The Playbook

The benchmark diesel price used for most fuel surcharges fell for the first time after 12 weeks of increases.

Rob Carpenter breaks down what it was like working with 60 Minutes on their explosive segment about chameleon carriers and the Super Ego network.

On Nov. 30, 2022, a delivery driver put Athena Strand in the back of a branded van and strangled her. The company that hired him was seven months old. Its owner had never worked a day in the trucking industry. The box was checked. The FBI has linked more than 850 murders to commercial truck drivers since 2004 and is tracking 450 active suspects right now. This is a hiring problem. It has always been a hiring problem.

The war with Iran moved diesel up nearly 50 percent in five weeks and analysts are modeling $6 and higher if the Strait of Hormuz stays disrupted into summer. Carriers are repricing surcharges, shippers are absorbing new fees and everyone is looking for relief. The biggest lever most fleets have on their fuel budget is not an aerodynamics package or a new engine spec. It is the driver.

The benchmark price used for most fuel surcharges rose for the 12th straight week.

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. […]

A data-driven investigation into the risk retention groups insuring America’s most dangerous carriers, the factoring companies keeping them cash-flowing, and what happens to crash victims when the whole thing collapses.

One Indianapolis suburb has 1,000 newly registered trucking carriers. One neighborhood inside that suburb has more than 300 active carriers covering roughly 250 homes. The CDL crackdown is real, starting today in Indiana

America’s highways became a testing ground for unqualified drivers long before anyone in Washington was paying attention. Now, with Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy shuttering thousands of sham CDL schools and placing unqualified truckers out of service, he emphasized to the frontline at the Mid-America Trucking Show that drivers’ day has finally come.

The benchmark diesel price used for most fuel surcharges is now up 11 weeks in a row.

Let’s start with what the numbers actually look like. On March 1, diesel was averaging roughly $3.90 per gallon nationally. By March 9, a single week produced a 96-cent spike — the largest one-week increase in diesel prices since the federal government began tracking the series. By mid-month it crossed $5. As of this week […]

If you have spent any time in trucking Facebook groups, diesel forums, or on X this week, you have probably seen some version of this story: The EPA removed DEF requirements. The DOJ said deletes are legal. DPF is going away. The whole emissions system is getting scrapped. Trump said you can modify your truck. […]

The mood has shifted. After three years of one of the most brutal freight downturns in modern trucking history, the data is finally moving in the right direction. Spot van rates have climbed for seven consecutive months. Load-to-truck ratios are at multi-year highs. Carrier exits have been accelerating, tightening the supply side of the equation. […]

You delivered the load. The BOL is signed. The POD is in. The job is done. And now you wait — 30 days, 45 days, sometimes longer — for a broker to release payment while your truck payment, your fuel bill, your insurance premium, and your driver’s paycheck are all due right now. That gap […]

One in eight return-to-duty clearances in the FMCSA Clearinghouse may be fraudulent. This is the network that made it possible.

The $750,000 federal minimum set in 1980 has lost 70% of its purchasing power and covers a fraction of what a serious crash costs today.

The benchmark diesel price used for most fuel surcharges is up for the 10th straight week.

No federal law requires an insurer to evaluate a carrier’s safety record before issuing a commercial trucking policy and that’s creating a significant safety gap.

The difference between what a driver should catch on the pre-trip and what a PM program should catch before the truck ever leaves the shop tells two completely different stories about where the failure lives

Let’s start with what is not in dispute. In 2023, 5,472 people were killed in traffic crashes involving large trucks, according to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration’s Fatality Analysis Reporting System — the most reliable national crash database that exists. Seventy percent of those people — 3,837 of them — were not in the […]