The Playbook

The deal is straightforward. Shell Rotella and Truck Parking Club are running a promotion called “Night on Us.” Drivers who get a qualifying Shell Rotella T5 Synthetic Blend or T6 Full Synthetic oil change — at a minimum of 11 gallons — at a participating service location can submit their receipt at rotella.com/nightonus and receive […]

The benchmark used for most fuel surcharges is above $5/g for the first time in more than 3 years.

If you are watching your shop bills, you may have noticed the fourth quarter of 2025 was slightly less brutal than the third. That is not an accident, and it is not because your trucks got more reliable. There is a real reason the numbers moved the way they did, and understanding that reason tells […]

Part two of a two-part series on how Dragos Sprinceana, while carrying $889,630 in unpaid federal fines, became a self-described envoy to Trump’s inner circle.

Part one of a two-part series that highlights 150 crashes, 10 fatalities, $889,630 in unpaid federal fines, and a dead man running a Mar-a-lago linked trucking company

Sanjay Singh founded Royal Bengal Logistics, Inc. in 2018 in Coral Springs, Florida. He built a website that described a company with 250 employees, a fleet of over 200 semi-trucks and growing, and revenue of $1 million per month. He held annual investor banquets in hotel ballrooms. He posted a video of himself onstage announcing […]

There is a legal process in the United States called civil asset forfeiture, and if you drive a truck, carry cash, or run a small business that deals in either, you need to understand it before you drive through Texas — or most other states — with your operating capital in your pocket. The case […]

Dalilah Coleman is a seven-year-old girl from California’s San Bernardino County who, on June 20, 2024, was five years old and riding in her family’s car when a commercial 18-wheeler driven by Partap Singh — a citizen of India who entered the country illegally through the southern border in 2022 and was later issued a […]

For most of the past year, two federal agencies have been doing more to reshape the trucking driver pool than anything else in the industry: the Department of Transportation with its non-domiciled CDL crackdown, and the Department of Homeland Security with its immigration enforcement raids. DOT and DHS have operated in close coordination — DOT […]

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 […]

FMCSA just put the industry on formal notice of the sale of MC authorities and DOT numbers.

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 […]

The headline writes itself and the industry groups are celebrating: Pell Grants are coming to CDL schools. The American Trucking Associations called it a move that would “dismantle financial barriers that prevent students from low-income households from accessing the career pathways that lead to the trucking industry.” The Secretary of Education said a great education […]

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 […]

A driver gets his permit in Hawaii, boards a plane to New Jersey, trains Sunday through Thursday, passes a skills test on Friday, flies home Saturday, and walks out of a DMV with a commercial driver’s license. Federal law allowed all of it. That’s the problem.

Before you can have an honest conversation about what’s happening to DACA recipients in the trucking industry right now, you have to first be honest about what DACA actually is – because a lot of people are weighing in on this policy debate without a firm grip on the facts, and that confusion is doing […]

Most small carriers do not lose in hiring. They lose in what happens after the handshake — the documentation that didn’t get collected, the employer verification that never got followed up on, the drug test that cleared but nobody logged into the right system, the medical card that expired and sat in a drawer for […]

Diesel is approaching $5 a gallon and the geopolitical situation driving it is not showing signs of a quick resolution. You cannot control what crude does on the futures market. You cannot control what’s happening in the Strait of Hormuz. You cannot control whether the Federal Reserve pauses rate cuts or whether the broker on […]