The capacity levers being pulled continue to favor large carriers. It started last year with stricter enforcement of non-domiciled CDL rules and English-language proficiency requirements, and crackdowns on shady driver schools and ELD providers.

Capacity constraints have ramped in recent weeks. Federal authorities are more strictly enforcing cabotage rules and revoking visas. Further, the impact the Supreme Court’s broker liability ruling has on driver vetting and insurance requirements is still being contemplated across the industry.

The net impact from the regulations will purge hundreds of thousands of noncompliant drivers from the industry, analysts contend, allowing carriers operating legally to recoup pricing and restore margins.

“This industry is behind,” said Spencer Frazier, executive vice president of sales and marketing at J.B. Hunt Transport Services (NASDAQ: JBHT), during a Tuesday appearance at a Wells Fargo investor conference in Chicago. “It’s been four years in a cost-inflationary environment and a rate-deflationary environment. The industry is still not healthy.”

Frazier said most fleets haven’t generated the returns needed to adequately reinvest in their networks, which has led to a steady drumbeat of carrier bankruptcies. He said that all TL operating expense lines are up roughly 30% to 50% over the past five years while rates have been on the decline.

“So, the industry has a catch-up period from a cost perspective to go through,” Frazier said.

He noted driver wage pressure in some markets, which will also have to be recouped through rate negotiations. Management at J.B. Hunt (NASDAQ: JBHT) flagged the likelihood of a cumulative 20% rate hike over the next two years at an investor conference last month.

Most carriers raised bid season expectations during the first-quarter earnings season, which ended in early May. The group had targeted low- to mid-single-digit rate increases entering the year, but a tightening supply side now has it calling for mid- to high-single-digit increases, with some shippers seeing double-digit rate hikes.

Routing guides are crumbing

Contract rates set early in the 2026 bid season aren’t holding, management teams from Schneider National (NYSE: SNDR) and Werner Enterprises (NASDAQ: WERN) said at the Tuesday event. Mini-bid activity has spiked, and some shippers have been forced to rebid their entire book as tender rejections surge.

May brought about another jump in spot rates ahead of and after Roadcheck.

Werner said one-way contractual renewals have continued to accelerate through bid season after yielding mid-single-digit increases earlier in the year. The company renegotiates one-fourth of its contracts in the first quarter and roughly one-third in the second quarter. Revenue per total mile is forecast to increase between 1% and 4% year over year in the second quarter, which seems conservative given the 3.6% increase it booked in the first quarter.

Utilization has been the bigger lever for Werner.

Most public carriers have held off on incremental equipment additions, instead choosing to increase paid miles through better freight selection, load planning and route optimization. Revenue per truck per week was nearly 10% higher y/y at Werner’s one-way fleet in the first quarter, as miles per truck increased 5.7%.

Management teams said rebid and mini-bid activity has been widespread across verticals and geographies—a signal the market likely stays tighter for longer.

“Are we going to have a leveling, or is this going to continue to accelerate?” Frazier said.

Schneider noted on its first-quarter call that contract renewals were at the highest levels since 2021 as “irrational capacity” is leaving the market.

Jim Filter, group president of transportation and logistics at Schneider, said Tuesday it will probably take “a couple of allocation events to recoup price.” However, he believes the shift in industry capacity is likely structural, not transitory, suggesting the inflationary rate environment could last longer than in prior cycles.

(Filter will succeed Schneider President and CEO Mark Rourke on July 1. Rourke will transition to Executive Chairman.)

Montgomery ruling viewed as ‘net benefit’ by brokers with assets

The three companies said they didn’t need to alter third-party carrier onboarding procedures at their brokerage units following the Supreme Court’s landmark ruling in the Montgomery v. Caribe Transport II case. (The decision widened liability exposure for freight brokers found negligent in their driver hiring practices.)

The companies implemented more stringent protocols years ago to weed out chameleon carriers and reduce cargo theft. Tech and data tools have also improved since the pandemic, allowing for vetting on an ongoing basis. The companies have reduced approved-carrier lists by at least half since.

“Based on our experience, there aren’t 50,000 carriers in this country that you could vet and say that they’re safe,” Filter said.

Werner said the Montgomery decision will be a “net benefit” for its brokerage operations. It believes size and sophistication matter. It said shippers are aligning with providers that can guarantee assets and safety while providing the flexibility of a broker model.

The brokerage market is likely to consolidate further as shippers shift freight allocations and insurance carriers get more selective in underwriting risk.

More FreightWaves articles by Todd Maiden:

• Analysts say Amazon won’t shake LTL market—yet
• LTL general rate increases no longer an annual event
• ArcBest raises Q2 outlook for LTL, asset-light units

The post Truckload carriers eyeing multiyear rate upcycle appeared first on FreightWaves.

Americans for Prosperity, the flagship advocacy organization backed by conservative industrialist Charles Koch, said it plans a six-figure digital ad campaign urging Congress to permanently repeal the Jones Act.

The century-old law requires ships carrying cargo between American ports to be U.S.-built, owned, crewed and flagged.  

President Donald Trump in March temporarily suspended the Jones Act for 60 days over concerns that the Iran war could result in price-gouging and shortages of fuel, fertilizer, and other vital commodities. The waiver, extended to 90 days, permits foreign-flag ships to operate in commerce between U.S. destinations, such as carrying fuel from the Gulf to eastern markets.

The waiver provided temporary but modest economic benefits – primarily by increasing shipping options – but did not significantly reduce consumer fuel prices in the immediate term, analysts say. The suspension also created uncertainty for the U.S. maritime industry over jobs and for carriers engaged in coastwise trade.

Wichita-based Koch Industries, with annual revenues of $125 billion, has operations in petroleum refining, chemicals and fertilizer production, areas where it would likely benefit from a Jones Act repeal.  

“The century-old shipping mandate continues to needlessly drive up the cost of fuel, food, and energy for American families,” the org said in a release. The campaign pairs targeted digital advertising with a nationwide citizens’ effort writing letters to Congress to demand relief.

Trump issued the emergency waiver after Iran closed the Strait of Hormuz, the gateway to the Persian Gulf through which 20% of the world’s crude oil passes. 

The campaign launches as inflation and rising consumer prices for food, gas and other staples has made affordability a central voter issue ahead of the midterm elections. It follows a May 6 coalition letter urging Congress to repeal the Jones Act as part of AFP’s larger affordability agenda.

“For more than a century, Washington has forced families to pay a hidden tax every time goods move between our own ports, and it is way past time to put an end to this failed regulation that has decimated the industry it was intended to help,” said AFP Chief Government Affairs Officer Brent Gardner, in a release. “You cannot claim to care about the cost of living while defending a law you have to suspend every time families need relief. Our message is simple: with a single vote, Congress can lower costs for every household in the country. It’s time to repeal the Jones Act.”

The campaign of digital ads and grassroots efforts is focused on key states and districts, in particular members of the House Committee on Transportation and Infrastructure, “as well as senators who campaign on lowering costs for working families. The goal is to build support for permanent repeal.”

AFP said that the waiver shows a fully booked Jones Act fleet was supplemented and not displaced by foreign vessels.

Read more articles by Stuart Chirls here.

Related coverage:

For 1st time, U.S. approves controversial LNG production ship

Port Houston’s hurricane playbook: Safety first, cargo moving fast 

But…but…shipbuilding! Democrats want China port tax reinstated

Frontload frenzy? New tariffs fueling early trans-Pacific peak season

The post Conservative network has law protecting U.S.-flag shipping in its sights appeared first on FreightWaves.

It comes at a pivotal time. In the EV and autonomous space, software and hardware have matured enough to support full-scale operations rather than the limited pilot tests common in years past.

Einride leadership celebrated the public debut by ringing the Nasdaq Opening Bell at MarketSite in Times Square. The listing capped a de-SPAC process that began with a deal announcement in November and ended with shareholder approval last week.

“Over the past decade, Einride has built the technology and the customer base to lead the transition to autonomous and electric freight,” said Roozbeh Charli, chief executive officer of Einride. “Our focus now is clear: continue expanding with our customers and increase automation within their networks, demonstrating that every mile we run makes the entire network more efficient.”

A Different Approach from Day One

Founded in 2016, Einride built its autonomous vehicle strategy around a cabless design. It eliminates the driver compartment entirely and forced the company to solve some of the hardest engineering challenges early.

“We took a different approach from day one,” Charli told FreightWaves in an interview. “Having a cabless autonomous vehicle that’s built for autonomy from day one — it doesn’t have a cab because you don’t need a cab if you want to drive autonomously.”

The company’s deployments in the United States and Sweden operate without safety drivers by design. “There is no room for a driver,” Charli said. “That also means you have to build your safety case from day one without relying on a human operator.”

Dutch contract manufacturer VDL builds the chassis and skateboard platform. Einride handles final assembly of the hull and computer stack at its R&D facility in Sweden. The company plans to build a similar setup in the United States.

The Land-and-Expand Strategy

Einride enters the public markets with $92 million in annual recurring revenue and more than $800 million in potential ARR. These figures come from joint business plans with its 30 global customers.

“We’ve been focused over the last five or six years on our land-and-expand sales strategy: getting in with large transport buyers, getting their transportation data onto our platform, starting execution, and deploying both our electric and autonomous vehicles,” Charli said.

The GE Appliances partnership shows how the model works. Einride began by analyzing transportation data and building a $50 million ARR joint business plan. Operations started with two electric trucks in a Kentucky pilot. The business has since grown to roughly 20-25 electric trucks and two autonomous vehicles.

For Einride, its electric vehicle and autonomous operations form a clear win-win.

Customers get immediate benefits from lower operating costs and decarbonized transport in high-utilization lanes.

At the same time, those deployments generate revenue and margins for Einride. They also build customer relationships and the operational data needed to train autonomous models and map routes, charging infrastructure, and day-to-day workflows for future driverless vehicles.

“The electric business is a line of business in itself. It’s generating revenue and margins,” Charli said. “You’re gaining a position with the customer and collecting data. You can use that data to train autonomous models while also building a detailed understanding of operational setups.”

Cost Efficiency Drives Adoption

High-utilization, repetitive freight lanes represent the strongest opportunity for Einride’s technology. Grocery retail operations, industrial shuttle routes, and FMCG flows offer the cost efficiencies that make the business case work.

“The ticket to play is being cost-competitive with the diesel solution you’re replacing,” Charli said. “We achieve that through the platform, software, optimization tools, and AI models we’ve built.”

Defense Applications Emerge

Einride has also deployed its autonomous technology on military vehicles. It has run pilots with NATO countries and the Swedish Resilience Initiative. The company equipped a Bandvagn vehicle for dual-use applications. These vehicles can maintain power lines in peacetime and handle logistics in high-risk wartime environments.

“War is an enormous logistical exercise,” Charli said. “There’s significant potential for autonomous technology in those environments, particularly when it comes to reducing risk and keeping people out of harm’s way.”

Gen. Keith Alexander, former director of the National Security Agency, joined Einride’s board to support defense initiatives.

Robert Falck, founder and executive chairman, framed the listing as validation of the company’s original thesis. “Einride started with the simple idea that freight could be done differently, and better. Today’s listing marks an important milestone for Einride and reflects the strength of the technology platform, the trust of our customers, and the work our team has done to build and scale a modern freight technology business.”

The post Einride begins trading on Nasdaq after completing de-SPAC appeared first on FreightWaves.

I pulled every roadside inspection from the FMCSA database and split the carriers by what they actually run: straight trucks versus tractor-trailers. The trucks themselves came back clean. Box truck fleets get a vehicle put out of service 17.2 times per hundred inspections. Tractor fleets run 19.4. On vehicle maintenance, the broad measure of whether the equipment is roadworthy, the box trucks again came in lower than the big rigs. The iron is not the story here.

The driver is. Box truck fleets get a driver pulled off the road 7.6 times per hundred inspections. Tractor fleets, 4.1. That is nearly double on the same roads, with the same enforcement, under the same criteria. A driver-out-of-service order has nothing to do with the machine. It means the person behind the wheel had no business there, an invalid or missing license, a disqualification, a medical card that does not check out, or hours run past the legal limit.

Everyone wants to blame the truck. The data blames the man driving it. That number points to somewhere nobody in this business wants to look, so the rest of this is about why it happens and why it is not just a box-truck problem.

The line for a commercial driver’s license is 26,001 pounds. Almost every box truck on an American street is built to exactly 26,000, one pound under, which is why it is the most common commercial truck in the country. The line for federal safety regulation is lower, 10,001 pounds, and that one catches most box trucks. A 24,000-pound delivery truck is not unregulated. It still owes a DOT number, hours of service, a medical card, driver qualification files, the works. What it does not require is drug testing or a CDL; the CDL is the hook the testing program hangs on. People hear “no CDL” and assume “no rules.” That’s the gap.

There is a third line on the passenger side, with 16 seats (counting the driver), and you need a commercial license with a passenger endorsement. Fifteen seats and you need nothing but an ordinary driver’s license, even when somebody is paying for the ride. None of these numbers describes a real change in danger. A 26,000-pound truck does not stop any shorter than a 26,500-pound one. A fifteen-seat van full of people is no safer than a sixteen-seat van full of people. They are paperwork lines, and operators build their entire equipment strategy around landing under them.

The drivers are the problem

When you break the inspection record into the federal safety categories, the box truck disadvantage shows up in exactly two places, and almost nowhere else.

The first is Driver Fitness, which covers licensing, medical certification, and disqualification. Box truck fleets have a violation rate two and a half times that of tractor fleets and an out-of-service rate more than three times that of tractor fleets. The second is Controlled Substances and Alcohol, where box truck fleets run more than two and a half times the rate of the tractor fleets.

A truck under 26,001 pounds is not in the federal drug and alcohol testing program. No random tests, no pre-employment screen, nothing. That does not make it legal to drive high or drunk; it just changes how you get caught. I sorted these citations by code, and about three-quarters of them are roadside findings, an officer catching it at the window under 49 CFR 392.4 and 392.5, not a failed test. There is no test. The cop is the test, and it is not mostly drunk driving, as people assume. The drug findings, operating while in possession or under the influence, outnumber the alcohol findings roughly four to one. The single largest category is a driver operating under the influence of drugs. With no screening program in front of him, the only thing standing between an impaired box truck driver and your street is whether he happens to get stopped.

Now look at the categories that are not about whether the driver should have been hired. On hours of service, the tractor fleets are worse. This makes sense because these non-CDL CMVs are short-haul exempt. On unsafe driving, the two are about even. On maintenance, as I said, the tractors are worse. The box truck penalty is not spread across the board the way a general quality problem would be. It sits almost surgically in the two categories that measure fitness to hold the wheel. That is not what cheap equipment looks like. That is what a hiring problem looks like.

The passenger side proves the same point, and the gap there is even wider. Among passenger carriers in my data, the small van and limo operators, the tier that needs no commercial license, get a driver put out of service 2.4 times per hundred inspections. The big bus and motor coach fleets that do require a CDL run 0.5. The license-exempt tier is parked due to driver problems at roughly five times the rate of the licensed tier. The van sample is thin, a few hundred carriers, partly because these vehicles barely get stopped at all, which is its own quiet problem. The pattern holds, and it is sharpest where the cargo is people.

Where the prohibited go to keep driving

This is the part I have spent years reporting, and the mechanism is not a theory. It is written into the rules.

The drug and alcohol testing program, including the federal Clearinghouse, is built around the CDL. The Department of Transportation says straight out that non-CDL operations are not subject to the Clearinghouse and should not even register with it. So a box truck outfit hiring a driver for a 26,000-pound truck has no duty to run a query, and the system tells it to stay out. No testing, no database check, no record following the driver in the door.

It gets worse because the agency’s own guidance creates a trap. An employer whose CDL holders run only non-CDL trucks may run a Clearinghouse query, but is not required to when they hold a CDL but don’t operate CDL equipment. The prohibition reaches further than most people know. If someone ran that query and it came back as prohibited, the employer would be barred from allowing that driver to operate either a real commercial vehicle or a non-CDL one until he cleaned up his record. So the prohibition legally covers the box truck. A driver flagged for drugs or alcohol is not supposed to be in one, but the required check, the only thing that would surface the flag, attaches to CDL equipment. The prohibition follows the driver. The mandatory check follows the truck. They don’t meet, and the unscreened driver lives in the space between them. The prohibition covers the box truck. The check that would catch it does not.

Then there is the funnel that feeds the whole thing. Since late 2024, a driver who lands in prohibited status has their CDL downgraded by the state to a regular license. The enforcement action meant to get a drug-or-alcohol driver off the road instead hands him the exact license a box truck or a fifteen-passenger van requires, in the one corner of the industry that runs no test and checks no database. I have reported before on the crooked side of this, the operators who clear prohibited drivers for a fee, work in other outlets and that has since picked up. That is the illegal door out. The downgrade rule is the legal one. Both empty into the same parking lot, and it is full of small trucks. Drop under 10,001 pounds into the cargo van and the light shuttle, and the vehicle is not even a commercial motor vehicle by definition, so the prohibition may not reach it at all.

Fifty states, fifty rulebooks

Everything so far is the federal picture, which governs freight that crosses a state line. Freight that loads and delivers inside one state falls under that state’s rules, and the states are all over the map.

A fifty-state survey of those rules says about half the states apply their driver qualification rules only above 26,000 pounds for intrastate work, which leaves the box truck under that line outside the requirement entirely. Ten states have not adopted the federal drug and alcohol testing rules for intrastate carriers at all: Delaware, Hawaii, Iowa, Kansas, Missouri, North Carolina, Rhode Island, South Dakota, Tennessee, and Vermont. Cross those two lists, and you get the deepest pocket, seven states where an intrastate box truck escapes both driver qualification and drug and alcohol testing in one shot. Delaware, Iowa, Missouri, North Carolina, South Dakota, Tennessee, and Vermont.

FMCSA data puts a number on that pocket. More than 1,400 box truck fleets run intrastate across those seven states, and nearly 1,150 of them are in North Carolina alone. The bigger raw counts sit in California, Texas, New York and Florida, which hold the largest intrastate box truck populations, but California and a few others close the gap by regulating their drivers no matter the weight. Size is not the same as exposure. The exposure is worst where a large intrastate fleet meets a state that allows it to run unscreened, and North Carolina is the clearest case in the file. North Carolina is the safe space for box trucks, just as Indiana is the safe and cheap space for license plates. 

Last-mile delivery, the warehouse-to-doorstep business that exploded over the last decade, is mostly intrastate. The package crosses the state line in a long-haul trailer, then moves locally on a light truck that never leaves the state. The fastest-growing segment of American freight settled into the tier with the thinnest driver oversight.

A nation shopping from the couch

None of this would matter at scale if the box truck were still a niche. We made it the spine of how we live. The country went from buying things in stores to ordering them from the couch, down to the mattress and the case of water, and the freight followed. Federal crash data tells the rest. Between 2016 and 2020, fatal crashes involving the lightest class of large trucks, the 10,001 to 14,000-pound range that includes box trucks and delivery vans, rose 44 percent. Fatal crashes involving the heaviest trucks, over 26,000 pounds, fell 2 percent. The trucks we fear most and regulate hardest got safer. The little ones we wave past got deadlier.

The structure underneath the boom should be familiar to anyone who has chased chameleon carriers. Last-mile relies on subcontracted delivery companies that pop up and shut down easily, pushing drivers from one paper entity to the next. That churn is how accountability gets diffused until nobody is holding it.

You can see who that work belongs to in the inspection record. The shipper named most often on box truck fleet inspections, by a wide margin, is Amazon, appearing on nearly 3,900 inspections across more than 1,500 carriers. That is the delivery service partner model in a single number, one retailer’s freight on fifteen hundred little box truck companies, the liability scattered across all of them. Behind it, the list reads like a receipt for modern life: Home Depot, Lowe’s, Costco, Walmart, Best Buy, and the furniture and mattress economy that barely existed at this scale ten years ago, Mattress Firm, Ashley, Wayfair.

One retailer’s freight, fifteen hundred separate box truck companies, and not one of them with the retailer’s name on the door.

One category blows my mind. Hazmat. Propane and industrial gas haulers are among the heaviest users of less-than-26,000-pound trucks in the data, including AmeriGas, Suburban Propane, NuCO2, and NexAir, with AmeriGas alone running well over 2,000 less-than-26,000-pound assets as part of its 6,000-asset fleet. That is placarded hazardous material on bobtail trucks in the same sub-26,000-pound class as everything else here. The screening questions from the hazmat story and the box truck story turn out to be the same questions about the same trucks.

