TRUCKING

Cross-border carriers spent last week believing a deal was close. By Monday they were watching their share prices fall. Talks between the US and Canada collapsed late on Friday, and among the sticking points, according to reporting from Bloomberg, Reuters and Politico, were tariffs on medium- and heavy-duty vehicles. Negotiators had been working toward cutting the standard auto tariff to 15 per cent from 25; Canada wanted that relief extended to Class 3 through 8 trucks and d

The people stealing freight off American highways are stealing less of it and making far more money, and that shift tells you the crime has changed hands. Verisk CargoNet's second-quarter analysis, released this month, recorded 677 cargo theft incidents across the US and Canada, down 26 per cent from a year earlier and 14 per cent from the first quarter. Yet estimated losses more than doubled over the same period, reaching $304.6 million against $135.7 million a year ago. The

An enforcement sweep pitched as a safety exercise has become the sharpest edge of the administration's immigration agenda, and the target is the man behind the wheel of the truck next to you. On 4 August the Transportation and Homeland Security departments released results from the second wave of Operation Highway Shield, a three-day blitz across Illinois, Indiana, Iowa and Ohio from 28 to 30 July. The tally: 766 unsafe drivers and vehicles placed out of service, 86 operators

The starkest fact about the American truck-manufacturing business this week is that its largest player is shutting a historic factory at the very moment it expects demand to rise. Daimler Truck North America confirmed it will end production at its Swan Island plant in Portland, Oregon, on 30 October, closing a site that has built trucks since 1947 and ending 84 years of Freightliner manufacturing in the city. A state filing puts the layoffs at 387, most of them union members

For two years the trucking story was rates. This week it became lawsuits, and the market repriced the whole sector accordingly. Trucking and logistics stocks are heading for their worst month in over a year. The Russell 3000 Trucking Index has fallen more than 8 per cent, its steepest drop since President Trump's tariff announcements sparked a broad selloff in April 2025. The trigger is not demand but legal exposure, layered on top of a run of disappointing earnings. The root

There is an old line in the industry that truckers only buy trucks when they are making money. By that measure, the longest freight downturn in living memory has ended. North American Class 8 orders surged in June to 30,500 units on FTR's count and 31,400 on ACT Research's, up 241 and 231 per cent respectively on a year earlier. The comparison flatters, since summer 2025 marked a 16-year seasonal low, but the run is now seven months long and orders are up 125 per cent year to

Trucking's legal ground shifted in a Dallas courtroom last week, and the freight brokerage industry is still measuring the tremor. On July 23, a Dallas County jury returned a verdict of more than $600 million in a personal injury case involving C.H. Robinson and a carrier it had hired — one of the largest nuclear verdicts ever in a truck crash case, and the first major broker case decided after the Supreme Court's ruling in Montgomery v. Caribe Transport II. The case stemmed

Aurora Innovation rolled out its second generation of driverless trucks on July 22, a hardware reset the company is betting will carry it from proving autonomy works to selling it at industrial scale. The new fleet is built on International's LT Series tractor and upfitted by Roush at a dedicated production facility, with next-generation sensors designed to last a million miles at roughly half the build cost of Aurora's first generation. Roush is targeting an annual productio

For three years the American trucking industry has waited for the freight recession to end. This week brought the clearest evidence yet that it has, and the reason has less to do with demand than with regulators. Knight-Swift Transportation, the largest asset-based carrier in the country and the sector's reliable bellwether, reported second-quarter results on Wednesday that beat expectations across the board. Total revenue rose 12.6% to $2.1 billion. Adjusted earnings per sha

The trucking industry's most powerful small-business lobby is trying to turn a highway tragedy into law, and it wants the House to move now. In a July 15 letter to Speaker Mike Johnson, the Owner-Operator Independent Drivers Association demanded an immediate floor vote on H.R. 5688, known as Dalilah's Law, which would tighten citizenship and English-language requirements for commercial driver's licences. The bill would codify a Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration rule

