of case law, and the training materials real schools use.

Every claim is checked

If a lesson tells you a rule, the rule was read, not remembered. The citation goes in the script so it can be checked by anyone.

The minimum is labelled

The federally required syllabus is covered and named as the floor. Most of the material is what comes after it.

Terms before jargon

A word is explained in plain English before it is used, and expanding an acronym does not count as explaining it.

It gets remade when the law moves

A regulation change means the affected lesson is rebuilt, not annotated. Wrong information left up is worse than no video.

The whole plan is public: 52 weeks and 340 written lesson titles, with the regulation behind each week.

What this is not

Worth being blunt about, because the wrong assumption here costs money and time.

It is not entry level driver training you can certify with
Since February 2022, a first time CDL applicant has to complete theory and behind the wheel training with a provider listed on the FMCSA Training Provider Registry, and that provider files your certificate. Trucking Tutor is not on that registry and does not file anything. Watching this does not satisfy the requirement, and any course that tells you otherwise is one to walk away from.
It is not behind the wheel training
Nobody learns to back a trailer from a video. This is the classroom half. The seat time has to happen in a truck with an instructor beside you.
It is not a substitute for your own state manual
Federal rules set the floor and states go past it constantly, on weights, lengths, permits and chain laws. The course teaches the differences and teaches you to look them up, and you still read your state manual before you test.
It is not legal advice
Case law is taught to show what went wrong and what it cost. If something has happened to you, that is a conversation with a lawyer, not with a YouTube channel.

How it stays free

The lessons are free on YouTube and stay that way. The channel earns from advertising the same as any other channel, which is why there is no paywall and no login.

There will eventually be a paid version for people who want the whole thing as a download rather than as a year of videos. The free course is not a trailer for it. It is the course.

Get in touch

Corrections especially. If a lesson gets a regulation wrong, that is worth more to this project than a compliment.

contact@truckingtutor.com