The numbers even sort the business into two models. AmeriGas runs thousands of inspections across a handful of carriers, a dedicated fleet it owns and can be held to answer for. Amazon runs thousands across fifteen hundred, a contractor pool nobody claims when something goes wrong. Both move enormous volumes on the lightly regulated trucks on the road. Only one is built, so the company on the package can answer for the driver behind the wheel.

The driver was the variable all along

We built this system around the truck. The weight rating, the seat count, and the license class. We assumed that if we controlled the equipment, we controlled the risk. The risk was never just in the steel. It was in who we let drive, and the rules we wrote around the vehicle left the driver free to slide downhill, out of the CDL tier and into the box truck, out of the testing program and into the van, out of the regulated state and into the one next door.

Drivers parked at twice the rate, concentrated in fitness and substance violations, which is the exact fingerprint of people who could not pass the screen and found the trucks that do not screen. The trailer that burned on I-75 near Chattanooga was caught on camera. The bigger story is the delivery truck on your street, driven by somebody an officer would have ordered off the road, hauling your packages through a loophole.

Fixing it does not take a new database or a new piece of technology. It takes deciding that the prohibition follows the person, all the way down, no matter how small the truck or how short the trip.

The post The Driver remains the box truck’s Achilles heel appeared first on FreightWaves.

The event, hosted by Reliance Partners and Borderless Coverage, brought together more than 500 of the industry’s leading voices as U.S.-Mexico freight continues to face unprecedented regulatory and operational challenges.

Opening the conference, Jerry Maldonado, chairman of the Laredo Motor Carriers Association, highlighted the organization’s 10th anniversary and emphasized Laredo’s role as the leading inland port in North America.

“Laredo is the No. 1 inland port in the northern hemisphere,” Maldonado said, noting that freight transportation companies operating through the border city are directly affected by ongoing policy debates surrounding trade, transportation and logistics. 

He also pointed to uncertainty surrounding upcoming USMCA negotiations but expressed confidence that the cross-border trade relationship would remain strong.

“We are very blessed as the [Laredo Motor Carriers Association] to have built strong relationships at a local level, at a state level, and at a federal level,” Maldonado said. “What does that mean for you? What does that mean for everyone here? Anything that you do that has to do with international trade, with logistics, with transportation, and you are here in Laredo, your load, your trailers, your customers, freight, goes through Laredo, it affects you.”

Mark Vickers, executive vice president of international logistics at Reliance Partners and founder of Borderless Coverage, said the conference was created to help industry stakeholders adapt to rapidly changing conditions in cross-border transportation.

“We modernize to make money,” Vickers said. “We want everybody to leave today super engaged on a number of topics.”

Among those topics were the U.S. Supreme Court’s recent Montgomery v. Caribe Transport II ruling, carrier-vetting requirements, cargo security, insurance trends and preparations for a potential USMCA 2.0 framework. 

Vickers also pointed to long-term supply chain shifts resulting from the pandemic, including increased freight flows through Mexico and the Port of Manzanillo.

“There’s a number of geopolitical events that have kind of changed everything for us, and a lot of these changes are still from COVID, where the port congestion in Los Angeles was mitigated by U.S. companies bringing their Chinese freight through the Port of Manzanillo and trucking that up through Laredo to hit the U.S. market,” Vickers said. “That supply chain has stayed and that’s changed the way U.S. companies look at risk in Mexico.”

Supreme Court’s Montgomery ruling reshapes broker liability landscape

One of the most closely watched discussions of the day focused on the Supreme Court’s Montgomery v. Caribe Transport II decision and its implications for freight brokers.

The panel, moderated by Thom Albrecht, chief financial and revenue officer at Reliance Partners, featured Jamie Cannon, senior vice president of logistics services at Reliance Partners, and Luca Winters, vice president for U.S.-Mexico cross-border logistics at Kuehne + Nagel.

Panelists said the ruling is already prompting insurance underwriters, brokers and shippers to reevaluate carrier-selection practices and liability exposure.

Cannon said insurers are scrutinizing broker-carrier agreements, standard operating procedures and carrier-vetting processes more closely than ever before.

“They’re looking at broker-carrier agreements. They’re looking at standard operating procedures for carrier vetting. They’re looking at what companies you’re using and whether you’re actually utilizing those systems,” Cannon said.

Winters said the decision elevates “reasonable care” from a compliance concept to a core business function.

“No longer are we in a position to say, as freight brokers, ‘I’ve done my minimum due diligence,’” Winters said. “Now we’re all going to have to become experts in how to mitigate risk.”

Panelists predicted that carrier-vetting practices will become increasingly standardized and technology-driven, with brokers expected to document decisions more thoroughly and demonstrate consistent adherence to internal procedures.

Cannon noted that underwriters are increasingly focused on documentation and consistency.

“Come up with a really good plan, document it, don’t deviate from it,” he said.

The discussion also touched on the growing role of technology, artificial intelligence and third-party vetting platforms as brokers attempt to navigate heightened legal exposure and mounting shipper expectations. 

Panelists suggested that larger brokers with sophisticated compliance and vetting programs may gain market share as customers increasingly prioritize risk management.

Related: The Supreme Court Just Stripped Brokers of Their Biggest Legal Shield

Mexico carrier vetting moves to center stage

Another major panel focused on carrier vetting in Mexico, an issue that many participants said has become one of the most important risk-management tools in cross-border transportation.

Moderated by Carlos Sesma, senior partner at Sesma Sesma & McNeese, the panel featured Colton Sadler, chief legal officer at Steam Logistics, and Logan Pearce, head of claims and recoveries at Anova Marine Insurance.

Panelists said cargo theft in Mexico continues to evolve, with organized criminals increasingly relying on fraud, identity theft and digital impersonation schemes rather than traditional hijackings.

“We also have what we could say now is digital theft,” Sesma said. “Companies come into load boards, put their information up and start getting loads, and you never see your loads again.”

According to the panel, customers are no longer willing to accept traditional contractual language that shifts all responsibility once freight crosses the border. Instead, shippers increasingly expect brokers and logistics providers to demonstrate robust carrier-vetting programs and risk-management controls.

Sesma described carrier vetting as “the single most powerful risk management tool” available to companies moving freight between the U.S. and Mexico. Vetting can help mitigate operational, legal, compliance and cargo-loss risks while providing documentation that may prove critical during litigation or insurance claims, he said.

Sadler said carrier vetting in Mexico historically has been more difficult because of limited technology and fragmented data sources compared with the U.S.

“The biggest difference between vetting a U.S. carrier and a Mexican carrier is the technology available,” Sadler said. “Mexico’s a little bit behind with the U.S. on the technology side, but that’s changing.”

He also said that the Montgomery decision did not create new risks as much as it removed a legal defense that brokers had relied upon for years.

“The liability was always out there,” Sadler said. “What Montgomery did is we lost a defense.”

Pearce urged brokers, carriers and logistics providers to understand the specifics of their insurance coverage before losses occur, warning that many companies mistakenly assume cargo insurance will automatically cover every scenario.

“Know your coverage,” Pearce said. “Don’t just assume your insurance is going to handle it.”

The post Montgomery ruling, cargo fraud dominate Texas cross-border trade summit  appeared first on FreightWaves.

The progress on heat safety was made possible by vigilant enforcement of the 2023 national contract with UPS (NYSE: UPS), which has also resulted in workers winning many other grievance filings,  O’Brien told rank-and-file members in a video message posted on social media. One of the hard-fought additions in the contract is the requirement for a first-ever standing arbitrator who can quickly rule on worker grievances, such as back pay.

The Teamsters chief said the arbitrator has been critical to faster resolution of union grievances and hundreds of millions of dollars in awards to workers.

UPS in October agreed to modify 5,000 delivery vehicles in hot zones with air conditioning systems after the Teamsters publicly called out the company for dragging its feet on commitments to purchase or retrofit 28,000 sprinter vans and package cars with in-cab air conditioning by the summer of 2027 to protect drivers from excessive heat conditions.

The first 2,000 retrofitted vehicles were delivered, as required, by June 1, O’Brien said. The rollout of the remaining 3,000 vehicles is supposed to be finished by June 1, 2027.

The October agreement also requires the freight transportation company to upgrade 100 package cars with air conditioning vented into the cargo compartment. Teamsters officials are currently evaluating the effectiveness of ventilating cargo compartments with retrofitted air ducts. 

“Air circulation in the back is key because without air circulation back here, it’s a sauna. We’re pretty damn excited about it. I’ve been around this company for damn near 40 years. I never thought I would see the day that we had air conditioning in the vehicle,” said Karla Schumann, the Teamsters western region vice president and an officer in Local 104 in Arizona, while standing in a test vehicle. 

O’Brien told members that “UPS is being held accountable to make sure they deliver on every single heat protection that we won at the table,” including installation of heat shields between the cab and exhaust vents.

And Teamsters members need to continue enforcing the contract to the letter in all areas, O’Brien argued, because UPS will look for every opportunity to violate the terms and save money.

“UPS is still just another giant corporation. At the end of the day, Carol Tomé  and UPS executives care more about their stock price than they care about you,” the Teamsters chief said.

In early April, the Teamsters pressure forced UPS to limit voluntary buyouts for drivers to 7,500 positions after the company offered $150,000 severance packages to 105,000 long-haul truck and local delivery drivers as part of a network downsizing and cost initiative. UPS also agreed not to unilaterally make such offers again. About 3,000 drivers accepted far-less lucrative buyout terms last fall. UPS never publicly stated how many driver positions it hoped to eliminate under the second buyout program, but observers expected a higher target than 7,500 to meet UPS’s financial goals.

The Teamsters failed in court to block this year’s voluntary separation program, but continued to challenge UPS through the national master contract’s grievance procedures. The union alleged the buyouts violated the contract because UPS directly dealt with workers over job status, something it says must be negotiated, and undermined seniority rights. The union feared UPS would “cherry pick” who might be eligible for early retirement.

“It’s a powerful reminder that we must never take UPS at face value. We must never trust what UPS is telling us unless they’re showing up and sitting down at the table with our members,” O’Brien said about the success in enforcing the contract.

O’Brien said the Teamsters has shipped more than 100,000 heat thermometers to drivers nationwide to track heat conditions in their vehicles and enable them to report violations of mandatory heat protections. 

Members are routinely filing grievances with UPS on a range of workplace issues, such as forced overtime, overtime pay, rest periods, management working regular routes, exhaustion and back pay, the Teamsters president said.

The presence of a permanent arbitrator has resulted in grievances being resolved in weeks rather than dragging on for years and in hundreds of millions of dollars being returned to UPS Teamsters, he said.

“Keep filing grievances. Talk to your stewards. Meet with your business agent. Do not let 9-to-5 violations or paycheck errors fly under the radar. Do your part to hold UPS accountable and continue to enforce our strong contract,” O’Brien urged.

Teamsters convention

O’Brien’s social media post coincides with the International Brotherhood of Teamsters national convention in Las Vegas, which starts on Sunday. The conventions happen every five years. O’Brien plans to run for re-election as president, with voting beginning in October.

The platform for Teamsters Mobilize, which bills itself as a grassroots organization of Teamsters activists that aims to fight corporate power and expose corrupt Teamsters leadership, rejects O’Brien’s characterization of the 2023 UPS contract as a “historic” win for workers. 

The hardline group calls the UPS contract, which is widely considered as delivering some of the best benefits for workers anywhere in the country, as weak. After leading a “vote no” campaign, it remains upset that a part-time base wage of $25 per hour was not included in the contract.

Its convention platform includes an end to part-time job classification at UPS and shorter contracts with a three-year maximum. 

The activists’ manifesto says, “We reject the myth that workers and employers can exist together harmoniously, and believe that our unions should be fighting tooth and nail for our interests against employers. … We will expose and oppose collaboration between Teamsters leadership and our employers, as well as the rest of the ruling class (including not just the CEOs, but the government, Wall Street, and corporate media), whose riches come dripping from the sweat and blood of the working class.” 

Click here for more FreightWaves/American Shipper stories by Eric Kulisch.

Write to Eric Kulisch at ekulisch@freightwaves.com.

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“Everything was manual at that time,” Boppana told FreightWaves in an interview at Motive’s Vision 26 event.

Today, Boppana serves as chief information officer for the Bennett Family of Companies, overseeing a fleet of approximately 4,500 pieces of equipment — about 3,600 on the trucking side alone, including its drayage division. The company has an ambitious three-year roadmap to migrate its legacy systems into an artificial intelligence-powered future. His journey and Bennett’s strategy offer insights into how large carriers are modernizing without losing operational footing.

From Mail-In Logs to Electronic Compliance

Bennett’s transformation accelerated with the 2017 federal mandate for electronic logging devices. The company adopted Motive as its ELD provider, making it one of the platform’s early adopters.

The shift was not seamless. Bennett relies heavily on owner-operators, who initially resisted devices that track both their time and loads.

“When you’re talking about putting ELDs in their trucks, they’re not too happy about it initially,” Boppana said. “There was a lot of resentment. They don’t want ELDs, they don’t want anything tracking their trucks.”

The regulation forced adoption, but effective change management was essential. Today, Bennett operates at roughly 90 percent ELD compliance, with the remaining 10 percent on paper logs for equipment qualifying for exemptions due to age.

“If you think about it, it was really a blessing for large fleets like us to go from paper-based logs to electronic logs,” Boppana said. “Now we can’t even think of it as automation, but at that time it was huge.”

Dash Cams: The Hearts-and-Minds Campaign

ELD adoption came with the force of regulation. Dash cam adoption required a different approach — more carrot than stick. Boppana called it the most challenging change-management effort of his career.

Unlike ELDs, dash cams were not mandated. “It wasn’t regulated — it’s not a regulation,” he said. “There’s an option there; owner-operators can even say no to it because of the business model.”

Bennett used a “hearts-and-minds, marketing-style approach.” The central pitch: video evidence would enable faster exoneration for drivers not at fault in accidents.

“If you have a dash cam, we have visibility of what’s going on,” Boppana said. “We can actually exonerate you faster. That was one of the big selling points.”

The company covered all hardware and subscription costs, shared incident reports up to the CEO level and made dash cams mandatory for newly onboarded drivers. Transitioning the existing fleet took nearly a year.

Safety Scores, Insurance and Customer Trust

Investments in safety technology deliver returns beyond regulatory compliance. Shippers and customers evaluate carriers in part on their Compliance, Safety, Accountability scores.

“They look at our CSA scores — are we a safe carrier or not? Because that directly affects whether their commodity gets delivered safely and on time,” Boppana said. “The safer we are, the fewer incidents, the better our chances of getting more business.”

Bennett also leverages its safety posture to help manage insurance costs. The company provides coverage to its owner-operators. Lower claims translate to lower premiums for drivers as well.

“If we’re not paying as many claims, our insurance rates stay lower, which means driver premiums stay lower too,” Boppana said. “It’s a twofold win-win.”

Modernizing the Foundation

Like many large truckload carriers, Bennett still runs older core systems — what Boppana refers to as “legacy software.” Rather than exposing the AS/400 system directly to field employees and agents, the company built a modern Java application layer on top of it more than two decades ago.

“That allows us to more easily leverage new technologies like AI agents because the middle layer is still modern,” he said.

Bennett is now in the midst of a roughly three-year effort to migrate components off the AS/400 and into an AI-powered transportation management system. Motive data feeds directly into the safety module, with plans to expand visibility and coaching capabilities to operations teams and agents.

“What we’re trying to do is give operations that visibility and bring them into the coaching process — not just rely on the safety team, but expand coaching capabilities across operations and even to our agents,” Boppana said.

For Bennett, dash cams and telematics represent one piece of a broader modernization strategy. The company is integrating advanced capabilities from partners like Motive into its evolving tech stack. This modular approach allows Bennett to adopt the latest technology without having to build every solution in-house, as large fleets more commonly did in years past.

The post Bennett CIO on 24 years of trucking tech transformation appeared first on FreightWaves.

The idea is simple. Before you drive the truck, walk around it, look at it, check the brakes, tires, lights, coupling device, mirrors, and steering, and write down what you find. If something is wrong, you report it. The carrier fixes it before the truck moves. If nothing is wrong, you certify the truck is safe and you go to work. After the trip, you do it again and report anything that developed during the day. The next driver reviews the previous report, verifies that any reported defects were repaired, and the cycle continues.

That is what the regulation says. What happens on the ground at most carriers, including some carriers that consider themselves safety leaders, is different. The driver climbs into the cab, opens the ELD or the fleet management app, scrolls to the DVIR screen, taps the “no defects” button, signs it electronically, and starts driving. Total time: 30 seconds. Total inspection: none. The DVIR exists. It is completed. It is filed. It is also fiction.

Why the process breaks down

A proper pre-trip inspection on a tractor-trailer combination takes 15 to 20 minutes for a driver who knows what to look at. That is 15 to 20 minutes of unpaid time for most drivers under the current HOS structure, since the driver does not go on duty until the pre-trip is complete but the clock starts when the inspection begins. For a driver paid by the mile, those 20 minutes represent zero revenue. For a driver under pressure from dispatch to make a pickup window, those 20 minutes represent the difference between making the load and missing it. The economic incentive to skip the inspection is built into the compensation structure, and telling drivers to do it anyway without addressing the incentive is a training failure that repeats itself every morning in every truck yard in the country.

Dispatch culture makes it worse. A fleet that tells its drivers to complete thorough pre-trips but also tells its dispatchers to get trucks moving by 6 a.m. has created a conflict it has not resolved. The driver who reports a defect and delays departure is the driver who gets a phone call from dispatch asking why the truck is not moving. After that phone call happens two or three times, the driver stops reporting defects. The defect does not go away. The report does. The truck goes out on the road with a bad glad-hand seal, a leaking air line, a cracked mirror, or a tire at 60 psi that should be at 100, and the DVIR says everything is fine.

Training is the other failure point. A pre-trip inspection is a skill. It requires knowledge of what the components look like when they are functioning correctly, so the driver can recognize when they are not. It requires knowing what to listen for in an air brake test, what to feel for in a steering check, and what to look for in a suspension walk-around. Most CDL training programs teach a pre-trip as a memorized sequence for the skills test and never revisit it. Most carrier onboarding programs mention it in orientation and never reinforce it. The driver who was taught to pass the test is not the same driver who knows how to find a cracked brake drum at 5 a.m. in a dimly lit yard.

What it looks like in discovery

The litigation value of the DVIR depends entirely on whether it is real. A DVIR that shows a defect reported by the driver, followed by a work order showing the defect was repaired, followed by a certification that the repair was completed before the next trip, is evidence that the carrier’s system works. It is powerful evidence. It shows the driver looked, the carrier listened, and the truck was fixed. That is the kind of documentation that wins cases.

A DVIR that shows no defects reported for 60 or 90 consecutive days on a truck that accumulated multiple roadside violations during the same period is the opposite. The plaintiff’s expert will line up the DVIRs next to the roadside inspection reports and ask a simple question: if the driver inspected this truck every morning and found nothing wrong, and the trooper found four brake defects on March 14, and the driver reported no defects on March 13, who was wrong? The answer the jury hears is that the driver never looked.

It gets worse if the carrier has a pattern. When the plaintiff’s attorney pulls DVIRs across the fleet, not just the truck in the crash, and finds that 95 percent of all DVIRs fleet-wide report no defects, the argument shifts from one negligent driver to a systemic failure. The carrier did not train its drivers to inspect. Or it trained them and did not enforce it. Or it enforced it and created a culture where reporting defects was punished by dispatch pressure. Whichever version the evidence supports, the result is the same. The DVIR program was not functioning, and the carrier knew or should have known because the data was in its own system. If you have a fleet with 500k to 1 million miles and you have no defect DVIRs, you don’t have a DVIR communication program; you have a pencil-whipping checklist. 

Making it real

The fix is not complicated, but it requires commitment. Paid pre-trip time, separate from the driving clock, removes the economic penalty. A defect reporting process that does not result in dispatch pushback removes the cultural penalty. A training program that teaches drivers what a cracked brake drum looks like, what a leaking hub seal sounds like, and what a loose kingpin feels like at the fifth wheel removes the knowledge gap. Random spot-checks by a maintenance supervisor who walks the yard and compares what the DVIR says against what the truck looks like removes the accountability gap.