The great trucking recession is over, and the recovery arriving in its place looks nothing like the demand-led booms of years past. Fresh data from DAT Freight & Analytics confirmed the shift this month: in June, the national average dry van spot rate topped the contract rate for the first time since February 2022. It is a technical milestone with outsized meaning. When spot pricing overtakes contract pricing, carriers hold the leverage, and shippers who spent three years dic

The American truckload market has done something it has not managed in four years: charged more on the spot market than on contract. The reasons are the opposite of the last time it happened. DAT Freight & Analytics reported that June saw the national average dry van spot rate surpass the contract rate for the first time since February 2022. Dry van spot rates ran 49 percent above year-ago levels during the week ending 3 July. Spot linehaul rates rose at least 39 percent year

The long, strange war over diesel emissions tampering effectively ended this week, not with a rule change but with a presidential signature and a Truth Social post. President Trump pardoned roughly a dozen people convicted under the Clean Air Act for tampering with diesel emissions systems, framing the recipients as small-shop mechanics and tuners persecuted by the Biden administration and punished, in his words, for "fixing their car." A White House official confirmed 11 nam

Washington's decision to let the July 1 review deadline for the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement pass without renewal has injected fresh uncertainty into a freight market that had only just begun climbing out of its longest downturn in industry memory — and executives warn the fallout could take years to settle. The lapse lands at an awkward moment. Cross-border truck freight has been one of the sector's few unambiguous bright spots, with volumes to Mexico surging 23.4 p

The tell in trucking right now is a simple divergence: rates are going up while fuel is going down. When those two lines move in opposite directions, it means one thing, and carriers know it. All-in truckload rates kept climbing through the end of June even as diesel slid another 16 cents to $4.67 a gallon nationally, helped along by softening oil markets after the U.S.-Iran ceasefire. Falling fuel usually hands shippers leverage. Not this time. Demand is outrunning supply, t

The freight downturn that flattened American trucking for the better part of four years is over, and the recovery reshaping the market has almost nothing to do with a surge in demand. Spot truckload rates hit an all-time record in early June, jumping nine cents per mile overnight to $3.83, according to FreightWaves data — the highest figure ever recorded. Contract rates followed. But the story driving those numbers is one of disappearing capacity rather than roaring freight v

A wave of federal enforcement is colliding with an already-strained freight market, driving US truckload spot rates to the highest levels ever recorded and reshaping how shippers move goods this summer. Truckload spot rates hit an all-time record in early June, jumping nine cents per mile overnight to $3.83 per mile, the highest level ever logged. Behind the surge is a supply squeeze rather than a demand boom. Spot rates climbed on a combination of supply-side capacity tighte

The U.S. truckload market has crossed into territory the industry has not seen since the pandemic, and the people who move freight for a living are warning that this is not a passing squeeze but a structural reset. Truckload spot rates climbed near $3.83 per mile in early June, brushing against the COVID-era ceiling of $3.72, before settling in the low $3.70s as the month wore on. Tender rejections, the share of contracted loads carriers simply decline, hovered around 17 perc

America's truckload market has roared back to life, but the recovery driving freight executives' optimism is built on a foundation that worries shippers and regulators alike: not booming demand, but a shrinking pool of trucks. Spot rates hit an all-time record in early June, jumping nine cents per mile overnight to $3.83, the highest figure ever recorded and roughly $1.20 above where they sat a year ago. Tender rejections, the rate at which carriers turn down contracted loads

The U.S. truckload market entered one of its tightest stretches on record this week, with spot rates closing in on the COVID-era ceiling and shippers bracing for a late-June squeeze that brokers warn could overwhelm routing guides. Truckload spot rates are about $1.20 above last year and nearing the pandemic peak of $3.72 per mile, with tender rejections sitting at 17% nationally. Excluding fuel, rates remain up more than $0.90 per mile year over year. The defining feature of