Older Truck Drivers Match Younger Peers on Work Ability but Lag in Coordination Tests

Chile’s professional heavy vehicle drivers are defying one of the most persistent assumptions about aging workforces. A new cross-sectional study of 226 male drivers, published in the journal Heliyon, found that drivers aged 60 and older rated their capacity to work just as highly as colleagues in their thirties and forties, even scoring slightly better on the standard measure of work ability. Yet when the same men sat down at a battery of computerized psychomotor tests, clear age-related differences emerged in precisely the skills that keep a multi-ton vehicle under precise control: visuomotor coordination, reasoning speed, and bimanual dexterity.

The research, led by G. Bravo and colleagues including H.I. Castellucci and Martin Lavallière, comes at a moment when the demographics of work are shifting worldwide. By 2050, the United Nations projects that 16.4 percent of the global population will be 65 or older, and by 2030 roughly 20 percent of the labor force in many countries will consist of older adults. Transport is no exception. Commercial driving is physically and cognitively demanding, involving prolonged sitting, irregular schedules, sustained vigilance, and split-second decisions, all of which interact with the gradual sensory, motor, and cognitive erosion that accompanies aging. Understanding whether older professional drivers can still meet the demands of the job is therefore not an abstract question but one with direct consequences for road safety, workforce planning, and retirement policy.

The study team recruited every driver employed at two transport companies in central Chile, one passenger transport firm in Rancagua and one freight company in Concón. Of 811 drivers invited, 226 volunteered. All were men, with an average age of 51.2 years, and the sample was divided into three stages of working life: 58 younger drivers aged 30 to 44, 125 drivers aged 45 to 59 approaching retirement, and 43 older drivers aged 60 to 76. The researchers assessed body composition, grip strength, lower-limb endurance, and cardiorespiratory fitness, then administered a standardized psychotechnical test battery of the same type used by Chilean municipal transit authorities when issuing and renewing professional licenses. Work ability was measured with the Work Ability Index, a validated seven-item questionnaire that scores a worker’s capacity to meet job demands on a scale from 7 to 49.

The work ability results were striking in their uniformity. Among the 160 drivers who completed the questionnaire, 83 percent rated their work ability as good or excellent, with a mean score of 41.3. Contrary to expectations, the oldest group posted the highest average score at 42.50, compared with 41.45 for the middle group and 40.46 for the youngest. Neither simple nor covariate-adjusted regression models found a statistically significant association between age group and work ability. The authors suggest that a strong local cultural value attached to employment, providing purpose, social belonging, and family income, may help explain why older drivers perceive themselves as fully capable. The finding also aligns with prior reviews showing that age alone does not reliably predict declining work ability among professional drivers, particularly where workplace health and safety protocols are well established.

The psychomotor tests told a more nuanced story. In the lever test, which requires both hands to guide a needle along a track as quickly as possible, older drivers committed significantly more errors than their younger colleagues, averaging 6.70 errors versus 3.24, and their maximum error time was more than twice as long. After adjusting for body composition and fitness covariates, drivers aged 60 to 76 still showed an average increase of 3.19 errors and 0.69 seconds of maximum error time compared with the reference group. The bimanual coordination test, in which participants use rotary controls with both hands to steer two points along separate paths, revealed the largest gaps: older drivers averaged 35.02 errors versus 25.81 for the youngest group, an adjusted difference of 8.22 errors and 4.50 additional seconds of error time, both statistically significant.

The Lahy Dotting Test, which measures visuomotor coordination, rhythm, and concentration by requiring participants to touch black circles appearing on a rotating disk, produced a curious pattern. Older drivers achieved significantly fewer correct responses, 33.19 on average versus 37.31 for the youngest group, but they completed their correct responses faster, taking 11.22 seconds compared with 14.30 seconds for the young group. The authors interpret this speed-accuracy trade-off as consistent with age-related changes in executive function and visuospatial processing, where older participants may sacrifice thoroughness for pace. Meanwhile, the two tests most directly tied to emergency driving responses, the braking reaction time test and the speed anticipation test, showed no significant differences across age groups at all, with average braking reaction times hovering around 0.30 seconds in every group.

The absence of reaction time differences deserves particular attention. Laboratory studies of the general population consistently show that older adults react more slowly to visual stimuli, with one cited analysis finding older drivers display roughly 17 percent longer reaction times and make more than twice as many pedal errors as younger drivers. The authors suggest several explanations for the discrepancy. Professional drivers benefit from training and experience that shortens perception-to-braking latency. The controlled testing environment, in which participants knew exactly which signal to expect, may have minimized the mental load that typically exposes age-related slowing. In real traffic, where drivers must monitor intersections, pedestrians, and overtaking maneuvers simultaneously, the cognitive demands are far higher, and prior simulator studies have shown older drivers’ reaction times lengthen under mental load. The authors also note that obstructive sleep apnea, which is highly prevalent among professional drivers and increases with age, can impair vigilance and psychomotor performance, though it was not assessed in this study.

Importantly, the authors caution against interpreting poorer coordination scores as evidence of unsafe driving. All participants were active professionals who had recently passed Chile’s mandatory medical and psychotechnical licensing examinations, meaning the sample reflects a healthy-worker population. The magnitude of the observed differences was generally small, and the oldest group showed greater variability, suggesting that some older drivers perform as well as or better than younger peers while others lag further behind. Because the study did not measure on-road performance or collision outcomes, it cannot establish whether these psychomotor differences translate into safety risks. Safety managers in the transport sector often value older drivers for their work ethic, loyalty, superior trip management, and compensatory strategies such as driving more cautiously and avoiding high-demand situations, behaviors that may offset modest declines in raw processing speed.

The findings point toward targeted rather than blanket interventions. At the organizational level, the authors advocate a systemic approach built on the Total Worker Health framework, integrating health promotion, risk assessment, worker participation, and the Work Ability Index as a screening tool to monitor capacity over time. At the individual level, they propose that future studies test whether physical training targeting flexibility, coordination, and movement speed can improve performance on the specific tests that showed age-related declines, and whether educational programs combining theory with on-road practice can strengthen attention and situational awareness. The study’s limitations, including its cross-sectional design, convenience sample, all-male cohort, differential questionnaire completion across age groups, and unrecorded testing times, mean the results are hypothesis-generating rather than definitive. Still, the central message is clear: aging does not uniformly erode the capacities that matter for professional driving, and individualized monitoring, rather than age-based generalizations, is the path to keeping experienced drivers safely on the road.

Subject of Research: Age-related differences in work ability and psychomotor skills among professional heavy vehicle drivers

Article Title: Age-related differences in work ability and psychomotor skills among professional heavy vehicle drivers in Chile: A cross-sectional study

Article References: Bravo, G., Campos, A., Lavallière, M., & Castellucci, H. (2026). Age-related differences in work ability and psychomotor skills among professional heavy vehicle drivers in Chile: A cross-sectional study. Heliyon, 12(15), Article e45564. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.heliyon.2026.e45564

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1016/j.heliyon.2026.e45564

Keywords: work ability, psychomotor skills, aging workforce, professional drivers, heavy vehicles, occupational health, Chile, reaction time, visuomotor coordination, Work Ability Index, road safety, cross-sectional study