Some fleets are using technology to close the gap. Photo-verified DVIRs that require the driver to take a picture of each inspection point, with time and location stamping, create a record that is harder to fabricate than a checkbox. Video walk-around systems that record the entire pre-trip give the carrier a visual record that matches or contradicts the written report. Neither of these is required by regulation. Both of them, in a post-crash litigation environment where the plaintiff’s attorney will ask whether the carrier’s pre-trip process was real, are worth more than the cost of the subscription. Oftentimes in litigation, it isn’t about whether you were compliant; it’s what the rest of your reasonable industry peers are doing and why you weren’t doing it as well. It’s about defensibility and defensible programs and systems and workflows. This is the difference between having to make someone whole if you cause a crash vs making someone rich after you cause a crash. It’s very seldom about who was at fault for the actual event itself. It’s about the systems, programs, policies, and workflows, and how or if you managed them effectively and consistently. 

The carrier that takes DVIRs seriously is building a litigation defense every single day as its drivers complete honest inspections. The carrier that treats DVIRs as a formality is building a plaintiff’s case every single day that its drivers check a box and drive. The regulation is identical for both. The outcome in court is not.

The post The DVIR could be the maintenance program key you’re missing appeared first on FreightWaves.

Relay Payments, which has touted its expanding network of fuel retailers that accept its services as well as maintenance outlets, has brought on Platform Science as a new channel for its customers to pay merchants for a variety of services.

Platform Science is a fast-growing technology offering that integrates a wide variety of information streams coming off a truck, including ELDs and other telematics. 

Emily Neuman, executive vice president at Relay, told FreightWaves the outward most visible sign of how it would wed the two companies would be the ability of a truck driver to use the Platform Science-driven platform in the cab to make payments for fuel or other services.

The basic system for Relay Payments is that if a truck driver pulls into a fuel station or maintenance outlet that has agreed to accept payment from Relay, the user will be supplied a code through the Relay Payments app that will serve as something akin to a digital permission slip that allows the driver to pay for fuel, maintenance or other services like lumpers.

Having Relay Payments’ systems integrated into an ELD or TMS is not new, Neuman said. The number of TMS systems that have partnered with Relay Payments is more than 80, she said. That figure for ELDs is more than 300.

“The unique thing about Platform Science is that if you’re a driver using them, instead of maybe pulling out your own personal mobile phone that has Relay on it, your Platform Science tablet with our integration can also have the app on it,” Neuman said. “The driver can already be signed into the Relay app through the single signon that Platform Science has as part of their product.”

Codes instead of a swipe

In this era of fighting fraud, which at present seems to be the issue that is drawing a huge amount of focus, what the company calls the Relay Code is at the heart of its anti-fraud offerings and was featured in both the prepared statement released by the companies and by Neuman.

The digital code provided to Relay Payments users eliminates the need for a card swipe at a fuel dispenser, which has long been one of the biggest areas for fraudsters trying to cash in. In that sense, there is not much difference between what Relay has done with customers using its services via a phone-based mobile app and what will occur with Platform Science.

But putting multiple services on one platform, which is what Platform Science attempts to do, is a core part of the agreement between the two companies. 

“Relay is focused on removing friction from the driver experience while giving fleets greater visibility and control over their operations,” Ryan Droege, CEO of Relay Payments, said in the prepared statement. “By integrating directly with Platform Science, we’re making it easier than ever for fleets to deploy secure, modern payment solutions that drivers actually want to use.”

Platform Science is a single signon platform, a step in reducing that friction that Droege mentioned. 

First-party fraud

Relay Pulse is an anti-fraud feature of the company’s offering, which Neuman said “prevents against first-party fraud.” That is the sort of theft that is coming from inside the house, when a driver or some other employee in the fuel procurement part of a trucking company uses that position to steal fuel or cash.

Skimming credit card information at a pump would be considered an example of third-party fraud, Neuman said.

Relay Pulse is part of the integration with Platform Science, Neuman said. The data coming off the truck using Platform Science can include such information as how much of the fuel tank is unfilled and is the driver sticking to company restrictions on those sorts of measurements, which are also tied into the fraud fight.

“With Relay Pulse, we’re checking additional data points that that Platform Science is giving us to determine whether that driver really should have a fuel code unlocked,” Neuman said.

And by doing it with Platform Science, the anti-fraud tools are getting used with a company that is servicing the large fleets that Relay Payments has long targeted, she said.

Given that signing up an ELD or TMS customer is not breaking new ground for Relay, the question was asked: why tout the Platform Science deal when others didn’t get that sort of treatment?

Needed to grow merchant base

One aspect, Neuman said, is that the growth of the network of merchants accepting Relay Payments, like the clean sweep of the biggest travel centers (Love’s, TA, Circle K and Pilot), can then open the door to have Relay “be able to handle fleets of all sizes.”

The next step needed after growing the merchant network, Neuman said, was “we had to go and build out our integrations.” Lumper payments were one of the first big markets for Relay, she said, and that helped give a starting point to further integrate with services like Platform Science and other TMS and ELD systems.

In the prepared statement, the companies quoted Harman Cheema, the CEO of Cheema FreightlInes LLC which has been using Relay Payments through Platform Science. 

“Fuel is one of our largest expenses, and fraud has always been a concern for our industry,” said HarmanCheema, CEO of Cheema Freightlines LLC. “With Relay and Platform Science now integrated, our 400+drivers have a much simpler experience, and Relay Pulse gives us confidence that every transaction is verified against real-time data. It’s been a meaningful step forward for both efficiency and security.”

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The post Relay Payments snags its latest partner: Platform Science appeared first on FreightWaves.

Mike Baudendistel, head of intermodal solutions at FreightWaves SONAR, broke down the latest weekly rail traffic numbers from the Association of American Railroads (AAR) for the week ending June 6. 

Baudendistel highlighted that rail traffic has seen robust momentum across sectors, with rail carload traffic up 2.5% and rail intermodal traffic surging 8% year-over-year on a four-week rolling average. 

He emphasized that growth in rail carloads is historically a highly reliable, positive indicator that the broader industrial economy is expanding.

TMS evolution shifts toward accessible automation

PCS Software CEO Mark Hill joined the show to discuss how transportation management systems are being reborn through a new wave of technologies. 

Hill noted that the company has heavily invested in rearchitecting its platform with advanced AI capabilities, such as their award-winning Cortex system, to help carriers and asset-based brokers streamline dispatch and back-office operations. 

He emphasized that these powerful automation tools are no longer reserved for industry giants; modern accessibility allows small and mid-sized companies to compete on a level playing field.

Regulatory vetting shortfalls raise carrier safety concerns

Jim Mullen, president of the Truckload Carriers Association (TCA) and former acting administrator of the FMCSA, highlighted the safety risks created by staffing shortages at federal safety agencies. 

A recently released TCA white paper calls on Congress to address the math putting lives at risk, pointing out that only 1,100 federal employees are currently tasked with overseeing nearly 8 million regulated entities. 

Mullen advocated for a much more robust carrier vetting process at the outset, stating that obtaining operating authority should require more than simply having “$300 and a truck.”

Keep up with the latest news on FreightWaves Today

FreightWaves Today livestreams weekdays at noon ET at http://tv.freightwaves.com/.

The post FreightWaves Today: Broad rail traffic gains show growing industrial economy appeared first on FreightWaves.

These are symptoms of a systemic transition that FMCSA implemented and that the medical examiner community has not fully adopted, and most don’t know about. This same issue happened with Carriers and Clearinghouse. Half the carriers we deal with don’t realize Clearinghouse is a “thing and it’s existed for 6 years. The change is significant, shifting a critical compliance burden from the driver to the physician in a way that many certified medical examiners do not yet fully understand.

What changed

Under the previous system, a commercial driver who completed a DOT physical received a Medical Examiner’s Certificate (and the long form) directly from the physician. The driver was then responsible for providing that certificate to the state driver licensing agency to self-certify. The state would update the driver’s record to reflect the current medical certification, and the Motor Vehicle Record would show the driver as medically qualified. The process depended on the driver taking the certificate to the state, and if the driver forgot or delayed, the state record would not reflect the current medical status. Carriers then had to verify the self-certification and medical certification status through an MVR pull. 

Under National Registry 2, that workflow changed. The certified medical examiner is now required to electronically transmit the results of the DOT physical directly to FMCSA through the National Registry system. FMCSA then transmits the medical certification data to the appropriate state driver licensing agency. The state automatically updates the driver’s record based on data it receives from the FMCSA. The driver no longer needs to hand-carry the certificate to the DMV. The physician uploads it, FMCSA routes it, and the state records it. The process is cleaner on paper and eliminates the compliance gap that existed when drivers failed to submit their own certificates. But it only works if the physician completes the upload.

Where the process is breaking

The failure point is at the first step. Not all certified medical examiners, including physicians, chiropractors, nurse practitioners, physician assistants, and doctors of osteopathic medicine, are aware that the upload responsibility has shifted to them. Many are still handing the driver the paper certificate and considering the encounter complete. The driver walks out with a valid medical certificate in hand, believes the process is complete, and has no reason to suspect that the electronic transmission to the FMCSA did not occur. Weeks or months later, the state sends a notice that no current medical certification is on file, and the CDL will be downgraded if the issue is not resolved.

The problem is compounded by the variety of medical professionals who perform DOT physicals. A hospital-affiliated occupational health clinic with dedicated EHR integration may have built the FMCSA upload into its standard workflow. A solo-practice chiropractor performing DOT physicals on the side may not know the upload exists. A nurse practitioner at a walk-in clinic may know the requirement but lack access to the National Registry portal, or may not have been trained to use it. The certification to perform DOT physicals requires completing a training program and passing an examination, but training in the administrative upload process is not always part of that curriculum, and the administrative infrastructure varies widely across practice settings.

The resulting compliance gap is invisible to the driver and the carrier until the state sends the downgrade notice. The driver has the paper certificate. The carrier has a copy in the driver qualification file. The annual MVR pull, if the carrier runs one, may not reflect the problem until the state has already initiated the downgrade. At that point, the carrier has a driver who is technically disqualified from operating a commercial motor vehicle, and every mile that driver drove between the failed upload and the downgrade notice is a mile the carrier’s insurance may not cover.

What drivers need to do

A driver who completes a DOT physical should not leave the examiner’s office until confirming that the physician is aware of and intends to complete the electronic upload to the FMCSA through the National Registry portal. That is not a confrontational question. It is a compliance question, and any certified medical examiner who is up to date on the requirements will understand it. If the physician is not familiar with the upload requirement, the driver needs to find a different examiner, because a certificate not transmitted electronically is one the state will never see.

After the exam, the driver should check with their state licensing agency to see if the results do not appear within a reasonable period. If the results do not appear within a reasonable period, the driver should contact the examiner’s office and request that the upload be completed again. Waiting for the state to send a downgrade notice is waiting too long. By the time that letter arrives, the driver’s MVR already shows a lapsed medical certification, and any carrier that checked the MVR during that window would see a driver who appears disqualified.

What carriers need to do

The carrier’s obligation under Part 391 is to ensure that every driver in the fleet holds a current, valid medical certificate and that the driver qualification file contains a copy. Under National Registry 2, that obligation now includes verifying that the physician’s upload actually reached the state. The DQ file may show a valid paper certificate dated last month. The state MVR may show no current medical certification on file because the physician never uploaded it. Those two records contradict each other, and in a post-crash litigation environment, a plaintiff’s attorney will use that contradiction to argue that the carrier either did not check or did not care.

The fix is an MVR check within 30 days of every DOT physical. Not the annual pull that most carriers run as a regulatory minimum, but a targeted pull specifically to confirm that the new medical certification appears on the state record. If it does not, the carrier contacts the physician’s office and demands that the upload be completed before the driver’s next dispatch. Carriers should also consider adding a line to their onboarding and recertification processes that requires the driver to confirm the examining physician’s name and National Registry number, so the carrier has a direct point of contact if the upload fails.

What physicians need to understand

The certified medical examiner who performs a DOT physical and does not upload the results to FMCSA has not completed the examination. The regulatory process does not end when the physician signs the certificate and hands it to the driver. It ends when the electronic transmission reaches the FMCSA, which then transmits the data to the state. A physician who performs DOT physicals under National Registry certification and fails to complete the upload is putting the driver’s CDL at risk, exposing the driver to a potential downgrade, and creating a compliance gap that the driver and the carrier may not discover until the damage is done.

The upload isn’t optional; it’s a federal requirement tied to the physician’s certification with the National Registry of Certified Medical Examiners. A physician who consistently fails to complete uploads risks referral to FMCSA for review of their National Registry certification. More immediately, the physician risks a phone call from a very unhappy commercial driver whose CDL was downgraded because the physician did not complete the paperwork, followed by a call from the carrier’s safety director, and, in some cases, a call from regulators. Those calls are avoidable by completing the five-minute electronic upload required by the regulation.

The system works when everyone in the chain does their part. The driver gets the physical. The physician uploads the results. FMCSA routes the data. The state updates the record. The carrier pulls the MVR and confirms the cycle is complete. When any link in that chain fails, the driver is the one who pays, and the driver is the one with the least ability to fix it. That is why this matters. A commercial driver’s livelihood depends on a medical certification that a physician may not know they are supposed to transmit, through a system the physician may not know how to use, to an agency that will downgrade the license without asking whether the failure was the driver’s fault. The process has changed. The industry needs to catch up.

The post The medical certification gap is putting CDLs at risk appeared first on FreightWaves.

Drivers will be able to initiate an update, turn off the truck, lock it and leave. This can happen when heading home for the night or stepping away during a break. The truck completes the update in the background.

“We are always striving to maximize our customers’ uptime, and this is an important milestone,” said Peter Voorhoeve, president of Volvo Trucks North America. “Drivers will be able to start a software update, lock the truck and walk away, whether that’s for a break or at the end of the day, and return to an updated vehicle. It’s a simpler way for fleets to keep trucks current without interrupting operations.”

The new capability is the latest evolution in Volvo’s remote programming. While passenger cars are more familiar with this type of functionality, the greater impact is in trucking, where vehicles often operate eight to 11 hours a day.

“Any time saved directly translates into increased productivity for our customers,” Voorhoeve said.

From Manual Calls to Automated Deployment

The unattended update feature is eight years in the making for Volvo’s remote programming. The original system required fleets to call and request software packages, which were sent to trucks for drivers to install. The process was complicated by 30-day expiration windows. The challenge grows significantly for fleets managing hundreds or thousands of vehicles.

“It’s not hard to call and ask for an update, but it’s a very easy task to postpone,” said Madeline Sullivan of Volvo Trucks North America. “And then if you’ve got 1,000 trucks, I mean, it gets complicated with, well, which ones of my trucks are up to date, which ones aren’t?”

Earlier this year, Volvo introduced a deployment engine that automatically pushes updates to opted-in trucks, similar to how smartphones receive software. The result: more than 80 percent of connected Volvo trucks now run the latest software, and unplanned stops have dropped 24 percent. In May alone, Volvo completed more than 18,000 over-the-air updates, with systems capable of handling up to 10,000 per day.

Expanded ECU Support, Recall Success and Future Upgrades

The unattended feature is made possible by Volvo’s new connected 24-volt platform. Legacy trucks could update only three electronic control units over the air: the engine, transmission and aftertreatment. The new platform enables updates to nearly every ECU on the vehicle.

The expanded capability has already proved its value during recalls. In those cases, Volvo can remotely deactivate a feature and later deploy the fix over the air with no dealer visit required.

The new unattended option gives drivers more flexibility. Those living in their trucks can still run updates with the vehicle on during breaks. Drivers parking at depots can initiate updates and head home.

“If I can do it on my break, that’s great. If I didn’t get to it on my break, now I can still do it at the end of the day when I go home,” Sullivan said. “It’s just trying to bring in more options of when they can do these updates.”

Looking ahead, the expanded connectivity could open the door for fleets to purchase performance upgrades. In the near future, adjustments such as torque changes could be made remotely. This continues to bridge the gap between commercial trucking and consumer electronics expectations for software updates.

The post Volvo Trucks unattended over-the-air updates launching later this year appeared first on FreightWaves.

Analysts largely looked past the news, too.

Amazon (NASDAQ: AMZN) has openly provided in-bound LTL services in the U.S. for over a year, mirroring an operation it has run in Europe for several years. The e-commerce company’s expanded U.S. service appears to include an asset-light model at roughly 30 terminals across its package-delivery network, which primarily moves parcels weighing less than five pounds. However, the offering in its current form is unlikely to challenge traditional incumbents, which specialize in transporting heavy pallets with stringent service requirements.

Richa Harnain, equity research analyst at Deutsche Bank (NYSE: DB), told investors in a Wednesday note that Amazon’s LTL service is more akin to what brokers offer.

“We don’t think AMZN’s LTL footprint is enough to become a more formidable full-fledged nationwide asset-based operator,” Harnain said. “We also acknowledge the space has typically bounced back strongly following other AMZN-related knee jerk negative reactions.”

Amazon certainly has the pocketbook to compete and dominate in the space. But the market is relatively small (roughly $60 billion) and an asset-light model is typically not the path to industry-leading margins and returns. The company could be attempting a very-targeted approach in select markets to utilize latent capacity in the network. It could also be planning to compete at the less-service-sensitive end of the LTL market.

Jason Seidl, an analyst at TD Cowen, said Amazon’s use of an intermodal container pool likely “suggests the offering will primarily compete with the economy (3-4 day) sub-segment of the LTL market.” He said Amazon could take some market share “on the margins” from legacy carriers “without driving en-masse share exodus.”

Amazon’s latest LTL foray

Before the market opened Wednesday, Amazon Supply Chain Services (ASCS) announced LTL service for “all businesses” to “any type of destination” in major U.S. markets. The offering is targeting “businesses of all sizes,” with shipment sizes likely ranging from one to six pallets (150 to 15,000 pounds).

Customers can arrange next-day live pickup and same-day pickup through drop-trailer service. Volume shippers are eligible for recurring daily pickups. Amazon offers EDI interfacing for ordering, real-time tracking and invoicing.

An Amazon Freight LTL coverage map shows decent density in the Eastern U.S., with a few select metros in the West. (Most national carrier networks have 200 to 300 service centers, serving nearly all U.S. zip codes.)

Amazon Freight had previously been offering an inbound-only LTL model with palletized freight being broken up at one of the company’s facilities and then delivered to final destinations (mostly consumer households) through its package-delivery network. However, Amazon was rumored to be approaching shippers earlier this year to gauge interest in a more traditional LTL offering in select markets, where loaded pallets would remain intact through transfer.

The company touted positive feedback from customers in its Wednesday announcement as the reason for the full rollout, noting that tens of thousands of sellers have been shipping freight by pallet across its network since 2019.

“The feedback from Amazon selling partners using our LTL service was clear: the technology, visibility, and reliability were exactly what they needed—and they wanted to use it more broadly,” said Jim Ruiz, director of Amazon Freight, in a news release explaining the company’s “cost-effective freight shipping.”

Ruiz elaborated in a separate statement to FreightWaves: “For years, customers told us their LTL freight never matched the reliability and visibility of their full-truckload shipments. We built an asset-backed LTL service that closes that gap—flexible same-day and next-day pickup, real-time shipment tracking from dock to door, and dedicated LTL-trained drivers.”

This new launch follows the company’s May update, announcing it unified and expanded its third-party logistics solutions. Operating under the ASCS brand, the service provides end-to-end freight transportation, distribution, fulfillment and parcel shipping.

Amazon Freight offers full truckload, LTL and intermodal service with a fleet of over 80,000 trailers and 24,000 intermodal containers. Amazon Freight is part of ASCS.

LTL industry has high barriers to entry

The LTL market is mostly consolidated with less than a dozen true national carriers. The top-five companies historically account for a little more than half of the revenue.

The space has high barriers to entry. It takes a significant capital outlay to acquire and maintain a national network of cross-dock terminals and a large fleet with multiple truck and trailer types. It also requires heavy tech investments to create customer interfaces and to optimize linehaul and dock operations. Many carriers rely on veteran leadership to run a successful hub-and-spoke network.

For decades, legacy carriers have prioritized service by reinvesting in their networks to build a powerful flywheel effect. Targeted improvements in service lead to increased yields and enhanced margins, which ultimately produce the capital necessary for further service-centric network improvements.

