Hello, I'm Manuel Saragossa. Welcome to Business Daily from the BBC. Coming up, is it the end of the road for American truckers?

You make a lot of sacrifices being gone health-wise, not eating right and not getting good exercise.

You know, I've ended up in the hospital a couple times out on the road.

Why no one wants to be a truck driver anymore in America?

Are robot trucks the answer?

Are you insane? You see what's going on with the cars already?

I mean, they're wrecking.

What do you think of one of these things that wrecked like that?

You kill somebody.

That's all here in Business Daily from the BBC.

Is there a more quintessentially American job than driving a truck?

There are an estimated 1.7 million truck drivers working today in the US.

But even that's not enough because the country is suffering a big shortage of truck

drivers. Our reporter, Jad Khalil, went to a truck stop in the U.S. state of Virginia to find out why.

70 kilometers south of Washington, D.C. is one of America's 1.7 million truckers. He's waiting in a garage for his tractor.

My name is Bob Fitzgerald, and everybody calls me Fitz. Fitts's tractor is a huge Volvo. It's painted

in post-war shades of cream in red. This is Fitts's home away from home. Well, it's got the old

paint scheme on it. This has like a shower and kitchen set and, you know, everything in here.

So it's like all the comforts at home. It's like an RV.

The small living space in the back comes in handy because Fitt spends a lot of time on the road.

I guess we're probably gone 30 weeks a year maybe. Yeah, that's probably pretty safe.

You know, there are some guys who are out for three months at a time. They go home for a week or two, you know.

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