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New SONAR interface makes debut at F3

Faster speed, better searching, more prominent rate information highlights of upgraded system

John Kingston
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FreightWaves' Zach Strickland demonstrates the capabilities of the new SONAR interface at F3 in Chattanooga. (Photo: Jim Allen/FreightWaves)

CHATTANOOGA, Tenn. — A brand-new interface for the FreightWaves SONAR product was introduced to the trucking community at the F3: Future of Freight Festival.

Rollout of the upgraded SONAR, which was unveiled at the FreightWaves festival in Chattanooga, Tennessee, on Monday, will begin next month. 

“It has been core to everything that we have done inside of our organization,” FreightWaves CEO and founder Craig Fuller said during an F3 session to introduce the upgraded product. “The high-frequency data of SONAR is so important to use and provide fresh insights.”

While SONAR will continue to add new data streams to its offerings, including flatbed trucking information that will be introduced in the coming weeks, the primary goal of the upgraded version of SONAR is customer usability and speed.


“One of the things that we have invested in significantly is improving the quality of the data,” Fuller said, citing “the speed and freshness and depth of it.”

“But we have done a poor job on actually improving the interface and experience,” he added, noting that the user interface in SONAR dates back to the product’s launch in 2018. 

Zach Strickland, FreightWaves’ director of freight market intelligence, said the speed of the system “was one of the biggest things we really focused on because we listened to you. … A lot of the feedback we got was that it just wasn’t moving fast enough.” 

Testing is showing that pages are loading 2.5 to 3.5 times faster than previously.


Among the new features:

  • More functionality moved to the top of the page. “We’ve moved a lot of the stuff that was on the left side of the page to the top,” Strickland said. “This just makes the geography a lot easier to work with and a lot bigger.”
  • Those commands at the top of the page now include a Chart button that will produce a graphic far quicker than in previous versions and also can be quickly saved to a download. And the charting tools in general have far greater graphic capabilities to display multiple data streams in one graph.
  • The new user interface, when SONAR is opened, will have greater immediate visibility into trucking rates from TRAC, the Trusted Rate Assessment Consortium that provides data on the cost of moving truckload freight between key points. That data will be for both spot and contract rates. Those rates include not just a per-mile rate but the recently rolled out data on the all-in cost in a lane, a new feature in SONAR.
  • Making a window containing a chart smaller in the old interface had the unfortunate side effect of cutting down on the data that was visible. But in the new interface, the chart will shrink proportionately so that all the data will be displayed in the new smaller window. That would enable a full chart to be seen on a screen as small as that in a tablet.
  • Although changing an interface doesn’t change the speed that a server delivers a piece of data to a dashboard, a drawback to the existing SONAR interface is that an update kicked off an update of every page, slowing the speed of the data dashboard being fully uploaded. With just the requested page uploading in the new interface, speed will be enhanced even though there is no change to the delivery time of API data to the system.
  • Finding data will be significantly easier. Various tools in the system will allow a more direct language search for data streams so that knowledge of the exact code isn’t necessary to do a quick search for a data stream. 

“SONAR will still have the high-frequency data that your market and our customers use on a daily basis,” Fuller said. “It still has many of the features that drive quick decisions and market intelligence. But it doesn’t have the clunkiness and the inability to search for data and find what you’re looking for if you don’t know the ticker.” 

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John Kingston

John has an almost 40-year career covering commodities, most of the time at S&P Global Platts. He created the Dated Brent benchmark, now the world’s most important crude oil marker. He was Director of Oil, Director of News, the editor in chief of Platts Oilgram News and the “talking head” for Platts on numerous media outlets, including CNBC, Fox Business and Canada’s BNN. He covered metals before joining Platts and then spent a year running Platts’ metals business as well. He was awarded the International Association of Energy Economics Award for Excellence in Written Journalism in 2015. In 2010, he won two Corporate Achievement Awards from McGraw-Hill, an extremely rare accomplishment, one for steering coverage of the BP Deepwater Horizon disaster and the other for the launch of a public affairs television show, Platts Energy Week.