A comprehensive annual shipper survey establishes carrier rankings across 28 distinct service metrics. The results are significant as they can impact how shippers allocate freight. An asset-light approach, using third-party carriers, typically means a carrier loses the ability to control service and ultimately pricing.

Morgan Stanley’s (NYSE: MS) Ravi Shanker was a dissenter on Wednesday, saying that even a third-party, asset-light LTL model could be a disruptor.

“While LTL likely represents only a small component of AMZN’s overall logistics footprint, we reiterate that AMZN has repeatedly demonstrated an ability to gain traction in transportation markets through a flexible and iterative operating model,” Shanker said. “As a result, we believe the Company may be able to capture meaningful market share even if they are unable to offer best-in-class service levels immediately. This could strike at the perceived ‘moat’ of real estate footprint and service that form the central pillar of the LTL thesis today.”

LTL competitive landscape is changing

While public carriers contend terminal counts—the true sign of industry capacity—haven’t expanded over the past decade, the competitive landscape has changed.

FedEx Freight (NYSE: FDXF), the nation’s largest LTL carrier, spun off from parent FedEx Corp. (NYSE: FDX) earlier this month. It now has over 500 dedicated LTL sales reps looking to fill its 365-terminal network with freight.

Walmart (NASDAQ: WMT) recently announced an upgrade to its LTL consolidation program, allowing shippers to combine inbound LTL shipments into full truckloads destined for one of its 42 regional distribution centers using a single national purchase order.

Knight-Swift Transportation (NYSE: KNX) entered the LTL arena in 2021 with the acquisition of AAA Cooper Transportation. The company has since expanded its footprint through the purchase of additional regional carriers and the organic addition of approximately 60 terminals, including sites formerly operated by the now-defunct Yellow Corp.

TFI International (NYSE: TFII) has aspirations of establishing a mostly pure-play LTL entity by spinning off its TL businesses into a separate publicly traded company. However, those plans have been pushed back as it works to improve U.S. LTL margins and grow market cap before proceeding with a corporate split.

In early 2025, Amazon was rumored to be pursuing Old Dominion Freight Line (NASDAQ: ODFL), but management from that carrier said at the time it was not in talks to be acquired by Amazon.

Shares of AMZN closed Wednesday down 2.5% compared to the S&P 500, which was down 1.6%.

More FreightWaves articles by Todd Maiden:

• LTL general rate increases no longer an annual event
• ArcBest raises Q2 outlook for LTL, asset-light units
• Knight-Swift founder, executive chairman Kevin Knight retires

The post Analysts say Amazon won’t shake LTL market—yet appeared first on FreightWaves.

A recent SONAR Sitrep report found that nuclear civil case verdicts, runaway litigation and massive jury awards are no longer just occasional anomalies –they have ballooned into systemic existential risks threatening carrier profitability across the U.S.

Defined as civil jury awards exceeding $10 million, “nuclear verdicts” are disproportionately targeting the transportation sector. Market intelligence shows that roughly one in four auto accident trials resulting in a $10 million-plus verdict involves a commercial trucking carrier. 

Furthermore, trucking ranked third among all industries by nuclear verdict frequency in 2024. 

The litigation cost surge

Data tracked by Marathon Strategies highlights a record-setting surge in both the quantity and severity of these massive judgments:

• In 2024 alone, 135 nuclear verdicts totaling $31.3 billion were handed down across all industries –representing a 52% increase in cases and a staggering 116% jump in total value compared to 2023. 
• The trucking and automotive sectors absorbed $4.1 billion of that total across 15 major verdicts. 
• The median nuclear verdict reached $51 million in 2024, skyrocketing from $44 million in 2023 and just $21 million in 2020. 
• Whatsmore, “thermonuclear” verdicts exceeding $100 million surged by 81% in 2024 to 49 cases, with massive awards including a $160 million product liability judgment against Daimler Truck North America in Alabama. 

The real-world toll on operations

The financial shockwave is filtering down directly to carrier balance sheets through skyrocketing insurance premiums, which hit an all-time record of $0.102 per mile in 2024. 

According to data from the American Research Institute (ATRI), commercial vehicle liability premiums rose 18.6% from 2021 to 2024, outpacing consumer inflation by 5.4 percentage points. Over that same period, per-mile liability losses surged 33.1% –even as actual crash rates fell by 2.6%. 

To maintain the same level of safety coverage they held in 2021, 33% of fleets have been forced to buy extra policy layers as excess insurance costs climb. 

The top states leading the cost surge are Nevada ($8.4B), California ($6.9B), Pennsylvania ($3.4B), Texas ($3B) and New York ($2.1B). 

Protect your fleet with advanced market intelligence

In an era where plaintiff attorneys actively target commercial fleets as deep-pocketed defendants, navigating today’s trucking landscape requires more than just reactive safety policies. Knowing how, when and where litigation risks will drive up your operating costs is essential to maintaining profitability. 

Don’t let the next industry shift catch your logistics business off-guard. Sign up for SONAR today or request a demo here to unlock the full Nuclear Verdicts & the Trucking Profitability Crisis report and secure your competitive edge.

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The post SONAR Sitrep: How nuclear verdicts are reshaping carrier economics appeared first on FreightWaves.

What followed was one of the most expensive experiments in trucking insurance history, a $130 million collapse that put dangerous carriers on American highways for years before anyone with a badge or a regulatory mandate noticed a thing. The Biden administration’s FMCSA didn’t catch it. The Arizona Department of Insurance issued a consent order over missed phone calls. And tens of thousands of small carriers who never should have been on the road got insurance certificates, and kept rolling, long after the data said they shouldn’t have.

This is the story of the Mohave deal.

The Setup

In 2004, Knight-Swift quietly formed Mohave Transportation Insurance Company as an Arizona-domiciled captive insurer, NAIC CoCode 14349, domiciled at 2200 S. 75th Avenue in Phoenix. It sat on the shelf for years, used internally, until someone had a bigger idea.

By 2020, as the freight market entered its COVID-era explosion and a tsunami of new small carriers flooded into the industry, Knight-Swift initiated an insurance program for third-party carriers. In September 2021, they announced it publicly. Their own press release described it:

“An organization that brings together services essential to transportation carriers and includes insurance, equipment maintenance, fuel purchasing, and truck sales and rentals. Iron Truck Services provides affordable solutions to truckload carriers by leveraging the scale and infrastructure of the nation’s largest carrier, Knight-Swift.”  Knight-Swift press release, September 14, 2021 (BusinessWire)

The centerpiece, Iron Insurance, was writing commercial trucking policies on Chubb and Harco paper, with Mohave serving as the captive reinsurer, absorbing the risk. Harco is a Chubb subsidiary, making this exactly the Chubb/ACE paper arrangement that industry sources have described.

Distribution ran through the Independent Carrier Safety Association, a nonprofit formed in 2019. The mechanics were elegant on paper: join ICSA, install ICSA-approved in-cab event recorders, share your ELD data, submit to mandatory hair drug testing, and you qualified for affordable truck insurance through Mohave. Telematics for coverage. Safety compliance for a policy. The concept was sound. The execution was about to become a textbook case in what happens when volume overwhelms infrastructure.

The Boom

The timing was perfect for selling insurance to small trucking companies, and disastrous for the risk math behind it. In 2021 alone, 109,340 trucking companies opened for business, nearly triple the number that received authority in 2018. Most were single-truck operations, owner-operators who bought a truck during the freight boom because rates were high enough to make it look profitable.

FMCSA audits lagged catastrophically behind the surge. In 2021, only 45% of the 119,872 newly issued motor carrier authorities received the required safety audit. In 2022, only 44% of 108,019 new entrants were audited. That means over 100,000 new carriers entered the market during peak Mohave enrollment years without any formal federal safety review. Iron Insurance was writing policies on many of them.

The Biden Administration essentially allowed every barrier to the trucking industry to not only come down, but also to be replaced with the worst carriers possible. Insurers helped with bottom-dollar rates and no barriers to entry. 

The program’s own earnings filings from Q3 2022 showed it was working; Iron Insurance was generating a 96.6% revenue increase and $18.5 million in operating income. The program was printing money. The telematics data was there. Whether anyone was actually using it to manage the book in real time is a different question entirely.

Knight-Swift’s own SEC filings from this period describe the opportunity in language that, in retrospect, reads as a warning:

“Back in 2021, there was unprecedented growth in small fleets and there was a financial incentive and opportunity for large fleets to try to get extra revenue while utilizing their extensive footprint of maintenance shops and nationwide roadside networks. But a flood of new entrants, many with little experience in either trucking or owning a business, means a higher likelihood for accidents and claims.”  FreightWaves / Knight-Swift earnings analysis, January 2024

The Crash

The freight market turned in mid-2022. Spot rates collapsed. Small carriers who had entered the market with thin capitalization and no cushion suddenly couldn’t make their truck payments, couldn’t make their premium payments, and couldn’t generate the freight revenue to stay solvent. The same carriers who were Iron Insurance’s book started dying.

The first public acknowledgment came with Q1 2023 earnings, filed April 20, 2023. Knight-Swift’s own 8-K filing used language that should have triggered alarm across the regulatory apparatus:

“Overall, our Iron Insurance line of business produced a $22.8 million operating loss (or $0.11 per diluted share) during the first quarter of 2023, primarily due to increased frequency and unfavorable claim development during the quarter as well as insurance premium collection issues associated with small carriers who are struggling given the soft freight market conditions. We are continuing to execute our plan to improve the underwriting profitability of the insurance program, and we have decided to reduce our exposure to small carrier risk in the current market as we believe the extreme pressure small carriers are under is producing undesirable risk characteristics.”  Knight-Swift 8-K, Q1 2023 Earnings, April 20, 2023. SEC EDGAR

Premium collection issues. Carriers weren’t paying their premiums. They were still operating, still on the road, still hauling freight, still capable of causing fatal crashes, but not paying for the insurance that was supposed to cover those crashes. The telematics-for-coverage promise had inverted completely. The cameras were installed, but nobody was collecting the checks.

The Q1 2023 investor presentation, also filed with the SEC, was equally stark:

“Third-party insurance business posted $22.8M loss due to increased frequency and unfavorable claims development and revenue collectability challenges with small carriers. Growth trajectory expected to temporarily slow. Strategic Pivot on Third-Party Insurance, Temporarily reducing exposure to third-party insurance risk in an unusually difficult environment for small operators. Near-term headwind to revenue growth for this program, but the prudent move for our business at this point in the cycle.”   Knight-Swift Q1 2023 Earnings Presentation, Exhibit 99.2, April 20, 2023, SEC EDGAR

They said they were raising rates, tightening underwriting, and reducing exposure. It was too late. By Q2 2023, insurance losses were a 45-cent drag on full-year earnings guidance, totaling $38 million in the first half alone. By Q3, the losses were compounding. The Q3 2023 8-K filed October 19, 2023, is particularly telling:

“Our third-party insurance business operating loss for the current quarter increased slightly to $15.9 million (or $0.08 per diluted share) from a $15.0 million operating loss (or $0.07 per diluted share) in the second quarter of 2023. Our GAAP and non-GAAP results for the quarter included… the $22.0 million reduction in operating income in our Iron Truck insurance program.”   Knight-Swift 8-K, Q3 2023 Earnings, October 19, 2023, SEC EDGAR

In the same period, Knight-Swift issued a statement in an 8-K filing trying to reassure investors:

“It will take some time for these changes in the insurance business to fully materialize in the results, but we are making progress raising premiums and improving the quality of risk as we work to mitigate volatility.”  Knight-Swift 8-K filing, Q3 2023 SEC EDGAR

They were not making progress. Then came Q4.

A $71.7 million operating loss in a single quarter. The company began canceling policies and reduced the number of trucks under coverage by 75%. CFO Adam Miller said on the earnings call: “Because we have to give certain notice to the insureds before we can cancel the policy, there is this run-out period.” Knight-Swift reported operating losses in every quarter of 2023 as claims were more frequent and more severe than in any prior period. With losses persisting, executives determined the need to exit a model that the company previously hailed as a potential for growth.

By April 1, 2024, the program was dead. The Chubb and Harco paper stopped. Mohave stopped underwriting. Iron Insurance was over.

Total documented losses in 2023 alone: over $130 million.

The Regulatory Record

The story gets uncomfortable for the people who were supposed to be watching within the Biden Administration and the Buttigieg DOT. 

The Arizona Department of Insurance’s formal response to the Mohave Transportation Insurance Company’s conduct during this period was a consent order filed on October 19, 2023. Case number 23A-065-INS. NAIC CoCode 14349. The enforcement type: Penalty. The penalty amount: $1,000.

One thousand dollars. The underlying violation documented in the consent order: failing to return a claimant’s phone calls. The complaint was filed in November 2022, the same period during which the losses were accelerating, and carriers with unpaid premiums were still operating on the road.

BBB complaint records from the same period show carriers being canceled mid-policy over camera compliance disputes, with no communication from claims adjusters for months. One complainant documented going five months after a crash with only four actual conversations with a claims representative. Another had their DOT authority canceled, effectively being put out of business, over a dispute over a camera delivery.

On the federal side, FMCSA was focused elsewhere. The agency was working on AEB rulemaking. Each year, roughly twice as many trucking companies enter the industry as regulators can audit. That was the documented condition in 2021 and 2022 when Iron Insurance was at peak enrollment. FMCSA knew its new-entrant audit completion rate had dropped to 44-45%. The agency had published data showing new entrant crash rates nearly tripled, rising from 1.3% in the 2018 cohort to 3.5% by 2021. What it lacked was a mechanism to connect that deteriorating new-entrant safety profile to the insurance programs actively underwriting those same carriers.

No federal regulator reviewed the Iron Insurance book of business. No federal regulator cross-referenced the new-entrant crash rate data against the ICSA enrollment numbers. No federal regulator asked what happened to premium collection when the freight market turned. The $130 million loss was documented in public SEC filings through four consecutive quarters before the program was shut down. Washington never looked.

What THE TEA Data Shows

The insurance data, built from FMCSA’s own public licensing and insurance filing records, tells a story that regulators weren’t equipped to read in real time.

Using the FMCSA SODA insurance history endpoint covering 7.37 million records going back to 1986, we can trace the carriers that passed through Iron Insurance’s book, when they were written, what their safety profiles looked like at the time of coverage, what their crash and violation records showed during the policy period, and which ones are still operating today.

The carrier population that moved through Iron Insurance is not a clean one. It skews toward:

• New authorities. Carriers with authority under two years at the time of policy writing
• Thin inspection histories. Carriers written before any meaningful FMCSA audit had occurred
• Carriers that entered the market in 2021 and exited in 2023 as the freight recession hit
• Entities that cycled through multiple insurers after losing Iron coverage, many ending up in RRG books or residual market programs

Some of them are still on the road.

The telematics data that was supposed to manage this risk existed. ICSA had the ELD feeds, the camera data, and the inspection records. The problem was that the data was never being used to actually gate coverage decisions in real time. It was a marketing premise, not an operating discipline. Producers wrote volume. ICSA couldn’t keep up with verification. The book was filled with carriers who had cameras in their trucks and unpaid premiums on their accounts.

The parallel with our RRG instability data is direct. Several of the Risk Retention Groups that THE TEA currently flags as COLLAPSE RISK or ELEVATED CONCERN show the same pattern Iron Insurance displayed in 2022, adding high-risk carriers rapidly, recording zero cancellations, with portfolio trajectory scores in freefall. The carriers cycling out of those RRGs are the same population that was cycling through Iron Insurance’s exit pipeline two years ago.

The Nirvana Comparison

The contrast with Nirvana Insurance is instructive and intentional. Nirvana sold its first policy in 2022, the same year Iron Insurance was at peak volume. Both were telematics-for-coverage plays targeting small carriers in a market dominated by legacy underwriters who weren’t using available safety data.

The difference was discipline. Nirvana is now valued at $830 million following a Series C and recently completed a $100 million Series D. Iron Insurance lost $130 million and closed. Same thesis. Same market. Completely different execution.

The lesson is not that telematics-based trucking insurance doesn’t work. The lesson is that telematics is a tool, not a strategy. If you use it to write volume without integrating the data into ongoing underwriting and portfolio management decisions, you haven’t built a smarter insurance program. You’ve built a faster way to make bad decisions at scale.

Iron Insurance ran cameras in trucks. Nobody was watching the footage until the crash happened.

What Needs to Change

The Iron Insurance collapse was not a black swan. The warning signs were in the Biden FMCSA’s own data, in the carrier registration surge numbers, in the new-entrant crash rate data, in the premium collection failures that showed up in Knight-Swift’s Q1 2023 SEC filing. A regulator with the right tools and the right data access could have seen it coming. I found it. 

The $750,000 insurance minimum for motor carriers hasn’t changed in more than 40 years. It would need to be approximately $2.3 million today to carry the same real value. That gap between required minimums and actual crash costs is part of what made the Iron Insurance book viable to write at the prices it was writing. Carriers who couldn’t get coverage at adequate premiums were finding a price point that didn’t reflect their true risk, and the difference was being absorbed by a captive reinsurer that had been eating losses for four straight quarters before shutting down.

FMCSA needs a mechanism to monitor insurance program-level risk concentration in real time. Not just individual carrier safety ratings, but aggregate portfolio quality for programs writing large books of small carriers. If a program’s book is generating crash rates or OOS rates that diverge significantly from the voluntary market baseline, that should trigger oversight. Right now, nothing does.

The Biden administration had four years and didn’t build it. The data to do it was public the entire time.

I’ve built a version of it, Tea Technologies, for the insurance industry. The question is whether the regulator will ever build one for itself.

A Note on the Distribution Chain

The retail production layer between Knight-Swift/Mohave and the end-carrier market involved program intermediaries consistent with the structure described here, entities responsible for driving enrollment volume to the ICSA program and writing policies at prices that did not anticipate the market turn. The specific identities of those intermediaries and the full chain of production accountability remain subjects of ongoing reporting.

SOURCE DOCUMENTATION: All Primary Sources

I. SEC / EDGAR FILINGS. Knight-Swift Transportation Holdings (CIK: 0001492691)

All Knight-Swift SEC filings are publicly available through EDGAR:

Master EDGAR Filing Index (all KNX filings): https://www.sec.gov/cgi-bin/browse-edgar?action=getcompany&CIK=0001492691&type=10-K&dateb=&owner=include&count=40

Q1 2023. First documented $22.8M Iron Insurance loss (April 20, 2023):

KEY QUOTE: “Overall, our Iron Insurance line of business produced a $22.8 million operating loss (or $0.11 per diluted share) during the first quarter of 2023, primarily due to increased frequency and unfavorable claim development during the quarter as well as insurance premium collection issues associated with small carriers who are struggling given the soft freight market conditions… we believe the extreme pressure small carriers are under is producing undesirable risk characteristics.”

8-K Exhibit 99.1 (Earnings Press Release): https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1492691/000149269123000042/exhibit99103312023.htm

8-K Exhibit 99.2 (Investor Presentation. Strategic Pivot slide): https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/0001492691/000149269123000042/exhibit99203312023.htm

Q3 2023. $15.9M quarterly loss, ‘making progress’ statement (October 19, 2023):

KEY QUOTE: “Our third-party insurance business operating loss for the current quarter increased slightly to $15.9 million (or $0.08 per diluted share) from a $15.0 million operating loss in the second quarter of 2023… the $22.0 million reduction in operating income in our Iron Truck insurance program.”

8-K Exhibit 99.1 (Q3 2023 Earnings): https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1492691/000149269123000084/exhibit99109302023.htm

FY2022 Investor Presentation. Iron Insurance at peak revenue (Q3 2022):

Shows 96.6% revenue increase and $18.5M operating income, the program’s high-water mark before collapse.

8-K Exhibit 99.2 (Q3 2022 Presentation): https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/0001492691/000149269122000058/exhibit99209302022.htm

FY2021 Investor Presentation. Iron Insurance launch, $96M revenue projection:

8-K Exhibit (Q2 2021 Presentation): https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/0001492691/000149269121000058/exhibit99206302021.htm

FY2023 10-K Annual Report. Full year collapse documented:

10-K Annual Report (December 31, 2023): https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/0001492691/000149269124000015/knx-20231231.htm

II. Arizona Regulatory Filings. Mohave Transportation Insurance Company

NAIC CoCode: 14349 | Arizona-domiciled captive insurer | Certificate of authority issued June 13, 2006

Consent Order Case 23A-065-INS (October 19, 2023):

Order Type: Consent Order | Enforcement Type: Penalty | Penalty: $1,000 | Penalty Paid: $1,000

Violation: Failure to return claimant communications on a vehicle claim filed November 2022.

