This school has trucks that are easier to pass the DMV test with than many of the competing schools in the area for those interested in getting a class A license with a manual transmission truck. They also offer training and provide automatic trucks to practice and test with for those who don't mind getting a class A with a restriction for automatic transmission only. The trucks they offer have 28 foot flat bed trailers. Just be advised that they don't have any restrooms or porta potty on site at neither the Sylmar location nor the Lancaster location so if you need to go to the bathroom during training you'll need to drive to a local restaurant or gas station for that. Also, at the Sylmar training yard, they have quite a few 53 foot dry van semi trucks parked there that licensed drivers use to drive in and out of the lot. Unfortunately these drivers like to park their trucks in the only area where Gobind students are allowed to practice their parking maneuvers. These truckers park the trucks there and park their personal cars, check the truck tires, chat with other drivers etc not caring that because of them, the Gobind students have to lose time out of their half hour of parking practice time per day waiting for the trucks to move and then it's the next student's turn to practice regardless of how much or how little actual practice time each student gets per day. The Gobind instructor makes the students wait for the licensed truckers until they decide to move and makes them move out of the truckers' way immediately if a student is ever blocking a trucker from getting in or out of the lot. Regarding the pretrip walkaround practice, they do have a old truck that's always parked at the Sylmar location for students to practice locating and identifying the truck's components, but under the hood of that truck looks different than the truck you would be testing with at DMV. They do provide a nice study guide with color pictures of some components and descriptions of what to say during the test and it's in a plastic folder so the pages stay clean. The Sylmar location is only offering parking maneuver skills training, so to get trained on driving the truck on the road, you would need to travel to Lancaster each time, and then if students are taking their test the truck becomes unavailable for driving practice for a hour and a half to 2 hours for each student's test. (There is one manual truck and one automatic truck at both Sylmar and Lancaster locations). Once you get in the truck with the school's owner in Lancaster for the road skills (driving) training, he is almost always on the phone talking or playing loud music during the 20 to 30 minutes that you would be driving on the road until it's the next student's turn, so don't expect to get much opportunity to ask him questions. In both Sylmar and Lancaster, there is 1 instructor for 5 to 10 students at a time. They do start early in the morning in Sylmar though, so starting training at 5:30am is often a option and the trailers have bright lights which make it easy to see the cones and reference points when it's still dark in the mornings (sometimes the trucks become available at 6:00). Competing schools in the area usually start training later in the morning. At Lancaster, training starts closer to 8:00am. Sylmar parking maneuver training is also available on the weekends. In summary, Gobind Trucking School is a okay school to go to, but other schools in the area offer restrooms for the students, training for both parking maneuvers and road driving skills near the same location such as Sun Valley or Granada Hills for example without having to drive all the way to Lancaster and wait for tests to finish, and training lots that aren't frequently being blocked during the students' parking maneuver skills training time for those who don't mind learning with more difficult (albeit more realistic for what you will probably drive on the job) manual transmission trucks and 28 foot dry van trailers at most competitor schools in the area. read more
