Indiana Pre-trip With Examiner

So I'm finally ready to schedule my examination to get my CDL and I'm wondering how the pre-trip section will work with the examiner. Will they ask me about each section or just tell me to perform a pre-trip inspection and follow me around the truck while I perform the pre-trip?

Every state is different - and every examiner for that matter to some degree - and I'm not sure about Indiana but most states will just tell you to do a pre-trip to see if you know it.

Maybe someone that has their license in Indiana will have more specifics for ya, but I would assume they'll just tell you to do a pre-trip and stand back and watch.

Well if it's anything like Maine our instructors told us how they work it. You get 7-8 minutes to run through a pretrip. When you touch on certain things like say the tires and brakes on one side they don't make you do it again on the other. They said that the examiners are looking mainly to see that you know where things are and that you know what they are. Of course this is ME not IN. Over here you get one hour for the whole test including Pretrip, four manuevers, and road test. They don't want you taking to much time with pretrip. I hope this helps a little

In Indiana you go through the pretrip just as you would (or should) when you are on your own. You just go through it and say the parts your checking and what problems your looking for. If you study it's not that tough.

But keep in mind there are some things that are auto fails. Especially during the air brake portion of the in cab inspection.

Woody

Yeah, air brakes is auto-fail in Indiana. But I think it is most places. I think in Indiana you only do one side of the truck, because it's going to be a repeat on the other side. Not sure how other inspectors are, but when I did mine I set a good tone by saying all the right things at the beginning so when I got to repetitive parts later on as soon as I'd start the spiel again, the inspector would cut me off with "Next!" to keep it moving. From what I've seen and heard from other people, if you sound like you know what you're doing and don't forget any obvious parts they cut you a lot of slack. If you start out sounding like you don't know what you're doing, they watch you more carefully the rest of the time.