DIFI Enforcement Filing Page: https://difi.az.gov/enforcement/23a-065-ins

Consent Order PDF (direct): https://difi.az.gov/sites/default/files/230065.pdf

III. Federal Court Litigation Involving Mohave Transportation Insurance

Moreland v. Mohave Transportation Insurance Company et al (N.D. Georgia, 2023): https://dockets.justia.com/docket/georgia/gandce/1:2023cv04858/321833

Booth v. Mohave Transportation Insurance Co et al (E.D. Louisiana): https://www.govinfo.gov/app/details/USCOURTS-laed-2_13-cv-06746Nebraska District Court case (2018): https://www.govinfo.gov/app/details/USCOURTS-ned-7_18-cv-05008

IV. FMCSA Data. New Entrant Statistics and Regulatory Record

FMCSA Registration Statistics (carrier authority trends by year): https://ai.fmcsa.dot.gov/RegistrationStatistics

FMCSA Trends in New Motor Carrier Registration Data: https://www.fmcsa.dot.gov/safety/data-and-statistics/trends-new-motor-carrier-registration-data

FMCSA New Entrant Safety Assurance Program: https://www.fmcsa.dot.gov/safety/new-entrant-safety-assurance-processFMCSA Open Data Program (insurance filing datasets): https://www.fmcsa.dot.gov/registration/fmcsa-data-dissemination-program

V. Corporate Press Releases

Knight-Swift Iron Truck Services Launch (September 14, 2021):

KEY QUOTE: “Iron Insurance, which provides auto, general, and cargo liability insurance, as well as physical damage insurance options at affordable rates. All policies are supported by risk management services that promote safe operational practices for policyholders.”BusinessWire Press Release: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20210914005720/en/Knight-Swift-Transportation-Creates-Iron-Truck-Services-Bringing-Affordable-Solutions-Nationwide-to-Truckload-Carriers-of-All-Size

VI. Trade Press Coverage

Trucking Dive. Knight-Swift shutting down third-party insurance (January 25, 2024): https://www.truckingdive.com/news/knight-swift-shuttering-third-party-insurance-business/705556/

FreightWaves. Insurance woes weigh down Knight-Swift Q4 earnings (January 25, 2024): https://www.freightwaves.com/news/insurance-woes-weigh-down-knight-swift-earnings

FreightWaves. Knight-Swift introduces Iron Truck Services (September 2021): https://www.freightwaves.com/news/knight-swift-introduces-services-division-for-smaller-carriers

FreightWaves. Knight-Swift reels in 2023 outlook after poor Q2 (July 2023): https://www.freightwaves.com/news/knight-swift-reels-in-2023-outlook-after-poor-q2

The Insurer / Program Manager. Mohave stops underwriting April 1 (March 2024): https://www.theinsurer.com/program-manager/news/chubb-supported-trucking-program-mohave-to-stop-underwriting-at-1-april/

Trucking Dive. Q1 2023 losses first reported (April 21, 2023): https://www.truckingdive.com/news/knight-swift-q1-2023-earnings/648277/

Trucking Dive. Fleets pressured by higher insurance costs (September 2023): https://www.truckingdive.com/news/carriers-deal-with-higher-insurance-and-claims-costs-2023/692041/

TheTrucker. Surging ahead, new trucking companies shattering records (February 2022): https://www.thetrucker.com/trucking-news/truckload-authority/trends-in-trucking/surging-ahead-number-of-new-trucking-companies-shattering-records

FreightWaves. New carrier authorities surging in surprising places: https://www.freightwaves.com/news/new-carrier-authorities-are-surging-in-surprising-places

VII. ICSA / Mohave Program Documentation

Independent Carrier Safety Association. Official Site: https://www.safecarriers.org

The Insurance Store. ICSA/Mohave program description: https://www.tisteam.com/icsa/

The Insurance Store. Who is ICSA?: https://www.tisteam.com/who-is-icsa/

Motive Marketplace. ICSA ELD data sharing integration: https://marketplace.gomotive.com/app/independent-carrier-safety-association-icsaICSA Team / Karen Rasmussen background: https://www.safecarriers.org/our-team/

VIII. Consumer Complaint Record

Mohave Transportation Insurance Company. BBB Complaints: https://www.bbb.org/us/az/phoenix/profile/insurance-agency/mohave-transportation-insurance-company-1126-1000110982/complaints

IX. Nirvana Insurance. Comparative Context

TechCrunch. Nirvana raises $80M at $830M valuation (March 2025): https://techcrunch.com/2025/03/10/nirvana-keeps-on-truckin-with-80m-at-a-830m-valuation-for-its-ai-powered-insurance/

TechCrunch. Nirvana raises $57M Series B (October 2023): https://techcrunch.com/2023/10/17/nirvana-nabs-57m-to-make-ai-inroads-into-commercial-trucking-insurance/Nirvana About page (first policy sold 2022): https://www.nirvanatech.com/about

The post The Iron Insurance Disaster appeared first on FreightWaves.

The controversial project led by Delfin Midstream of Houston, which includes several foreign investors, on Wednesday was granted a license for the project by the Maritime Administration.

The project also received export approval from the Department of Energy for a total of three planned vessels.

The Trump administration approved the project in March 2025 under the Unleashing American Energy executive order, opponents claim, without adequate environmental review or a single public hearing. 

The U.S. Department of Transportation in a release stated that the license will “secure America’s energy dominance and deliver affordable energy to families,” although critics question how an export program would benefit prices for domestic consumers.

Delfin has already secured purchase agreements with several foreign buyers; ocean carrier MOL of Japan is also connected to the project.

Approval for the floating port project – the largest in the world – was denied under the Biden administration in April 2024. The Trump administration in January shifted licensing authority for deepwater projects from the Coast Guard to Marad. 

Delifn was one of two deepwater port licenses issued by Marad. The other is Texas GulfLink, a crude oil export terminal under construction off the Texas coast.

Delfin expects to begin production in 2030, at 4.4 million metric tons per year capacity. The other vessels, to be launched in the next year, will bring capacity to 13.2 million mt/year, with exports of 1.8 billion cubic feet of natural gas per day.

“This is the first offshore LNG export terminal ever licensed in the United States, and getting here took the better part of a decade,” said Marad Administrator Stephen M. Carmel, at a media briefing. “That patience is the price of doing something genuinely new. Every cargo that leaves this port is a commitment the United States is able to keep.”

Trump lifted a Biden ban on LNG exports to non-Free Trade Agreement countries in 2025.

Samsung Heavy Industries of South Korea will construct the platforms, which will be located 40 miles off the coast of Cameron Parish, Louisiana.

Read more articles by Stuart Chirls here.

Related coverage:

Port Houston’s hurricane playbook: Safety first, cargo moving fast 

But…but…shipbuilding! Democrats want China port tax reinstated

Frontload frenzy? New tariffs fueling early trans-Pacific peak season

Containers say ‘hold my disruptions’ as ocean rates surge

The post For 1st time, U.S. approves controversial LNG production ship appeared first on FreightWaves.

Just as van trailer builder Wabash National found itself with another downgrade to its debt, there was the prospect of some relief on the horizon from a process that will put countervailing duties on imports from China and Mexico.  

The downgrade by S&P Global Ratings (NYSE: SPGI) on Wabash (NYSE: WNC) last week did not break new ground.  

In reducing its rating on Wabash to B- from B, S&P Global was matching the recent downgrade by Moody’s. That competing agency last month cut its rating on Wabash to B3, the third reduction by that agency in a year. The Moody’s grade of B3 and the S&P Global Ratings grade of B- are considered equivalent. 

But there might be a changed market ahead for Wabash and other trailer builders based on a recent pair of findings by the Commerce Department on the size of countervailing duties to be applied to van trailer imports from those two countries. The complaint was brought to the Commerce Department by the American Trailer Manufacturers Coalition. It’s a three-company group: Wabash, Great Dane and Stoughton Trailers.

‘Unfairly subsidize’

In a pair of notices posted last week in the Federal Register, the Commerce Department said it had determined that China and Mexico, as the coalition said in its reaction to the decision, “unfairly subsidize their van-type trailer industries.”

The countervailing duties to be applied to China will range from 82.3% to 128.7%, depending on the exporter. But the largest of them will be against a company called CIMC.

The Mexican countervailing duties are also dependent on the exporter but are less than 2%.

In its prepared statement, the coalition said it “applauds Commerce’s decision to impose preliminary duties as the first step towards introducing fairness in the U.S.van-type trailer market and looks forward to Commerce’s antidumping preliminary determination later this summer.”

The coalition estimates that about 40% of the U.S. market for van trailers is supplied by China, Mexico and Canada combined. Its summation of import data is that the U.S. imported about 48,000 van trailers per year between 2015-2017. That number between 2022 and 2024 was an annual average of 80,600 trailers. 

Wabash’s quarterly earnings publishes data on the number of vans it supplied, and it shows a significant downturn in recent years.

The coalition originally filed a complaint against Canadian imports as well. But subassembles from China are sent to Canada for final assembly, and the Commerce Department decision pulled in those finished exports from Canada under the Chinese countervailing duties. With that decision in hand, the coalition withdrew the Canadian portion of its request.

First action taken

The coalition had not filed any previous action on imports before those against the three countries.,”Trailer imports surged in the past few years with severe negative financial consequences for the domestic industry’s financial performance,” a coalition spokesman said about the Commerce Department decision. “Trade action was necessary to stop the continuing harm to the domestic industry.”

The process from this point on, according to trade attorneys knowledgeable about the process, is that the Customs and Border Protection agency will require that importers of both finished and semi-finished vans immediately begin to post a cash deposit at the rates found by Commerce, which are considered preliminary.

Process is ongoing

Commerce’s findings are preliminary and the investigation will continue. The final rate could be more or less. The coalition is expecting the final determination on the Chinese rate to be mid-August with Mexico in mid-December.

The International Trade Commission will be conducting its own investigation to determine whether the domestic van industry has been injured by the imports. That investigation is expected to be completed by mid-October, and is said to be likely to be the prevailing decision for all the countries.

The countervailing duties would be levied on top of section 301 duties that have been in effect since May 2019. That levy is 25%.  

In its report on Wabash, issued just before the Commerce Department findings were released, S&P Global said countervailing duties “may be somewhat beneficial over the next several years.”

“If Wabash’s petition is successful, average price for trailers from international competitors may increase, potentially making its trailers more attractive to freight carriers,” S&P Global said.

Much of the S&P Global report on Wabash repeated similar arguments heard from Moody’s. “Certain freight market indicators show signs of improvement, although the timing for trailer and truck body recovery and the magnitude of a potential rebound remain uncertain,” S&P Global said. “We expect reported free operating cash flow deficits and elevated S&P Global Ratings-adjusted leverage in 2026.”

A stronger freight market brings about its own problems, S&P Global said. Liquidity can “tighten as demand stabilizes,” according to S&P Global.

“Wabash reduced inventory investments and extended payable terms to its vendors in 2025 and into 2026,” the ratings agency said. “As demand rebounds, we expect related working capital spending to increase. Thus, liquidity will weaken somewhat in 2026 and 2027 as near-term demand precedes investment needs to maintain operations, and potentially higher cash interest expense hinders FOCF.”

Victory on chassis

The coalition’s law firm in the case is Wiley Law. The victory–so far–in the case over van trailers was not the only freight-related triumph it can tout in recent weeks.

On its company page, Wiley also said a final determination by the International Trade Commission will impose a series of duties on imports of chassis from three countries: Thailand, Vietnam and Mexico. Those duties in some cases will exceed 185%. 

The original case had been filed in February 2025. A case from 2021 filed against Chinese exporters of chassis to the U.S. also was successful.

More articles by John Kingston

Texas court nixes shipper liability in Home Depot/Werner case

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Amazon scores big win at NLRB over whether it’s a joint employer with DSPs

The post Commerce finding on van imports may give relief to beleaguered Wabash appeared first on FreightWaves.

“We’re preparing all year,” Eric Casey, chief operating officer at Port Houston told FreightWaves. “We do a full hot wash and after-action report after every season and every event, whether it’s Harvey, the derecho or another storm. We determine what worked, what didn’t, and immediately incorporate those lessons into our program.”

The hurricane season starts June 1 and ends November 30. The peak threat for the Texas coast exists from August through September, according to the National Weather Service. 

Port Houston serves as the public port authority for the Houston Ship Channel, home to more than 200 private and eight public terminals. The channel is the nation’s busiest waterway by tonnage and supports an estimated 1.5 million jobs in Texas and 3.37 million jobs nationwide.

As the 2026 Atlantic hurricane season gets underway, the port is refining emergency response plans built from lessons learned during major weather events, including Hurricane Harvey in 2017 and more recent severe storms that impacted the Houston region. 

Preparing for storms long before landfall

Casey said Port Houston begins monitoring tropical systems long before formal hurricane warnings are issued.

“We start way back in the very beginning,” Casey said. “As storms come across the Atlantic and into the Gulf, we’re already coordinating with the Coast Guard, Houston Pilots and industry partners on preparedness measures.”

Preparations often begin five or more days before a potential landfall. Port officials review equipment staging plans, coordinate vessel departures and begin securing cargo yards and terminal assets.

How Port Houston secures cranes, cargo and terminals

At 72 hours before expected impacts, known as Port Condition Whiskey, preparations accelerate. Empty container stacks are reduced and reconfigured to minimize wind risk, while crews begin securing equipment. 

Port Condition Codes are issued by the U.S. Coast Guard Captain of the Port

• Whisky (72 hrs): Begin securing facilities and early protective actions
• X-ray (48 hrs): Finalize securing and restrict operations
• Yankee(24 hrs): Port closed to inbound traffic; operations cease
• Zulu (12 hrs): Port fully secured; no vessel movement

As conditions worsen, operations move through Port Conditions X-Ray, Yankee and Zulu, with cranes secured once sustained winds approach 45 mph.

The decision to close the Houston Ship Channel is coordinated among the U.S. Coast Guard, National Weather Service, Houston Pilots and other stakeholders. When the channel closes, Port Houston works alongside those partners to prepare for reopening as soon as conditions safely allow.

Communication is critical during a crisis

Communication is a major component of the port’s hurricane response strategy. Port Houston uses website updates, text alerts, emails, conference calls and virtual meetings to keep ocean carriers, trucking companies, railroads, terminal operators and other customers informed about operational changes before and after storms.

“Clear, concise, correct communications really matter, especially in times of crisis,” Casey said. “No one does this alone.”

Once a storm passes, recovery efforts begin with safety assessments, followed by inspections of roads, terminals, cranes and cargo-handling equipment. Port officials then coordinate with channel partners to resume vessel movements and cargo operations.

Casey said Port Houston’s ability to return to service quickly reflects years of planning and coordination.

“The port is going to be a relief valve for getting goods into the Houston area that are going to be needed as part of the recovery effort,” Casey said. “The sooner we can get back up and establish normalcy, the sooner people are going to have access to critical goods to help them repair, recover and do what they need to do.”

Related: Extreme hurricane season could trigger ‘carrier revenge’

A year-round focus on preparedness

Port Houston conducts multiple emergency exercises throughout the year, including tabletop drills, communication tests and coordinated exercises with local, state and federal agencies. 

The preparations come even as forecasters at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration predict a below-normal 2026 Atlantic hurricane season, forecasting eight to 14 named storms, including three to six hurricanes and one to three major hurricanes.

NOAA officials have cautioned that it only takes one storm making landfall to cause major disruptions.

For supply chains, the stakes remain high. Hurricanes have historically disrupted ports, highways, rail networks and trucking capacity across the Gulf Coast. FreightWaves previously noted that Hurricane Harvey created one of the largest trucking capacity crunches in recent history and that major storms can trigger widespread transportation disruptions and delays.

While no two storms are alike, Casey said Port Houston’s approach remains consistent.

“We have been preparing since the last season ended, and we will continue to prepare up until we have an event,” Casey said.

The post Port Houston’s hurricane playbook: Safety first, cargo moving fast  appeared first on FreightWaves.

The suspension through November 9 was agreed to by President Donald Trump and Chinese President Xi Jinping at meetings in Beijing, and was a key concession in Trump’s interim trade pact with Xi.

The charges would total approximately $3.2 billion annually for large Chinese-built container and bulk vessels calling U.S. ports.

In a statement, Democrats Mark Kelly of Arizona and Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts urged United States Trade Representative Jamieson Greer to reinstate the fees, to protect domestic shipbuilding interests.

The port charges were implemented in 2025 after an investigation found that China leveraged unfair advantages to build a dominant position in global shipping and shipbuilding.

Kelly has authored legislation aimed at reviving the U.S. maritime industry; the Trump administration later released shipbuilding plans of its own.

The strategy to resurrect the business would require tens of billions of dollars in subsidies over several decades, observers say, and that U.S.-built ships would struggle to compete on a cost basis with shipyards in Asia.

Read more articles by Stuart Chirls here.

Related coverage:

Frontload frenzy? New tariffs fueling early trans-Pacific peak season

Containers say ‘hold my disruptions’ as ocean rates surge

Peak indicator: $2,600 increase on one U.S. shipping service

Box rates soar $1,000 in one week on peak

The post But…but…shipbuilding! Democrats want China port tax reinstated appeared first on FreightWaves.

The Association of American Railroads on Wednesday said volumes for the week ending June 6 totaled 521,804 carloads and intermodal units, an increase of 7.8% from the same week a year ago.

Carloads came to 228,076 units, up 1%, while 293,728 intermodal containers and trailers were better by 13.6% from 2025.

Six of 10 commodities posted gains as grain maintained its runaway lead, up 9.2% for the week, followed by metallic ores and metals, up 9.1%. Motor vehicles and parts were better by 6.1%.

Improving home sales gave forest products a boost, ahead 3.8%.

Coal was seasonally weaker, down 4.2%, followed by chemicals, dropping 1.8%.

Through the first 22 weeks of 2026, cumulative volume is 3.3% ahead y/y at 4,984,985 carloads. A total 6,113,730 intermodal units is a gain of 2.3%. Combined traffic reached 11,098,715 carloads and intermodal units, ahead 2.7% from 2025.

North American rail volume for the week on 9 U.S., Canadian and Mexican railroads totaled 333,030 carloads, up 1.7%, and 380,156 intermodal units, up 11% y/y. Combined traffic of 713,186 carloads and intermodal units, improved by 6.4%. North American volume for the first 22 weeks of 2026 was 15,281,170 carloads and intermodal units, up 2.4% y/y.

Subscribe to FreightWaves’ Rail e-newsletter and get the latest insights on rail freight right in your inbox.

Read more articles by Stuart Chirls here.

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The post Green over red for surging U.S. railfreight appeared first on FreightWaves.

SONAR’s new Accepted SONAR Truckload Volume Index (ASTVI) fills that gap. The dataset family isolates accepted truckload demand by stripping out rejection activity, giving a cleaner read on what’s actually flowing through the market versus what was simply offered.

The index is available at the national, regional, and market levels and updates daily. It covers total accepted volume, van, and reefer — with week-over-week, month-over-month, and year-over-year change metrics for each.

The distinction between tendered and accepted freight is especially meaningful in soft market conditions, when routing guide compliance deteriorates and the spread between offered and accepted loads widens. ASTVI gives brokers, carriers, shippers, and analysts a direct view of that spread without having to manually back into it from multiple indices.

ASTVI is available now to SONAR subscribers, access a pre-made dashboard here. Full ticker documentation is available in SONAR’s Knolwdege Center.

The post SONAR Launches Accepted Truckload Volume Index to Close the Gap Between Tendered and Moving Freight appeared first on FreightWaves.

