TRUCKING

US trucking companies are turning down loads at the fastest pace in years. Tougher enforcement on drivers, rising costs and a shrinking fleet are pushing freight prices higher heading into the holiday season. Carriers are rejecting about 14% of the loads offered to them under contract, roughly three times the 2023 level, according to SONAR market data. Truckload volumes, by contrast, are only about 9% higher than three years ago. "Carriers are rejecting nearly four times as m

Diesel hit an all-time high of $6.53 a gallon last Tuesday. That is 77 percent higher than a year ago, and nearly a dollar more than a month earlier. The White House is now weighing one of the most drastic options available: a ban on diesel exports. Speaking to Fox News at the Presidents Cup near Chicago on Sunday, President Trump said he was looking at it "very seriously." "We may do it," he said. Mixed signals That was a change from last week. On Wednesday, Energy Secretary

The national diesel benchmark has hit $5.967 a gallon, the highest on record, landing at precisely the moment the freight market was supposed to start rewarding the carriers who survived the downturn. The timing is brutal. Van contract rates are running 18 per cent above last year and spot rates are up 35.6 per cent, the clearest evidence yet that the long freight recession has broken. But diesel is up nearly $1.87 a gallon year on year, and for small fleets the fuel line is

The biggest story in trucking this week is not a rate, a merger or a bankruptcy. It is a database. On Thursday a federal judge takes up the case brought by 21 states and the District of Columbia against the Department of Transportation and the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration over the agency's demand for bulk access to the Commercial Driver's License Information System. At stake are roughly 17 million records. A temporary restraining order has blocked the transfer

The Commercial Vehicle Safety Alliance released full results this week from its three-day International Roadcheck blitz, and the reasons drivers are being pulled off the road have shifted markedly in a single year. Inspectors conducted 54,575 inspections across the US, Canada and Mexico between 12 and 14 May, placing 10,350 vehicles (19 per cent) and 3,184 drivers (5.8 per cent) out of service. Most passed, and 17,680 vehicles earned a CVSA decal for a clean inspection. But t

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