Trucking
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6correct to beat the crowd
50 free Trucking trivia questions with answers — trivia quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
Trucks move most of what people eat, wear and build, and the job has produced a culture all of its own. In the 1970s American truckers became folk heroes, with their own radio slang, their own country songs and a run of hit films about outrunning the highway patrol. This quiz covers the whole road: the codes and nicknames heard on the CB, the movies, television shows and songs that put truck drivers on screen and on the charts, and the history of the industry from the first semi-trailers to wartime supply convoys, union bosses and self-driving rigs. There are also questions on how the machines work, the companies that build them, and truck culture from Asia to the Arctic. It is written for drivers, their families and anyone who has ever pumped a fist at a passing truck to hear the air horn. Every answer comes with a short explanation, so you will finish with a few stories to tell at the next truck stop.
30 of 50 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01In Smokey and the Bandit, which brand of beer do two truckers race illegally from Texarkana to Atlanta?
Coors
Coors was not sold east of Texas in 1977, and with no preservatives it could spoil within a week unrefrigerated, which is why the film's haul has a 28-hour deadline.
Q 02Which future rock and roll singer was an unknown young truck driver when Sam Phillips recorded him in Memphis in 1954?
Elvis Presley
Elvis Presley had first walked into the Sun studio a year earlier and paid $3.98 plus tax to cut a private acetate record.
Q 03In the 2007 Transformers film, Optimus Prime turns into a blue and red semi built by which American truck maker?
Peterbilt
Peterbilt made the long-hooded 379 that plays him on screen, while the original 1980s toy was likely modelled on a flat-fronted Freightliner.
Q 04Which former Teamsters president vanished from a restaurant parking lot near Detroit in 1975 and was never found?
Jimmy Hoffa
Jimmy Hoffa, who led the union from 1957 to 1971, drove to the Machus Red Fox for a meeting, and his unlocked car was later found in the lot with no sign of him.
Q 05James Cameron quit his job as a truck driver to become a filmmaker after seeing which science fiction movie?
Star Wars
Star Wars thrilled Cameron in 1977, and he walked away from a run of odd jobs that had also included a spell as a high school janitor.
Q 06On CB radio, which ten-code do truckers use to say a message has been received and understood?
10-4
10-4 means acknowledged, and CB users even flip it around to 4-10 when asking whether the other driver agrees.
Q 07Which horror novelist directed Maximum Overdrive, a 1986 film about killer trucks with a soundtrack by AC/DC?
Stephen King
Stephen King adapted the film from his own short story Trucks in his directing debut, then disowned the result and never directed again.
Q 08Which actor, whose own father drove a truck of the same make, voices Mack the transporter in Pixar's Cars films?
John Ratzenberger
John Ratzenberger voices Mack, a modified 1985 Mack Super-Liner who serves as Lightning McQueen's loyal transporter.
Q 09The trucker anthem Convoy was sung by C. W. McCall, a character first invented to advertise which product on television?
Bread
Bread from the Old Home brand was the product, and ad man Bill Fries voiced the fictional driver in the commercials before turning him into a recording act.
Q 10Which country singer played the trucker Snowman in Smokey and the Bandit and also sang its theme song?
Jerry Reed
Jerry Reed wrote East Bound and Down virtually overnight, and the director had at first planned to cast him as the Bandit himself.
Q 11Which country songwriter and actor played the trucker Rubber Duck in Sam Peckinpah's 1978 film Convoy?
Kris Kristofferson
Kris Kristofferson played opposite Ali MacGraw, and the film went on to be the most commercially successful of its director's career.
Q 12In the NBC series B.J. and the Bear, the trucker hero's travelling companion Bear is which kind of animal?
A chimpanzee
A chimpanzee named after the Alabama football coach Bear Bryant rode in the cab of the hero's red and white Kenworth.
Q 13In the 1987 film Over the Top, Sylvester Stallone's long-haul trucker Lincoln Hawk competes in which sport?
Arm wrestling
Q 21Which sweeping change did the Motor Carrier Act of 1980, signed by Jimmy Carter, bring to American trucking?
Deregulation
Deregulation let carriers publish their own rates and raise or cut them by 15 percent without challenge, while opening the business to new entrants.