According to the Coconino County Sheriff’s Office, investigators received a report on May 29 that multiple individuals were removing merchandise from a stopped BNSF Railway train and loading it into a van and a box truck parked near the tracks. Authorities later stopped the van and arrested Jaime Beltran-Bojorquez, 32, and Gerardo Mares Vazquez, 28. Investigators said a second vehicle fled from deputies before crashing near Williams, Arizona. Two unidentified suspects fled on foot and remain at large. Law enforcement officials recovered merchandise valued at more than $500,000 from the vehicles. According to Detective Curtis Peery of the Coconino County Sheriff’s Office, the value is based on the retail value of the recovered products. While the arrests generated local headlines, investigators say the larger issue is the frequency of train burglaries occurring throughout Northern Arizona. “We probably have somewhere between 8 to 12 events a month,” Peery previously told local media.

Organized crews operating in the region

In comments provided to FreightWaves, Peery said investigators are encountering both independent theft crews and organized criminal networks operating in the region. “For the crews we have encountered both independent and organized network crews,” Peery said. According to Peery, electronics and clothing remain among the most frequently targeted commodities because they can be resold quickly through illicit markets. “The commodity that is targeted the most is electronics and clothing. Really anything that can be sold on the black market easily,” Peery said. Investigators believe much of the stolen merchandise ultimately leaves Arizona. “Anything that is taken is eventually taken back to California where it is sold on black market online or swap meets,” Peery said. The comments provide additional insight into the organized nature of cargo theft operations that have increasingly targeted freight moving through the Southwest. Northern Arizona has experienced a series of train burglary investigations in recent years involving footwear, electronics, consumer goods and other high-value merchandise moving through the BNSF network.

Remote locations create enforcement challenges

Peery said cargo theft investigations present unique challenges because many incidents occur in remote areas where law enforcement resources are limited and response times can be extended. “Because these crimes are happening in such remote areas it takes so much more effort and time from departments to combat it,” Peery said. He added that coordination among agencies has proven critical. “When we as departments work together that is where we have been the most effective and successful at combating these criminal organizations,” Peery said. Law enforcement agencies are working to establish a formal Northern Arizona railway task force focused on cargo theft investigations. Peery said the effort includes collaboration with the Southwest Transportation Security Council’s Arizona chapter to improve awareness and coordination around cargo theft issues.

Rail industry calls for broader action

BNSF Railway declined to comment on the specifics of the investigation. In a statement provided to FreightWaves, BNSF said it maintains robust security protocols and is working with federal, state, local and tribal law enforcement agencies to address cargo theft. “BNSF has robust security protocols, and our police department is focused on preventing these incidents on our network,” spokesperson Kendall Sloan said in a statement. The railroad also called for stronger support throughout the criminal justice system. “It’s essential that the entire criminal justice system, including policymakers, district attorneys and judges, focus on this crime trend and help to ensure these criminals are held responsible and prosecuted,” Sloan said. Authorities have not publicly identified the specific commodity involved in the May 29 burglary and have not indicated whether the two arrested suspects are connected to other train burglary investigations. The investigation remains ongoing.

Click here for more articles on cargo theft and freight fraud by Phillip Brink.

Eight indicted in alleged carrier impersonation scheme; prosecutors allege $4.49 million in cargo losses – FreightWaves

Why the freight industry needs Certified Fraud Compliance Officers – FreightWaves

Why the safest freight brokerages are usually the most boring – FreightWaves

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Amazon announced on Wednesday the expansion of its less-than-truckload service beyond its current inbound-only model to all destinations, including third-party warehouses, distribution centers and retail stores, adding another piece to a new initiative offering end-to-end logistics services to all businesses.

Exactly how the network will operate remains unclear as Amazon has a limited number of cross-dock terminals for moving heavy freight. Industry analysts said the scale of Amazon’s network will initially be limited, but that Amazon likely will continue growing its terminal and delivery footprint to serve more customers.

The news about externalizing Amazon’s partial-load service for transporting Amazon and marketplace sellers’ inventory follows last month’s opening of freight, distribution, fulfillment, and parcel shipping to non-Amazon sellers, under the umbrella of the new Amazon Supply Chain Services.

Amazon (NASDAQ: AMZN) launched an LTL offering in April 2025 for shippers that don’t require a full trailer, but it was only available for inbound delivery to Amazon facilities, where goods were stored after breaking apart large pallets and later individually shipped through the company’s regular package delivery network. Amazon has offered other limited LTL capacity since 2019.

The retail giant says it is now offering a more traditional hub-and-spoke LTL network in which palletized shipments are picked up, transferred at a nearby terminal and delivered to a final destination still on a pallet at a lower cost than available from legacy LTL carriers. It touts a fleet of 80,000 trailers and 24,000 intermodal containers.

Some analysts previously said that Amazon’s full-scale entry into the LTL business could significantly disrupt business for incumbent trucking companies, such as FedEx Freight, Old Dominion, Saia and Estes. How Amazon’s LTL network is configured is unclear.

But Satish Jindel, the president of ShipMatrix and an experienced industry consultant, said Amazon appears to be operating more like a freight broker, not an asset-based LTL carrier. That means their competition would be with companies like C.H. Robinson and Echo Global Logistics.

“They are trying to offer a brokerage service. They don’t have drivers. They don’t have trucks. They don’t have terminals to sort and load and deliver and pickup,” Jindel told FreightWaves. “They are looking to leverage their relationship as a large LTL inbound customer to offer lower rates for pickup and delivery of shipments that don’t touch an Amazon facility.”

The service appears more skewed to economy lanes with three-to-four-day delivery windows, heavily relying on intermodal for middle-mile transport and with a smaller coverage footprint, said TD Cowen analyst Jason Seidl, in a research note. Amazon accepts inbound freight at about 115 facilities, but many of these are simply fulfillment centers without a full truck-to-truck transfer design. As of the first quarter of 2025, Amazon had about 74 cross-dock facilities, he said.

“We continue to believe Amazon’s expansions could take share from LTLs on the margins without driving en-masse share exodus. Amazon’s emphasis on utilizing the intermodal container pool for the service suggests the offering will primarily compete with the economy sub-segment of the LTL market, which is predominantly the turf of ArcBest, TFII and FedEx Freight.,” Seidl wrote.

Amazon said the expansion of LTL service is a response to market demand and customer feedback for a broader rollout. 

“The feedback from Amazon selling partners using our LTL service was clear: the technology, visibility, and reliability were exactly what they needed — and they wanted to use it more broadly,” said Jim Ruiz, director of Amazon Freight, said in a news release. “Now Amazon LTL can move your freight wherever it needs to go, servicing destinations nationwide for businesses of all sizes.”

Businesses can ship one to six pallets, or between 150 to 15,000 pounds, into their warehouses, between their own facilities or to their retail partners and distributors, according to Amazon. 

Features of the new service include ;next-day live pickup for orders placed by 5 p.m., same-day pickup using a drop-trailer method and standing daily pickups for high-volume shippers. The drop-trailer service involves a unified pool of trailers for LTL and truckload shipments that are dropped at customer facilities instead of being unloaded upon arrival. 

LTL shippers receive real-time GPS tracking, automated appointment scheduling at receiving facilities, electronic proof-of-delivery and a sensor-equipped fleet for cargo security.

“While LTL likely represents only a small component of Amazon’s overall logistics footprint, we reiterate that Amazon has repeatedly demonstrated an ability to gain traction in transportation markets through a flexible and iterative operating model. As a result, we believe the company may be able to capture meaningful market share even if they are unable to offer best-in class service levels immediately,” said Morgan Stanley equity analyst Ravi Shanker in a client note.

Amazon Freight, part of Amazon Supply Chain Services, spans full truckload, less-than-truckload, and rail services.

Speculation about an expanded Amazon LTL offering has been brewing after Morgan Stanley reported in a research note early this year that Amazon was approaching shippers to gauge their interest in the service. 

Click here for more FreightWaves/American Shipper stories by Eric Kulisch.

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The post Amazon opens full-scale, less-than-truckload shipping to all businesses  appeared first on FreightWaves.

Mark Wallin, President and General Manager of Phillips Connect, highlighted how the dry van trailer is evolving from a basic asset into a highly intelligent, data-rich node on the supply chain. 

Beyond basic GPS tracking, fleets are rapidly adopting advanced sensors to monitor tire pressure, brake health and door-open events to combat cargo theft and improve roadside safety. 

Wallin noted that as the industry prepares for autonomous trucking, smart trailer capabilities –including cameras paired with AI to monitor volumetric cube utilization– will shift from a premium differentiator to a standard operational requirement.

Fuel markets

FreightWaves reporter John Kingston broke down the latest weekly Department of Energy diesel benchmark, which dropped 14 cents to land at $5.21 per gallon. 

This decline marks the third-lowest average price since the onset of the Iran war, mirroring broader downward pricing trends on CME ultra-low sulfur diesel contracts. 

Kingston noted that while gasoline often sees demand destruction from retail consumers, diesel demand remains rigid as commercial carriers must maintain their schedules to deliver essential goods regardless of price shifts.

RXO reports rising spot demand as contract routing guides fail

Corey Klujsza, vice president of pricing at RXO, joined the show’s “Capacity Now” segment to discuss how the accelerating freight market is placing unprecedented stress on traditional contract networks. 

As primary carriers increasingly reject contracted loads, shippers are seeing routing guide compliance deteriorate and are turning to spot providers for emergency coverage. 

Corey emphasized that spot brokerage operations are acting as a critical “911” service to keep shipper freight moving as tender rejections climb.

Keep up with the latest news on FreightWaves Today

FreightWaves Today livestreams weekdays at noon ET at http://tv.freightwaves.com/.

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Rates hikes and assorted surcharges by carriers that took effect June 1 sent Asia-U.S. West Coast prices up by 51% in the latest week, according to the Freightos Baltic Index, to $4,836 per forty foot equivalent unit (FEU). Asia-U.S. East Coast prices rose 25% to $6,336 per FEU.

“These spikes are the sharpest one-week increases since sudden tariff changes spurred a June demand surge last year,” said Judah Levine, research chief for Freightos (NASDAQ: CRGO), in an update, though rates climbed more than $2,000 per FEU at that time.

“Trans-Pacific ocean peak season is well underway, with some observers pointing to frontloading ahead of the approaching tariff deadline as one driver of the early start,” Levine said. “And though the [Strait of] Hormuz closure hadn’t caused broad operational changes beyond the Gulf states in the first three months of the war, the rising price of oil may be another factor to the early peak season surge.” 

The United States Trade Representative announced new tariffs on 60 countries it said haven’t done enough to combat imports produced by forced labor. Separate Section 301 probes could see new tariffs on Brazil and 16 other trading partners, developments that Deborah Elms, head of trade policy at the Hinrich Foundation in Singapore, called “astonishing”.

“The tariff wall around the U.S. keeps rising,” Elms said. “This may seem like old news but the net effect will be to accelerate global supply chain shifts.”

A hearing is scheduled for July 7.

Contracted shippers could be pulling shipments forward ahead of an 80% jump in fuel surcharges starting in July when the quarterly Bunker Adjustment Factor is updated. “And indications that Asian manufacturers are set to increase prices due to higher input costs may also be driving some of the observed early demand bump,” he said.

The National Retail Federation recently revised its estimates, said Levine, moving the expected peak season to June from July a month ago. The NRF predicts June import volumes 5% higher than in May, dropping to 3% in July and continuing to cool through September.

In 2025 prices weakened by mid-June as shippers waited out unsettled demand. “Indications are that additional rate increases set for next week could push prices up further this time,” Levine said. “But NRF projections that demand will peak in June, make additional rate increases in July less likely.”

While Israel’s expanded attacks in Lebanon spread the Iran conflict from the Arabian Gulf to the Mediterranean, its brief exchange of military strikes with Iran did little to moderate upward pressure on rates due to higher fuel costs across the global supply chain.

Likewise, Iran’s threat to mobilize Houthi militia in Yemen to close the Bab el-Mandeb Strait between the southern Red Sea and Gulf of Aden “would not change much for freight if implemented, as the vast majority of container traffic continues to divert away from the Red Sea,” said Levine. “The added tension may push back the timeline for a [Strait of] Hormuz reopening, though the White House continues to assert that negotiations are making progress.”

The Houthi said this week that they will again block Israel-linked shipping from the Red Sea.

Read more articles by Stuart Chirls here.

Related coverage:

Containers say ‘hold my disruptions’ as ocean rates surge

Peak indicator: $2,600 increase on one U.S. shipping service

Box rates soar $1,000 in one week on peak

Swearing-in of commissioner returns U.S. maritime regulator to full strength

The post Frontload frenzy? New tariffs fueling early trans-Pacific peak season appeared first on FreightWaves.

Scheduled for June 15–22, 2026, the hackathon challenges developers, designers and industry newcomers to spend seven days building a minimum viable product focused on improving the daily lives, wellness and retention of professional truck drivers.

Solving an underserved challenge

With most modern freight technology designed to benefit fleet managers, dispatchers and brokers, the nation’s 3.5 million professional truck drivers remain largely underserved.

DASH aims to steer development hours toward the labor supporting the $800 billion annual U.S. trucking industry.

Investment opportunities

To help builders develop high-quality applications, all registered participants will receive free access to the SONAR freight data API for the duration of the hackathon. This API grants participants access to the same market data used by major shippers, carriers and brokers across the country.

The competition is free to enter, open to global participants and ensures that developers retain 100% of their intellectual property. 

Completed projects will be evaluated by a judging panel of freight operators, FreightWaves executives and venture capital investors, giving finalists direct visibility to leaders who can help advise on or scale their ideas.

Get registered

Are you ready to build software that supports the backbone of American freight? Registration is free and open to anyone, anywhere. Sign up today to secure your free SONAR API access and prepare to make a difference for truck drivers.

[Register for the DASH hackathon here]

The post Calling devs: SONAR launches Driver App Shortage Hackathon appeared first on FreightWaves.

To understand how the industry is responding, FreightWaves and Trimble surveyed carriers, brokers, shippers, and owner-operators, and the results reveal where organizations are adopting AI today, the challenges slowing implementation, and what leaders expect next.

Download this report to learn:

• How freight companies are evaluating AI agents and automation tools
• Where organizations are currently investing in AI technologies
• The biggest barriers to adoption across operations and leadership teams
• Industry perspectives on trust, autonomy, and human oversight
• What the next phase of AI adoption could mean for carriers, brokers, and shippers

Get the data and insights shaping the future of AI in freight.

The post White Paper: AI Agent Readiness and Adoption in Freight appeared first on FreightWaves.

The four-year FedEx (NYSE: FDX) agreement, which takes effect on June 29 and becomes eligible for updating in December 2030, addresses multiple areas of employment, including compensation, retirement, scheduling, work rules, and job protections.

“Our focus now turns toward implementation and enforcement of the agreement,” said Capt. Jose Nieves, chairman of ALPA’s FedEx Master Executive Council. “We will remain actively involved throughout this process and continue representing and advocating for FedEx pilots.”

The FedEx airline has slightly less than 5,000 pilots, of which 98.5% participated in the vote. Union and management negotiators reached a tentative agreement on April 16. 

Pilots will receive a 40% increase in their hourly pay and other benefits, along with back pay (up to $150,000 for captains and $102,500 for first officers) to account for delayed raises during negotiations, according to a copy of the tentative agreement posted on a union website. Starting in 2028, they will receive 3% annual raises.

The relatively high disapproval level for the contract reflects the internal divide within the union membership over the negotiating strategy. In the summer of 2023, leaders on the FedEx union board advanced a tentative agreement to members that would have raised pay by 30% over five years, but they rejected it by a 57% to 43% margin. Opponents said leadership was too willing to compromise with management, resulting in a power struggle and replacement of the Master Executive Council officers. 

The pilots’ union long argued that FedEx’s improved financial performance demonstrates it can afford a better compensation package. 

During the fiscal-year third quarter, ended Feb. 28, FedEx revenue increased 8% to $520 billion and adjusted earnings per share jumped 16%, easily beating analysts’ expectations on strong pricing, volumes and cost reductions. FedEx raised its full-year guidance at the time and its three-year strategy calls for 14% annual profit growth by 2029. 

The National Mediation Board worked for years to bring the sides together. In 2024, ALPA asked the NMB to declare an impasse and release the parties from mediation, an initial step towards being able to strike under federal labor law. 

Click here for more FreightWaves/American Shipper stories by Eric Kulisch.

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Diesel prices are continuing on a mostly downward trend, with the benchmark price used for most fuel surcharges falling to one of its lowest levels since military action against Iran commenced at the beginning of March.

The Department of Energy/Energy Information Administration average weekly retail diesel price was published Tuesday, effective Monday, at $5.21/gallon. It is the lowest price since the first two prices that were published just after the start of hostilities, $4.859/g on March 9 and $5.071/g a week later.

It’s the fifth straight week the price has fallen. During that time, the declines total 43 cts/g.  

There is a growing disconnect between the DOE/EIA price and the daily AAA average retail diesel price. That number was posted Tuesday at $5.317/g.

The declines come as futures price continue to fall, for the most part, but where the voices who talk about “tank bottoms”–a withdrawal of global inventories so massive that it gets stocks down to the minimum level needed for the petroleum distribution system to operate–seem to be increasing against that backdrop of falling prices. 

That view of a disconnect was summed up in a post on X by John Arnold, a legendary trader and a thought leader on trading issues. 

The most recent EIA report on U.S. stocks, released Wednesday for the week ending May 29, showed total inventories of 1.573 billion barrels, the lowest in more than two years and the tenth straight week they had declined. Given their weekly publication, and the U.S. position as the world’s largest consumer, the data is closely watched as a sign of potential global trends.

Ultra low sulfur diesel on the CME commodity exchange posted a recent peak settlement of $3.8481/g on June 3. Its settlement Monday was $3.5999/g, and the market was trending lower Tuesday morning. 

Consistent Currie

One of the loudest voices saying that the commodity markets are not adequately pricing in the movement toward “tank bottoms” is Jeffrey Currie. He is the former head of commodity research at Goldman Sachs who is now on his own. And his message has been consistent for several weeks: what matters are the molecules, not paper markets that increasingly are bearish.

In a recent online interview, Currie said paper markets are “entirely disconnected from the physical markets.” Global crude benchmark Brent is now below $90/barrel. But crude delivered in some parts of the world is north of $150/b and product prices like jet or diesel are more than $200/b.

“The supply shock is almost equal to the demand shock during COVID, and we know what that did to global supply chains,” Currie said. “So I think if you’re at $100/b (in the futures market), it’s mispriced what is coming in the physical market.”

Why not buy forward barrels?

But if oil is mispriced, why aren’t traders buying barrels to be delivered several months from now, when the price will presumably be higher? They are not doing that, and the proof of that is in the forward curve. 

For example, Brent on CME settled Monday at $94.25 for July delivery. But for January delivery, six months out, Brent settled at $83.91/b.

That structure is called backwardation, with the front month the highest number in the price series. Backwardation develops during periods of tight inventories, as a market that is in perfect balance would see prices rise along the calendar, a structure known as contango.

That backwardation is one reason why companies are reluctant to buy the cheaper crude for later day, according to energy economist Philip Verleger. 

In a recent commentary Verleger said it would be expected that some companies that sell oil to consumers would want to accumulate inventories now at lower prices for future delivery. 

“These companies would probably want to hedge and, in some cases, would be required to do so by their banks,” Verleger said. “Unfortunately, hedging today locks in a large loss. For example, (a company) who bought diesel at the end of May and sought to sell forward to November would immediately incur a $9-per-barrel loss due to market backwardation. The loss this transaction would have incurred a year ago would have been perhaps $1 per barrel.”

As Verleger noted, “Few firms can afford to accept such losses on significant product volumes.”

Export ban concerns

There also is a market fear, Verleger said, that the U.S. might ban exports of crude and products if the now falling price of oil reverses itself. Should that happen, he said, “such an action would likely depress prices in the United States, possibly violently. Oil in tanks would suddenly be worth much less.”

Given that, according to Verleger, “the risk boosts the incentive to hold no oil. Every US firm in the oil business has every reason to minimize its inventory holdings today to protect against the uncertainties created by President Trump.”

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The post Retail diesel continues to fall while some voices fear what’s ahead appeared first on FreightWaves.

“Serving our vast network of customers requires a supply chain that is safe, reliable and built for the future,” said Jim Farrell, senior vice president of supply chain at PepsiCo. “Gatik is already operating inside our networks and brings the autonomous freight technology, commercial experience and scale we need to strengthen service, add capacity and move products more consistently for our customers.”

