FreightCTO

Carriers don't order trucks when they're scared. A 104% year-over-year jump in Class 8 orders is part demand recovery, part a rush to buy ahead of EPA 2027 — and a useful read on where the market thinks it's headed.

He started in the hardest place to drive a truck in America. The lever that took Timothy Maddox from one truck to a 23-truck fleet wasn't the equipment — it was learning that dispatching, relationships, and discipline are the actual business.

Who better to tell you what inspectors look for than someone who used to be one? John Seidl breaks down CSA scores, ELD tampering, and crash investigations — and why treating compliance as leverage beats treating it as a chore.

The loads were real. The trucks were real. The 'carriers' were not. Prosecutors say the ring stole roughly $4.49M by impersonating legitimate trucking companies — and the method is one every small fleet and broker should understand.

Every industry has its founders, and trucking has fewer of them at the top every year. Kevin Knight's retirement is a marker — the generation that built some of today's biggest carriers from the seat is handing off.

Heavy haul looks like a capital game — expensive trailers, big trucks, oversize permits. Joe Gibson argues the real moat is knowledge: the permit process, the lanes, and the willingness to negotiate every charge.

A Supreme Court decision just turned billions in collected tariffs into refunds. When that much cash moves back to importers, it tends to show up in import volumes — and eventually on the docks and the lanes.

Plenty of people start a dispatch service. Brandon Johnson built one to 65 trucks by doing the unglamorous things: starting free to prove value, specializing, and actually understanding the math of profit.

Another nine-figure emissions settlement lands on a major OEM. The trucks in question are years old — which is exactly why operators running older equipment should keep one eye on enforcement.

Nuclear verdicts aren't just a big-carrier problem. A single unsafe maneuver, a serious injury, and the right courtroom can produce a number that no small fleet's insurance was built to absorb.

If you touch LTL, the rulebook just changed. The NMFC overhaul shifts how freight gets classified, which means re-rated shipments, new disputes, and a reason to double-check your numbers.

If you felt gouged on container costs during the pandemic, federal prosecutors now allege there may have been a reason. The defendants are presumed innocent — but the scale of the claim is enormous.

Big events are big logistics. The World Cup coming to the NY/NJ region means a temporary surge in people, goods, hospitality, and the freight that supports all of it — and surges like that create short windows of opportunity.

The world's largest truck stop didn't start large. Iowa 80 grew the same way the best trucking businesses do — by obsessing over what drivers actually need, decade after decade.

The Court didn't rule that C.H. Robinson lost — it ruled the case can proceed. But that alone reshapes how brokers think about who they hand a load to, and how carriers prove they're worth trusting.

Editing the log after the fact used to feel invisible. Inspectors are now grabbing the data early to catch the manipulation — and the enforcement is getting more sophisticated than the cheating.

After a long, brutal stretch, the rate environment is finally moving the right way. Flatbed has strung together 19 straight weeks of gains, and dry van is at a level it hasn't seen in years.

Everyone's watching the AI gold rush. Fewer people are watching the trucks that move the steel, transformers, and equipment that make it physical. Landstar's numbers say it's already a real lane.

The system you use to get and keep your authority just changed, and the rollout hasn't been smooth. This is the kind of unglamorous infrastructure problem that can quietly stall a new carrier or a routine update.

Blitz week is a compliance test and a market event at the same time. Get your house in order — and understand why the carriers who park their trucks can move the rate needle.

When a giant starts handing out loads, everyone celebrates the volume. But volume isn't margin. Uber Freight proved that tech, capital, and shipper relationships don't automatically make the economics work for the truck.

A crackdown that removes tens of thousands of drivers sounds like it should tighten capacity and lift rates. It didn't — at least not yet. That gap between the headline and your rate sheet is the lesson.

Everyone asks whether the truck can drive itself. The better question is who's responsible when the load goes sideways. Driverless freight scatters liability across a new stack of parties — and the contracts will decide who's left holding the risk.

Amazon spent years building a logistics machine for itself. Now it's renting that machine to everyone and moving into LTL — which turns the biggest shipper in the country into a direct competitor of the carriers that haul for it.

Another line just got crossed. A real load, a real payment, and no human anywhere in the loop. Whatever you think of the timeline, the technology keeps moving from demo to deployment.