Q 22North Carolina trucking magnate Malcom McLean transformed world trade in 1956 by launching which way of moving cargo?
Container shipping
Container shipping began when his converted tanker Ideal-X sailed from Newark for Houston carrying 58 trailer vans, at a time when longshore workers moved most cargo manually.
Q 23Before inventing refrigerated truck units, Frederick McKinley Jones built sound equipment for which industry?
Arm wrestling takes Hawk to a world championship in Las Vegas, where he competes while trying to win back his estranged son.
Q 14Which actor plays the truck driver Jack Burton in John Carpenter's 1986 action comedy Big Trouble in Little China?
Kurt Russell
Kurt Russell played Burton as a blowhard who narrates his own legend over the CB radio, a comic twist on the straightforward cowboy hero of the first script.
Q 15In the 1953 French thriller The Wages of Fear, four desperate men drive trucks loaded with which dangerous cargo?
Nitroglycerin
Nitroglycerin was needed to blast out an oil well fire, and the mountain dirt roads made the job too dangerous for the oil company's own union drivers.
Q 16In the first season of Ice Road Truckers, drivers hauled supplies over frozen lakes to remote mines producing what?
Diamonds
Diamonds drew the trucks north, and the series itself grew out of a 2000 documentary based on the book Denison's Ice Road.
Q 17Which country singer topped the charts in 1976 with Teddy Bear, a spoken tale of a disabled boy on the CB?
Red Sovine
Red Sovine reached number one in five weeks with the song, his first country chart-topper since Giddyup Go a decade earlier.
Q 18Which singer's 1988 country number one is about a trucker named Charlie retiring after thirty years on the road?
Kathy Mattea
Kathy Mattea took Eighteen Wheels and a Dozen Roses to the top for two weeks, the longest stay at number one of her career.
Q 19The Teamsters union, which represents many American truckers, takes its name from workers who originally drove what?
Horse-drawn wagons
Horse-drawn wagons pulled by teams of oxen, horses or mules gave the teamster his name, and the union was formed in 1903 by merging two rival team drivers' unions.
Q 20Which truck convoy system, staffed mostly by Black American soldiers, began supplying Allied armies in August 1944?
The Red Ball Express
The Red Ball Express ran for 83 days on a route closed to civilian traffic, and at its peak close to 6,000 vehicles hauled about 12,500 tons of supplies a day.
Cinema
Cinema projectors ran on his superior sound system, and the same employer later asked him to design a cooling unit for trucks hauling perishable food.
Q 24The first semi-trailer truck, built by Cleveland inventor Alexander Winton in 1898, was designed to haul which cargo?
New automobiles
New automobiles were the load, because Winton wanted to ship his cars to customers without putting mileage on them, and he was soon selling haulers to rival makers.
Q 25Which numbered CB radio channel became known as the truckers' channel, the one most highway travelers monitor?
19
Channel 19 became the highway favorite partly because it sat clear of interference with channel 9, which regulators reserved for emergencies in 1969.
Q 26What do CB radio users call the on-air nickname, such as Rubber Duck, that a driver adopts instead of a real name?
A handle
A handle became the norm at the height of the CB craze, when many users ignored the rule requiring official call signs and invented their own names.
Q 27In trucker CB slang, which animal lends its name to a large strip of shredded tire lying on the highway?
An alligator
An alligator, or gator, is so called because from a distance the torn tread can look like the reptile sunning itself on the road.
Q 28When truckers on the CB radio warn each other about a chicken coop, which roadside facility do they mean?
A weigh station
A weigh station earns the nickname chicken coop, and a driver who rolls past one without stopping is said to be flying the coop.
Q 29Many towns post signs banning Jake brakes because of which side effect of the truck engine brake?
Loud noise
Loud noise from the exhaust, likened to a machine gun or a jackhammer, is the complaint, and the nickname comes from Jacobs Vehicle Systems, the first company to make the device.
Q 30Which horseshoe-shaped coupling on a tractor unit locks around the kingpin beneath the front of a semi-trailer?
The fifth wheel
The fifth wheel takes its name from a similar pivoting coupling once fitted to four-wheeled carriages and carts pulled by animals.