The driverless footprint: Three states and 250 retail stops

Gatik’s autonomous trucks currently serve around 250 retail locations for PepsiCo, including Walmart and Dollar General stores. The deliveries move across both highways and surface streets — a technical distinction that matters in the autonomous vehicle space, where many competitors remain limited to interstate corridors.

“Driverless trucks deployed in commercial capacity, driving across highways and surface streets — that’s what we’re doing with PepsiCo,” said Gautam Narang, CEO and co-founder of Gatik, in an interview with FreightWaves. “The fact that they’re adopting this in very complex supply chains is one of the proof points that autonomous trucking is mainstream.”

The partnership began in 2022. Gatik went driver-out with operations in June 2025. The company maintains a99% on time track record. 

No driver, no observer, one remote supervisor

Gatik’s operation stands out with fully driver-out trucks with no safety drivers or observers in the cab.

“To my understanding, in the trucking space we are the only company that can make that claim today — without a driver and without an observer,” Narang said.

The company uses Gatik Remote Supervisors, or GRS, to provide human oversight. These supervisors handle high-level go/no-go decisions but never perform remote driving or teleoperation on public roads. One person oversees multiple trucks at a time.

In the medium-duty space, the Isuzu box trucks offer another operational advantage: they can back directly into a dock. Unlike tractor-trailers, these straight trucks do not require hooking or unhooking a trailer.

The regulatory environment also supports the model. Gatik can operate in 29 states with favorable AV frameworks.

“Regulations are not, I would say, a bottleneck for us at all,” Narang said. “We do expect a national AV framework to be rolled out that will allow for safe and scalable rollout of driverless trucks.”

Because these are medium-duty operations focused on regional distribution center-to-store routes, market penetration can target a higher percentage of outbound volume compared with the more variable point-to-point nature of long-haul over-the-road trucking.

Scaling to tens of thousands of trucks

The manufacturing roadmap points to rapid expansion. Gatik, Isuzu Motors Ltd. and Nvidia are developing a production facility in South Carolina that will begin mass-producing Level 4 autonomous trucks in the second half of 2027.

“The volumes that we’re looking at for this year are in the hundreds of trucks,” Narang said. “Once the Isuzu facility is up and running and we have our vehicles coming off the production line, the volumes that we’re looking at are tens of thousands of trucks.”

The technology platform uses Gatik’s dynamic route orchestration, allowing PepsiCo to add or remove stops and adapt to shifting demand without overhauling existing operations.

“Autonomous trucking has reached commercial scale when it operates inside one of the most demanding supply chains on the planet,” Narang said. “That is what Gatik is doing with PepsiCo.”

Workforce impact: Adding capacity, not replacing people

PepsiCo frames the deployment as capacity expansion rather than workforce reduction. The focus is on high-demand regional networks that are difficult to staff — a persistent challenge facing carriers nationwide as driver wages rise and demand for safe, qualified drivers grows.

The approach aims to give frontline teams greater consistency and reliability while reducing variability across transportation networks. For an operation of PepsiCo’s scale, even marginal improvements in delivery consistency can translate to meaningful gains in customer service and shelf availability.

The partnership signals a shift for enterprise shippers evaluating autonomous freight — moving from cautious experimentation to scaling and operational integration.

The post PepsiCo and Gatik launch commercial driverless trucking deployment appeared first on FreightWaves.

Through the partnership, travelers can securely store luggage at participating DHL (XETRA: DHL) retail and partner locations across the U.S. About 30 locations are initially participating in the program and the number is expected to expand to around 100 locations nationwide as the rollout continues.

The new service offers travelers greater freedom and flexibility during their trips. Travelers can store their bags at a nearby DHL location before check-in, after check-out, during layovers, or while attending events. In addition, travelers have the option to ship luggage, souvenirs, or purchases directly to their home or future destination using DHL’s international shipping service.

The deal enables DHL Express to leverage existing infrastructure to marginally increase revenue.

“Travelers today are looking for greater convenience and flexibility, and this partnership delivers exactly that,” said Greg Hewitt, CEO, DHL Express U.S. in a news release. “By combining DHL’s global shipping and domestic retail network with Stasher’s storage and digital platform, we’re creating a seamless solution that allows customers to move freely without being weighed down by their luggage.”

Stasher connects travelers with thousands of verified hotels, shops and smart lockers to store their bags in more than 1,100 cities. Customers book and pay online for short-term luggage storage at these locations.

Click here for more FreightWaves/American Shipper stories by Eric Kulisch.

Write to Eric Kulisch at ekulisch@freightwaves.com.

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The enforcement disrupted drug trafficking networks, intercepted counterfeit luxury goods, and seized millions of dollars in illegal imports moving through ports, border crossings and parcel facilities. 

The cases underscore the growing role of supply chains in criminal enterprises, with smugglers using commercial freight, maritime containers, express shipments and parcel networks to move narcotics, counterfeit merchandise and other contraband.

One of the largest investigations occurred in Canada, where the Royal Canadian Mounted Police and Canada Border Services Agency dismantled an organized crime group accused of importing nearly 551-pounds of cocaine concealed inside flatbread shipped from the Dominican Republic. 

CBSA officers discovered 1,178 packages containing approximately 550-pounds of cocaine hidden within a container that arrived in Halifax, Nova Scotia. Three suspects from Quebec and Ontario were arrested and charged with multiple drug trafficking and conspiracy offenses.

Major cargo crime cases in April and May

Drug trafficking remains top threat

In South Texas, U.S. Customs and Border Protection officers intercepted one of the largest narcotics seizures of the period when they discovered 1,644 pounds of alleged methamphetamine concealed inside a commercial trailer carrying lettuce from Mexico through the Pharr International Bridge cargo facility.

The narcotics were valued at approximately $14.7 million. Homeland Security Investigations launched a criminal investigation.

On the West Coast, U.S. Border Patrol agents assigned to the San Clemente Station stopped a vehicle along Interstate 5 and discovered nearly 78 pounds of cocaine hidden beneath a non-factory compartment. The cocaine carried an estimated street value of almost $1.5 million.

Federal officers in Philadelphia also intercepted more than 32,000 prescription pills smuggled from Europe and destined for Georgia. The shipments included tramadol, lorazepam, diazepam, alprazolam and zolpidem, all concealed under false shipping descriptions.

In a separate case, CBP officers seized eight bottles of gamma-butyrolactone (GBL), a precursor chemical used to manufacture GHB, commonly known as the “date rape drug.”

Counterfeit goods continue flooding supply chains

Counterfeit merchandise remained a significant enforcement focus during the period.

CBP officers in Louisville seized 1,622 counterfeit luxury jewelry items arriving from Hong Kong and destined for Chicago. The shipment included bracelets and necklaces bearing counterfeit Cartier, Tiffany and Van Cleef & Arpels trademarks. Had the goods been authentic, they would have carried a retail value exceeding $14.1 million.

At Port Everglades in Florida, officers seized more than 8,500 counterfeit designer perfumes shipped from Singapore. The products falsely represented brands including Gucci, Burberry, Armani and Lancome and would have been worth more than $1 million if genuine.

CBP officers in Norfolk, Virginia, also seized 93 ceramic sinks bearing counterfeit plumbing certification marks, as well as shipments of scooters, vehicle headlamps and folding chairs that violated federal safety regulations.

Illegal vaping products and weapons components intercepted

One of the most significant cargo enforcement actions involved Operation Red Mist, a coordinated effort by CBP, the U.S. Coast Guard and the Food and Drug Administration targeting illegal vaping products entering the United States from China.

Authorities seized more than 18 million unauthorized vaping devices valued at over $175 million. Investigators said many shipments were deliberately mislabeled or improperly declared to avoid detection, taxes and duties. All products lacked FDA authorization for sale in the U.S.

CBP officers in Chicago intercepted 107 shipments containing illegal firearm conversion devices and suppressors. The seizures included 255 machine-gun conversion switches and 14 suppressors, all shipped from China to destinations throughout the U.S. Many of the shipments were falsely declared or lacked required import permits.

Agricultural and biosecurity threats remain concern

Cargo enforcement efforts also targeted agricultural and biosecurity risks.

CBP agriculture specialists in Cincinnati seized 337 hatching eggs arriving from Germany that had been falsely manifested as winter jackets. The eggs lacked required documentation and originated from a country affected by highly pathogenic avian influenza, making them inadmissible under U.S. Department of Agriculture regulations.

The post Authorities seize millions in counterfeits, drugs across North America appeared first on FreightWaves.

Freight fraud is no longer a fringe concern. It’s a systemic risk that touches every corner of the trucking industry from double-brokered loads to identity theft to cargo that simply vanishes between origin and destination. The second-order consequences of someone else’s fraud can be just as damaging for carriers as the fraud itself.

Amazon Relay, the tech giant’s free carrier-facing load board and mobile app, is a direct counter to that risk. In a conversation with FreightWaves’ Malcolm Harris on a recent episode of What the Truck?!?, Monika Joshi, product marketing at Amazon Relay, laid out how the web portal and mobile app’s layered verification systems, a new safety incentive program, and the approaching surge of Prime Day volume are converging into what she described as a compelling moment for carriers to get on board.

“Freight fraud doesn’t just hurt shippers. It can hurt honest carriers who can get caught in the middle,” Joshi said. “So we’ve built multiple layers of protection all the way from a carrier’s application to haul with Relay through to load hauling.”

Those layers start before a single mile is driven. Every carrier is screened before they’re approved to haul, and every driver undergoes identity verification and a background check before touching an Amazon load. But the protections extend well beyond onboarding.

“We have a direct relationship policy,” Joshi explained. “So this means once you’ve onboarded to Relay, you’re within the verified group of carriers that can haul Amazon loads. We don’t allow subcontracting, and there are no middlemen to put your reputation at risk.”

The direct-tender model is the structural foundation of Relay’s fraud defense. Where traditional load boards aggregate freight from countless sources (which creates opportunities for bad actors to insert themselves into the chain), Relay operates as a closed system. Every load listed on the web portal originates from Amazon or an approved third party shipper, and every booking is tendered directly to the carrier.

“No one other than Amazon is putting loads on our board,” Joshi said. “Everything booked through us is tendered to carriers directly from Amazon Relay.”

She went a step further, noting that carriers should be cautious about Amazon-branded loads appearing anywhere outside the Relay web portal. “We don’t recommend booking loads that appear to be from Amazon from anywhere other than Relay. Relay is our central source for all loads that we need hauled across our network, which again is just to help keep peace of mind for carriers that everything coming from Relay is legitimate and verified.”

The verification doesn’t stop at the point of booking. During active trips, Relay uses real-time photo checks and license validation to confirm that the driver hauling the load is the one who was approved to do so. Amazon’s trailer telematics add another layer: sensors, cameras and tamper detection systems that monitor shipments in transit.

“We track loads in real time using our trailer telematics,” Joshi said. “We have telematics signals, advanced cameras and tamper detections so we can spot problems as soon as they happen and not after the fact.”

Relay has been investing heavily in on-road safety infrastructure. In 2025, all new Amazon trailer purchases transitioned to roll-up doors to make docking and undocking safer. New trailers also came equipped with rollover-prevention braking systems that use sensors and control logic to detect instability conditions and automatically slow the vehicle. More than 65,000 branded trailers were fitted with flashing auxiliary lamps and reflective tape to reduce rear-end collisions.

But hardware upgrades only go so far. Relay’s newest initiative, Relay safety rewards, is designed to put money directly into the pockets of carriers who are already hauling safely.

“The safety rewards program is our way of supporting carriers who want to invest in safety technology and reward for safe hauling,” Joshi said. “Carriers who drive collision free with an eligible dashcam and in-cab alerts activated just to help support their drivers on the road have a chance to earn per-mile bonuses with Amazon Relay.”

The program works with dashcam providers Motive, Netradyne, and Verizon Connect. Carriers with eligible hardware already installed can enroll directly from their Relay account and earn between one and four cents extra per collision-free mile on top of their standard earnings.

For any carriers who don’t yet have a dashcam, Relay is subsidizing the hardware itself. “As a part of the safety rewards program, carriers can get Motive or Netradyne hardware, as well as installation and a year of subscription, all supported by Amazon when you enroll,” Joshi said.

The data exchange is lightweight. Relay receives a limited set of information from the dashcam providers, such as the number of devices in use, whether any collision alerts were triggered and severity levels. Relay then uses that data to calculate eligible mileage for the reward payout. Carriers don’t need to provide anything themselves. Payouts are issued monthly on top of regular weekly Relay earnings, and carriers can earn on up to 400,000 miles.

“It’s really just an extra added reward for carriers that are kind of already doing the right thing and hauling safely,” Joshi said.

The timing of these programs comes ahead of Amazon’s Prime Day, which is arriving in June this year. It will inevitably pull the usual summer peak volume window forward and compress the runway for carriers to get positioned.

“Prime Day is coming in June. This means that our usual sort of summer peak volume is hitting earlier than carriers might expect,” Joshi said. “For carriers, this means the window to get positioned to take advantage of that volume surge is honestly right now.”

Relay loads are tied directly to Amazon shopping volume. When consumers buy more, more freight moves over the road. And Prime Day is one of the single largest demand spikes on the calendar.

Relay offers multiple equipment types and move configurations to absorb that demand. Power-only work hauling Amazon’s branded trailers sits alongside opportunities for carriers running their own dry vans, reefers or box trucks. The web portal and mobile app also offer yard hostler and shuttling opportunities for day cabs at Amazon facilities. There are no fleet size minimums and no membership fees to access the load board.

“For carriers who are already active on Relay — thank you so much for all that you’re doing to help keep our network running,” Joshi said. “Prime Day contracts are already available on the contracts page of your Relay account.”

Prime Day has moved to June this year and there’s never been a better time to start hauling with Amazon Relay. If your company signs up, gets approved, and completes 7 Relay loads by July 11, 2026, you’ll earn $1,500.

That’s more money on top of what you’re already earning per load. Here’s how to get started before this summer’s peak volume season hits:

Go to relay.amazon.com/prime.

Fill out the short form at the top of the page and click submit.

Complete your Relay application including submitting all required documents and information.

If you receive approval to haul with Relay and complete at least 7 loads on the load board by July 11, 2026, your company will earn $1,500. Terms and conditions apply.

Click here to learn more about Amazon Relay.

The post Amazon Relay Is Tackling Freight Fraud, Incentivizing Safety, and Gearing up for Prime Day appeared first on FreightWaves.

“We’re a company that can afford to handle what the price is for this deal,” Vena said in an interview with CNBC, “and we do not need anybody’s help to do this.”

President Donald Trump had raised the possibility of the government acquiring a stake in the railroad in a May interview with Fortune magazine. The comment came as Trump discussed his view on having the government take equity stakes in companies essential to the nation, and while he mentioned a railroad merger, he did not mention UP (NYSE: UNP) or NS (NYSE: NSC) by name.

Vena did see Trump’s apparent interest as a positive.

“I find it comforting,” he said, “that the president of the United States looked at what we’re doing and says, ‘Son of a gun, this is a good business, a good business move, strong, and I’d like to invest.’” Vena said he had not had any direct communication about the idea of the government becoming a partner.

Since January 2025 the U.S. had invested almost $21 billion across 16 deals involving direct ownership, according to the Council on Foreign Relations. Those include a 10% stake in chip maker Intel (NASDAQ: INTC), a golden share with veto rights as part of Nippon Steel’s acquisition of U.S. Steel, and a future IPO trigger and option to buy in nuclear power specialist Westinghouse.

Vena met with Trump in September regarding the merger, with the White House saying the CEO had offered advice about use of the National Guard to fight crime. Trump subsequently announced his support for the merger.

Subscribe to FreightWaves’ Rail e-newsletter and get the latest insights on rail freight right in your inbox.

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Donald Broughton, the bowtie-wearing analyst of freight markets who spoke before conference audiences and television viewers likely hundreds of times, has died.

Broughton’s research firm, Broughton Capital, had not issued a statement regarding Broughton’s death as of publication time. The company’s website does not contain an announcement of his passing.

Facebook contained numerous tributes to Broughton on his passing including one from his brother Tim, a screenshot of which was sent to FreightWaves.

Tim Broughton said Donald died suddenly at home on May 30.

Facebook also features expressions of sympathy from college friends and fellow graduates of his Missouri high school. Those tributes from Cape Central High School in Cape Girardeau, Missouri said Broughton had graduated from there in 1982.

Broughton was not known to have been ill. He spoke to the annual meeting of the Transportation Intermediaries Association (TIA) in mid-April (this reporter was there and spoke briefly to him), and did one of his many CNBC appearances on May 12 where he gave a bullish outlook on the freight market.  

It appears from this link that Broughton was to deliver a freight market update to members of the TIA Tuesday. 

Broughton Capital, a research firm on trucking, freight and the supply chain, was founded in 2017. Broughton’s title was managing partner. 

Prior to starting that firm, Broughton worked on the research operations of several companies, including A.G. Edwards 

Broughton’s trademark in his many appearances was his bow tie. As his brother said in his post: “He did like his bowties.”

Sought for his expertise

John Larkin, a long-time freight industry analyst now with Clarendon Partners who knew Broughton well, liked to think of him, Broughton and Thom Albrecht, now the chief revenue officer of Reliance Partners, as three analysts who were “sought by institutional investors to be seasoned, knowledgeable, been around for decades, the kind of guys who were much more valuable than talking to the young kid on Wall Street who had been doing it for two years.”

“He was a warm person to be around,” Larkin said of Broughton. “He always had a kind word for me and anybody else in the industry. He loved being thought of as a sage.”

Larkin said any time he heard Broughton speak, “I always got a lot out of it. He was pretty thoughtful and forced you to think of the world in a different way.”

“He tried to use his intimate knowledge of freight transportation data to draw conclusions about the broader economy, and did about as good a job of that as anybody has ever done,” Larkin said.

Three amigos

Albrecht also said he saw a kinship among he, Larkin and Broughton. “We were the three amigos,” Albrecht said.

Albrecht hired Broughton into A.G. Edwards, based in St. Louis in Broughton’s home state. Broughton, according to Albrecht, was working for a beverage analyst who passed away.

“So Don was without a job, my junior analyst was going back to graduate school so I needed somebody pretty quickly,” Albrecht said. “With his background in distribution and transportation, and just his overall zeal, I ended up hiring him within a day or two.”

Broughton had “a passion for the industry,” Albrecht said. “He loved a good debate. He was very diligent with his numbers. Sometimes he would pull people the wrong way but he meant well all the time.”

More articles by John Kingston

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The post Donald Broughton, long-time analyst of freight markets, dies suddenly appeared first on FreightWaves.

A Thursday filing with the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California showed a stipulated permanent injunction requiring former Samsara employee, William Reich, to adhere to terms outlined in his “Employee Invention Assignment and Confidentiality Agreement,” which was signed when he began working for the San Francisco-based company in 2022.

Reich, a former senior manager in enterprise field sales with Samsara (NYSE: IOT), is required to “maintain the confidentiality of all Samsara Proprietary Information,” and “never disclose such Proprietary Information to any third party, including any future employer or his former employer Motive and/or any of Motive’s employees, for any reason whatsoever.”

A separate statement from Samsara said Reich has also agreed to “pay a substantial sum for breaching his employment agreement.” Reich has also resigned from Motive.

“Samsara remains committed to vigorously protecting its intellectual property rights and enforcing its rights against the misappropriation of its confidential information and trade secrets, including against Motive,” said Adam Eltouky, chief legal officer at Samsara, in a news release. “We will always take decisive action to safeguard the innovations that power our platform and serve our customers.”

Samsara alleged in a 2024 complaint that Reich downloaded “a large volume of Samsara trade secrets and confidential information to a currently unknown location in the days before resigning” to go work for Motive. The items downloaded were said to include product offerings in development along with sensitive customer data.

The complaint said the actions amounted to “theft of Samsara’s trade secrets and breaches of his ongoing contractual obligations.”

“In short, they would provide a former employee like Reich an unfair advantage in competing with Samsara in his new role and would provide a competitor with a blueprint of how to unfairly compete against Samsara,” the complaint read.

This is just one recent development in the extensive legal disputes involving the two fleet technology companies. Motive was recently cleared in a patent infringement lawsuit brought by Samsara, although Samsara secured a $30.3 million judgment against the company earlier this year following claims of false advertising.

Samsara filed a separate patent infringement lawsuit against Motive on Monday.

