A big rig crash closed eastbound Interstate 80 near Donner Pass early Tuesday morning, causing major traffic delays in California’s Sierra Nevada. According to CBS News, the crash happened shortly after 3:30 a.m. near the Donner Pass Commercial Vehicle Enforcement Facility, east of Truckee. According to reporting from CBS News Sacramento, the crash happened shortly […]
A driver rounds a curve on a dark rural road and sees a woman standing near the fog line, head shaved, wearing nothing but a beach towel, no other car or person anywhere in sight. Something is wrong. He acts. That woman turns out to be a human trafficking victim, and because a truck driver […]
(The views expressed here are solely those of the author and do not necessarily represent the views of FreightWaves or its affiliates.) Snap-on Incorporated just bought Diesel Laptops for $100 million in cash. The deal closed on June 8, 2026. The move gives Snap-on a stronger foothold in the world of big truck and heavy […]
A notice has been going out to carriers in the C.H. Robinson network, and it is worth reading carefully because of what may sit behind it. The message, branded under C.H. Robinson and titled “Changes to carrier eligibility,” tells the recipient that their company “exceeds intervention thresholds for C.H. Robinson’s scoring model based on data […]
Pull up the import data on U.S. charcoal briquette shipments and you are looking at something that some people in trucking would not think to check heading into a holiday weekend. But that data, read against the consumer spending picture for Memorial Day 2026, tells you something specific about the supply chain, the retail freight […]
The Day 2 Numbers Through two days of the 2026 International Roadcheck, FMCSA inspection records show 6,406 total inspections conducted, 11,010 violations logged, 2,055 out-of-service orders issued, and 5,217 distinct carriers inspected. Data via searchcarriers.com/blitz, which aggregates live FMCSA inspection records and refreshes daily during the event at no cost. Isolating Day 2 from the […]
Rob Carpenter breaks down what it was like working with 60 Minutes on their explosive segment about chameleon carriers and the Super Ego network.
Most truckers track spot rates. Some track load-to-truck ratios. A smaller number pull freight data every week. Not many are watching the pallet Producer Price Index or the American Forest & Paper Association’s monthly packaging report — which is exactly why understanding those two numbers right now puts you ahead of most of the market. […]
Let’s start with something that sounds simple but changes everything about how you should read the freight market: retail is the engine that drives truckload freight. Not manufacturing alone. Not energy. Retail. When Americans buy things — clothes, furniture, electronics, appliances, home goods, groceries — those products move on trucks. Multiple times. From a factory […]
Three times in five years. That is how many times the federal standard governing whether an owner-operator is legally classified as an independent contractor or an employee has fundamentally shifted under the Fair Labor Standards Act. The 2021 Trump rule. The 2024 Biden rule. And now, on February 27, 2026, the Department of Labor’s formal […]
FMCSA does not publish emergency bulletins for hypothetical problems. When a federal agency puts out a formal, dated, publicly addressed warning that begins with the phrase “DO NOT” in all capital letters, it is because the behavior being warned against is happening — at scale, right now — and the agency wants the industry to […]
The freight market is improving. That part is true. Spot rates on the Sonar National Truckload Index climbed from around $2.60 per mile in mid-January to nearly $2.82 by February — a 20-cent jump that had carriers posting on social media for the first time in years without the word “survival” attached to it. Tender […]
A crash on the Florida Turnpike last August killed three people. The driver was Harjinder Singh, a native of India who had entered the country without authorization in 2018 and was operating a commercial motor vehicle under an out-of-state CDL. On March 6, 2026, the Florida Senate passed a bill in direct response to that […]
The deadline everyone in trucking has been watching finally arrived. On March 6, 2026, approximately 13,000 non-domiciled commercial driver’s licenses were cancelled in California — not by a clean resolution, not by a negotiated agreement between the state and federal government, but by California bowing under the weight of a funding threat it had already […]
This is not a drill, and this is not a market correction. What is happening to oil prices right now is a full-scale geopolitical energy shock, and if you operate a small trucking company – a fleet of one to twenty trucks, an owner-operator running solo, a box truck or hotshot operator trying to hold […]
Florida didn’t just get cold this winter. It got cold in a way that most growers working those fields hadn’t seen in over a decade, and the damage to the state’s produce supply is still being tallied. What started as a warning on the weather radar turned into one of the most consequential agricultural events […]
For the last few years, if you’ve followed trucking headlines, you’d think the entire industry is falling apart. Fraud schemes. Cargo theft. Crash investigations. CDL scandals. Bankruptcy filings. Rate collapses. Regulatory fights. Scroll your feed long enough and it starts to feel like trucking is nothing but dysfunction. But that isn’t the full story. It […]
American agriculture rarely makes front-page freight headlines, yet it quietly underpins a significant portion of trucking demand. Grain, livestock, fertilizer, seed, feed, refrigerated meat, packaged goods, ethanol, farm equipment—entire freight ecosystems depend on a stable farm economy. Recent reporting has highlighted a sharp rise in farm bankruptcies and growing concern from agricultural leaders about systemic […]
For the better part of three plus years, most small carriers and owner-operators have felt like they’ve been grinding uphill in soft dirt. Rates fell, truckload volumes cooled and tender rejections disappeared. All while new authorities flooded in and every time it looked like things might turn, something else pushed it back down to a […]
A new legal battle is underway following the U.S. Department of Transportation’s final rule tightening eligibility standards for nondomiciled commercial driver’s licenses, setting the stage for continued litigation in the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals. One day after the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration published its final rule formalizing restrictions on nondomiciled CDLs, a coalition […]
