A bill moving through the House of Representatives right now would establish the first federal framework for putting fully autonomous heavy-duty trucks on public roads. The SELF DRIVE Act of 2026 — formally H.R. 7390, introduced February 5 by Rep. Bob Latta of Ohio — is being framed by its supporters as a necessary step […]
The price used to set diesel surcharges gained more in a week than it ever has in its 30+ year history.
There is no show like it in this industry. The Mid-America Trucking Show — MATS — returns to the Kentucky Exposition Center in Louisville from March 26 through March 28, 2026, and if you operate a small trucking company, an owner-operator business, or a fleet under twenty trucks, the question of whether you should go […]
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 […]
Diesel prices have spiked to $5.96 per gallon in premium markets as escalating Middle East tensions collide with America’s crumbling refinery base. The surge comes at a critical inflection point for trucking, with tender rejection rates climbing and capacity tightening after a brutal four-year freight recession, raising questions about whether the industry can capitalize on the recovery when fuel costs threaten to erase margin gains.
Small carriers and owner operators are not just fighting market conditions. They’re fighting the messaging. Every week, from the moment a DOT number gets applied for to the day a carrier tries to scale beyond their first truck, there is a constant stream of outreach, advertising, promises, and pitches flooding in from every direction. Fuel […]
For the first time in three years, the trucking industry was starting to believe it again. Not celebrating – this industry is too battle-tested for that – but believing. The numbers were moving in the right direction. Spot rates were climbing. Excess capacity had bled out of the market through years of carrier exits, ELP […]
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 […]
Diesel prices at both the retail level and in the futures market are soaring in the wake of the Middle East conflict.
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 […]
America sits on more oil than it can refine. While the Strait of Hormuz burns, the real chokepoint is between the wellhead and the truck stop.
A firsthand, frontline reality of how freight moves from broker, carrier, spot, shipper direct, interlined and non-commodity freight to the crash scene.
New bills, new enforcement actions, and a September deadline that turns every stalled bill into a live round.
The benchmark diesel price used for most fuel surcharges has risen for the 7th consecutive week.
A dangerous driver is still in a truck with his own DOT number, operating under someone else’s authority.
The seventh installment in FreightWaves’ investigation into America’s trucking insurance crisis reveals that the apparent diversity of the commercial truck insurance market is an illusion. Behind dozens of subsidiary names filing BMC-91s with FMCSA sit a small number of Fortune 500 holding companies. The concentration of risk is worse than anyone in the industry realizes.
The Entry-Level Driver Training regulations took effect in February 2022 after years of development and industry lobbying. The result was a federal training standard that requires no minimum hours of instruction, relies on self-certification at every checkpoint, and leaves every meaningful decision about actual driver competency to the fifty states, each operating in fifty different ways. The fraud factories did not slow down.
The Supreme Court ruled 6-3 that IEEPA does not authorize the President to impose tariffs. Within hours, the White House invoked Section 122 of the Trade Act of 1974 to impose a new 10% global surcharge, later raised to 15%. Up to $175 billion in collected duties now sits in legal limbo. Section 232 tariffs on steel, aluminum, and heavy trucks remain untouched. For the freight industry, the ruling didn’t end the trade war. It changed the weapons.
When a truck kills someone, we ask who was driving. We never ask who insured them. That question tells you more about what went wrong than anything else in the crash file.
Executive orders, rulemakings, legislation, and court challenges all operate on different timelines with different powers and different guardrails. Yesterday’s historic Duffy-Barrs press conference was the biggest enforcement announcement in a generation, and it still has to survive the process. Here’s why, and what comes next.
