“””A/C in a big brown aluminum box in the sun that gets shut down at every stop isn’t going to do much good.”””
Correct, huge open doors, the truck moves a few hundred feet and is turned off.
The A/C needs to be designed completely differently from normal and aimed directly at the driver so that he can cool a little for the couple of minutes of truck movement, in effect a cold fan, it would also be available so that he could park for a few minutes to get his body thermostat back under control if it was starting to get away from him.
Being completely immersed in 100 or 110-degree air with zero relief and none available, only interrupted by rapid movement carrying loads can quickly turn into death or a medical emergency.
That is in dry heat, in Houston with the humidity, you simply can’t sweat, so even though you want to keep going there is no sweat to keep your internal furnace from getting hotter and you have to stop, no matter how frustrating that is, but a cold fan aimed at you can get you back into the game after a break.
It would have to be a apu type system like sleepers on semi trucks. One bonus is this type of system can be retrofit to existing trucks.
The other option is to abandon the rule to shut off the engines so that a/c system can continue to cool. Other types of security can be used to prevent theft of the truck.
Yup. It gets hot in those trucks. It has for decades