More FreightWaves articles by Todd Maiden:

• LTL general rate increases no longer an annual event
• ArcBest raises Q2 outlook for LTL, asset-light units
• Knight-Swift founder, executive chairman Kevin Knight retires

The post Samsara wins trade secret dispute with former employee appeared first on FreightWaves.

Financial terms of the transaction were not disclosed.

“Freight brokerage is one of the largest and most fragmented service industries in the country — thousands of small brokers running on manual processes and heavy overhead,” stated a news release from Fura. “Fura’s view is that AI fundamentally changes the math of consolidation: rather than simply stacking acquired businesses on top of each other and inheriting their costs, Fura migrates each acquired brokerage onto a shared automation platform that runs the repetitive work, so every business it acquires gets leaner and more capable than it was standalone.”

LG Logistics Solutions specializes in full-truckload, less-than-truckload and intermodal shipping. The company will gain access to Fura’s platform and AI agents, allowing it to grow its book of business without adding incremental costs. It will also have access to Surround, Fura’s real-time visibility technology.

“Roll-ups in services usually fail because you’re just buying other people’s overhead,” said Jeff Dangelo, Fura co-founder and CEO. “AI changes that equation completely. When we acquire a brokerage, we don’t layer on more cost — we put it on a platform where automation does the repetitive work, so the business runs leaner and serves customers better than it did on its own.”

Fura acquired Barton Logistics for an undisclosed sum in March.

Luis Guardiola, founder of LG Logistics Solutions, and his staff will continue to run the day-to-day operations.

“I looked at where freight is heading, and the brokers trying to do it all by hand are going to be left behind,” Guardiola said. “If you own a brokerage and you’re wondering what the next chapter looks like, this is the most confident I’ve felt about a decision in a long time.”

More FreightWaves articles by Todd Maiden:

• LTL general rate increases no longer an annual event
• ArcBest raises Q2 outlook for LTL, asset-light units
• Knight-Swift founder, executive chairman Kevin Knight retires

The post AI-powered broker Fura announces latest acquisition appeared first on FreightWaves.

The bipartisan House Appropriations Committee added language to its fiscal 2027 transportation appropriations bill urging the Surface Transportation Board (STB) to apply strict scrutiny to the proposed $72 billion Union Pacific-Southern Pacific merger. 

If evaluated under the STB’s rigorous 2001 rules, the merger –which would create the first all-freight transcontinental railroad– must prove it enhances shipper options rather than just preserving current competition. 

While the STB conditionally accepted the application in late May, it has requested additional information from Union Pacific by July 27 before starting its formal review.

Event Logistics: Rock-It Cargo coordinates the ‘most complex’ World Cup

Daniel Rosenthal, CEO of Rock-It Companies, detailed the monumental challenge of managing logistics for the 2026 FIFA World Cup –an event he describes as the most complex in the sport’s history.

With the tournament expanding to 48 teams playing 104 matches across 16 venues in three countries, Rock-It is leveraging proprietary master delivery scheduling technology and its asset-light network to process roughly 1,500 highly time-sensitive shipments a day. 

Drawing on its legacy of moving touring gear for three-quarters of the global music industry, the company is managing everything from teams’ bespoke training gear crossing international borders to the specialized broadcast infrastructure supporting 150 international networks.

Cargo security: Eight indicted in $4.49M carrier impersonation ring

In a major victory for cargo security, federal prosecutors in Manhattan indicted eight individuals accused of running a massive carrier impersonation scheme. 

Operating across New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and Virginia, the group allegedly stole $4.49 million in freight –including copper, beef and cigarettes– by using legitimate motor carriers’ MC and DOT numbers to trick warehouses. 

Once loaded, the stolen cargo was allegedly moved to New York City, transferred to secondary vehicles and sold off.

Air logistics: FedEx partnering with China Southern to expand Asia-Pacific footprint

FedEx Corporate has signed a strategic memorandum of understanding with the air cargo division of China Southern Airlines to optimize their collective networks in Asia. 

The collaboration will target capacity sharing, ground operations, hub connections and digitalization to improve network efficiency. This alliance aligns with FedEx’s major expansion of its Guangzhou hub, a project slated for completion next year that will double the facility’s terminal footprint and triple hourly sorting capacity.

Regulation: FMCSA Registration Glitch Halts New Carrier Entrants

The Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration’s (FMCSA) new “Modus” carrier registry has hit a major roadblock, completely failing to register a single carrier in the three weeks since its launch.

Designed to curb chameleon carriers and rampant registration fraud, the system’s extended outage has drawn intense complaints across social media. 

However, analysts speculate this complete freeze on new entrants might actually act as a “feature, not a bug” for the health of the broader freight market by blocking new capacity and preventing fraudulent credential transfers.

Spot Rates: The mid-June rate dip is a seasonal pause, not a systemic drop

Despite reports of capacity loosening over the weekend, history suggests that the current dip is nothing more than a seasonal pause typical of the second week of June. 

Rates are expected to tighten significantly as end-of-month and end-of-quarter shipping volumes collide with the pre-July 4th holiday rush. With tender rejections currently sitting just below 18%, analysts are confident that the metric will breach the 20% threshold before the year is out.

Keep up with the latest news on FreightWaves Today

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ArcBest’s (NASDAQ: ARCB) LTL unit, ABF Freight, last implemented a GRI on Aug. 4. That increase was also expected to average 5.9% across general tariff codes and lanes. The company’s GRIs have been moving up approximately one month on the calendar over the past four years. This year’s update is approximately six weeks ahead of the one-year anniversary date.

Most public LTL carriers implemented GRIs about one month early last year.

A sign the LTL market has turned?

Last week, ArcBest raised its second-quarter guidance for both its asset-based and asset-light units.

The asset-based unit, which includes ABF Freight, is now forecast to see 600 to 700 basis points of sequential margin improvement. (The unit normally sees just 350 bps of margin improvement from the first to the second quarter.)

The company touted pricing initiatives and cost takeouts as drivers of the improved outlook. Its tonnage growth also accelerated in May on a two-year-stacked comparison, as it is seeing more truckload-rated shipments in the network.

On its first-quarter call in April, it flagged the expectation for double-digit TL rate increases during the second and third quarters. It also said that contractual LTL rates were 6.3% higher in the first quarter.

(Less-than-truckload fuel surcharge mechanisms include a step function as diesel prices rise, typically resulting in margin accretion.)

Industrial activity improved for a fifth consecutive month in May, according to manufacturing data released from the Institute for Supply Management. The ISM’s Manufacturing PMI registered a 54 reading for the month, which was 130 bps higher than April, and the highest reading in four years. (A reading above 50 signals expansion, while one below 50 indicates contraction.) The subindex for new orders—an indicator of future activity—registered a 56.8 reading, which was 270 bps higher sequentially.

Inflections in ISM data usually lead LTL volumes by a few months.

ArcBest also increased its operating income outlook for the asset-light unit, which includes brokerage and managed transportation services, last week. It now expects adjusted operating income of $3 million to $5 million in the second quarter, which is $2 million higher than the prior forecast.

Shares of ARCB were 7.2% higher on Monday compared to the S&P 500, which was 0.3% higher on the day.

More FreightWaves articles by Todd Maiden:

• ArcBest raises Q2 outlook for LTL, asset-light units
• Knight-Swift founder, executive chairman Kevin Knight retires
• XPO’s Q2 tonnage trending ahead of guidance

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Despite serious disruptions from the Iran war, where hostilities now stretch from the Persian Gulf to the Mediterranean, global container traffic remained ‘remarkably resilient’ at 16.2 million twenty foot equivalent units in April, according to Container Trade Statistics.

That’s up 4% from April 2025, and a narrow 1.6% improvement from March.

CTS, which gets its data directly from many of the largest shipping lines, said year-to-date volumes remain 5% above 2025 levels.

“This reinforces a long-standing maxim of global trade: Cargo behaves much like water, finding alternative routes when traditional pathways become restricted,” the British-based analyst said.

The CTS Global Price Index rose sharply to 89 points in April, up more than 12% from 79 in March, pressured by the Hormuz crisis. That’s the biggest gain since June 2024, at the height of carriers diverting vessels away from the Red Sea, substantially removing market capacity.

All regions saw growing imports except North America and, unsurprisingly, the Indian Sub-continent and Middle East, which declined by 2% and 4%, respectively.

A decline in North America came on reduced volumes originating from Europe, the Indian Sub-continent and Middle East, and South and Central America. 

Rates on the benchmark trans-Pacific have been surging over the past month. Carriers have been managing capacity with blankings while issuing a storm of surcharges and rate restoration fees. Market observers say some importers have begun bringing in goods ahead of schedule – or frontloading – as uncertainty swirls and the peak season gets underway.

Exports compare similarly with the import market. India/Mideast and North America were the only regions to see volume drops, of 15% and 3%. Year-to-date, Europe exports are off 2%, an improvement from March’s 3% slide. While European exports have shown gradual improvement throughout early 2026, those results have been undermined by a substantial reduction in cargo moving into the India/Mideast region.

Still, ‘while volumes have softened slightly in affected regions, overall trade remains robust,” CTS said. Sub-Saharan Africa continues to emerge as one of the strongest performing regions globally. Year-to-date, exports are up 10% and imports are up 15%, where alternative trade routes and emerging markets are increasingly supporting global growth. 

A key unknown is when and if higher transport costs begin to exert meaningful pressure on global volumes.

Read more articles by Stuart Chirls here.

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The post Containers say ‘hold my disruptions’ as ocean rates surge appeared first on FreightWaves.

Alexander M. Owens, a partner at Pietragallo Gordon Alfano Bosick & Raspanti LLP in Philadelphia who represents whistleblowers and businesses in False Claims Act cases, said customs fraud enforcement has evolved from a niche area of government oversight into a rapidly growing enforcement priority.

“We think this is really an area that’s getting pretty hot in terms of the False Claims Act world,” Owens told FreightWaves. “The government learns how to investigate these cases better, the word gets out for participants in the industry, and there becomes this pipeline of cases for decades.”

The trend comes as federal authorities pursue a growing number of customs fraud and tariff evasion cases. Recent actions include the government’s $549.5 million settlement involving aluminum extrusion imports, a customs fraud claim against bankrupt auto-parts supplier First Brands Group, and enforcement actions targeting alleged country-of-origin fraud and duty evasion schemes.

According to research compiled by Owens, customs fraud recoveries under the False Claims Act totaled more than $570 million during the first five months of 2026, surpassing all prior annual totals and exceeding the combined recoveries from many previous years. 

The report states that more than $918 million has been recovered through customs fraud cases brought under the False Claims Act.

Related: Tariff fraud enforcement targets importers over alleged duty evasion

Common customs fraud schemes

Owens said most customs fraud cases fall into three primary categories: misclassification of goods, misrepresentation of country of origin, and undervaluation of imports.

Misclassification schemes involve importers assigning products to tariff codes with lower duty rates. Undervaluation cases often involve false invoices or other efforts to understate the value of imported goods. Country-of-origin fraud can include transshipping products through third countries to disguise where they were manufactured.

“Part of the prosecutorial appeal of customs fraud cases is that these matters tend to involve a handful of common typologies,” Owens wrote in an analysis of recent enforcement trends.

Owens said fraud schemes are becoming more sophisticated as enforcement intensifies.

“What we’re seeing now is more elaborate efforts to create the appearance of legitimate transactions,” Owens said.

Recent cases

China-linked imports remain a major focus

Industries subject to high antidumping, countervailing and Section 301 duties continue to generate significant enforcement activity, Owens said.

Aluminum, steel, furniture, textiles and apparel are among the sectors most frequently associated with customs fraud investigations because high duty rates create strong incentives for evasion.

China remains at the center of many enforcement actions. Owens’ research found that 37 of 46 reported False Claims Act customs fraud recoveries involved imports from China.

“The higher the tariffs, the greater the risk of fraud as importers grow more incentivized to evade higher levies,” according to Owens.

Whistleblowers play growing role

A key driver behind the increase in cases is the False Claims Act’s whistleblower provision, which allows private individuals to file lawsuits on behalf of the federal government and receive a share of any recovery.

Unlike many other fraud investigations, customs cases are increasingly being initiated not only by current and former employees but also by competitors, customs brokers and others working throughout the supply chain, Owens said.

Recent whistleblower awards have drawn attention across the industry. According to Owens’ analysis, the whistleblower in the aluminum extrusion settlement is expected to receive approximately $96 million, while another customs fraud whistleblower received more than $9.7 million in a tungsten carbide case.

“Large awards are the best form of advertisement for whistleblower laws,” Owens wrote. “Expect more customs fraud cases to show up in the FCA pipeline soon enough.”

More enforcement ahead

Owens said he expects customs fraud investigations to continue growing over the next several years, regardless of how tariff policies evolve.

He pointed to improving enforcement capabilities at Customs and Border Protection, growing awareness of whistleblower rewards and continued pressure to prevent tariff evasion.

The DOJ is also expected to scrutinize emerging risks, including alleged abuse of Delivered Duty Paid (DDP) transactions and potential fraud involving tariff refund programs. Owens warned that large-scale refund efforts can create opportunities for bad actors, much like pandemic-era fraud involving the Paycheck Protection Program.

“I think we’re going to see more fraud, but I also think we’re going to see more of these actions,” Owens said. “CBP’s own surveillance apparatus is getting much better, and I think we’re going to see more whistleblower cases as well.”

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Last year, C.H. Robinson, whose embrace of AI helped to drive its stock up by almost by a factor of three in a little more than two years, is rolling out its next initiative with a public launch.

Many of the AI enhancements that the country’s biggest brokerage has implemented in its operations are done without fanfare. But that changed a year ago when the company announced its Lean AI Planner. 

At the time, Jordan Kaas, president of C.H. Robinson’s Managed Solutions group, said the Planner was a “digital teammate” that as an agentic AI solution worked behind the scenes “to manage and execute the end-to-end logistics process to facilitate better supply chain orientation.”

The next phase is being rolled out this month: the Lean AI Engineer whose value proposition is that it continually assesses and audits a supply chain to find the areas where possible problems lurk, where it is operating at less than full efficiency and where fixes can be designed and implemented.

Cracking 90% for Planner

Kass, in an interview with FreightWaves to discuss the next iteration of AI in Managed Solutions, said the Planner has grown to the point where 92% of Managed Solutions’ shipments for its 4PL customers are being driven autonomously by the Planner.

“But when you think about a shipping department, it’s not just planning and execution,” Kass said. “It’s also continuous process improvement.” But he added that those improvements tended to be “episodic and periodic.”

Getting noticed in a constant barrage of freight tech announcements of the newest and the best can be challenging. C.H. Robinson (NASDAQ: CHRW), by dint of its size and its success in implementing AI, the proof of which is its rising profitability against a backdrop of a shrinking workforce, inevitably gets more publicity than others. 

Open 24 hours a day

Kass said “the groundbreaking story here, and the innovation and the transformation, is that this runs continuously.”

As Kass put it, most auditing of supply chains are a “look back” to see what worked and what failed. But the Lean AI Engineer, he said, does hold “historical data and current data at the same time, as well as the entirety of a network. That’s just something a human being can’t do.” And with all that data, it can review what worked in the past and look forward to fixes and improvements in the future.

What Kass called the “servings” coming out of the Engineer are “served up in a continuous way and a proactive way.”

“You hear a lot of people waiting on a signal,” Kass said. “This isn’t waiting. This is saying I’m going to look into the future and be programmed.”

C.H. Robinson’s North American Surface Transportation (NAST) group, which houses the company’s traditional freight brokerage operations, gets most of the focus on the company. 

While the Engineer and Planner tools are being rolled out in Managed Transportation, which Kass described as “a logistics department in a box,” the technologies will make their way into other parts of the business like NAST, Kass added.

And it wouldn’t be just a technology dump into another part of the business. Kass said the AI Engineer will be “continuously studying a logistics network,” and can be powered by data from other parts of C.H. Robinson that service a customer. “It can analyze their entire network and serve up solutions, but no differently than if a customer is a core carrier or shipper or we’re doing contractual business for them.”

All of them, he said, would be receiving from the Engineer “predicted proactive information” about their supply chain. 

What comes out of that process, Kass said, is “incredibly sticky and really drives value for our customers.”

In the prepared statement released by C.H. Robinson in conjunction with the release of Engineer, Kass described it as a “closed-loop AI system.”

“It will run continuously, improve the operation it’s running and heal itself when something breaks — without an alert or a human noticing a problem first,” Kass said. “The Lean AI Planner executes in real time while the Lean AI Engineer studies the results, identifies patterns, adapts logic and influences future decisions.”

Limitations for personnel

In that same statement, after praising the “talented people to manage complexity,” Kass said talent doesn’t “scale.”

But with the Engineer, Kass said, “shippers will get infinite talent and expertise, consistently applied across every shipment, regardless of who’s available in what time zone or how much their shipping volume grows or spikes.“

Kass described an example of how the system might work. 

He spoke of an LTL customer for the Managed Solutions group, “and maybe we’re managing their LTL in addition to their truckload, and they had three LTL shipments Monday, Wednesday and Friday to the same destination.”

The Engineer, according to Kass, can see that and in essence say to the customer, “Hey, hang on a second. You ship three LTLs to the same destination in a week. Why don’t we ship this as a single truckload one day a week.” 

Or the Engineer might look at a long haul truckload route and determine that intermodal is a better option, Kass said. He added that “these are real world examples of what we see happening on the 4PL side.

More articles by John Kingston

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Amazon (NASDAQ: AMZN) relies on robots to make the work environment safer and easier for employees, while improving package processing speed. Amazon Robotics was founded in 2012 when Amazon acquired Massachusetts-based Kiva Systems. The original Kiva robots moved stacks of shelves within a warehouse. Now robots conduct a variety of tasks. Some zip around like motorized saucers, while others have mechanical arms for lifting. 

Amazon recently surpassed 1 million robots developed, produced and deployed across its operations network. 

At an event in London Thursday, the retail logistics behemoth introduced the next-generation Proteus autonomous robot. It is designed to do physically demanding tasks such as moving heavy carts with packages over long distances to the outbound loading dock so employees can reduce their risk of injury and focus on managing inventory flow, quality control and other high-skill work. 

Proteus, introduced in Nashville, Tennessee, in 2022, is Amazon’s first fully autonomous mobile robot, meaning it can navigate freely throughout a warehouse using sensors to detect and avoid objects in front of it. The original version of the self-guided transporter works in conjunction with Cardinal, a robotic arm that tightly loads packages up to 50 pounds into carts in a Tetris-like manner. Cardinal uses advanced AI and computer vision to quickly select one package from a pile of packages delivered via a chute, lift it with air suction, read the label and precisely place it in the appropriate cart assigned to a specific truck.

One of the major changes, made possible by advances in artificial intelligence, involves how employees interact with the robot. Proteus, about the size of a 50-inch flat-screen TV, is capable of understanding instructions in plain, conversational language with no technical commands and no programming interface. That means warehouse workers can assign tasks to the robot the way they would communicate with a colleague.

The next-generation Proteus is also designed to travel much further than the original. Rather than operating only in dock areas, the new system can work anywhere items need to be moved. Amazon said this includes transporting containers as they arrive at a site, transferring them between workstations, and assisting employees across Amazon’s fulfillment centers and delivery sites.

“You tell it what needs to be done. It figures out the priority, the route, the timing,” said Scott Dresser, vice president of Amazon Robotics, in an article on the company’s website. “It becomes your assistant for material movement.”

Proteus 2.0 is currently being tested in Amazon labs, with deployment in Europe expected in the first half of 2027. 

Broader robotics roadmap

The scaling of these systems reached a new peak with the 2024 launch of Amazon’s next-generation fulfillment center in Shreveport, Louisiana. The site uses eight different robotics systems that work in harmony to support package fulfillment and delivery, according to another blog post. 

Alongside advancements in mobile robots, Amazon is also developing new collaborative technology and robotic manipulation — the ability to handle individual objects with precision. 

This includes STARK, a new collaborative robotic tote-handling system. The brainchild of an operations employee, STARK picks full totes from conveyors and places them on carts — work that otherwise requires repetitive heavy lifting. First piloted in Barcelona, Spain, STARK is planned to expand to 15 sites across Europe by 2027, Amazon said.

Amazon said it will also expand the use of Vulcan, the company’s first robot with a sense of touch. Vulcan uses sensors to pick and stow at the top-and-bottom rows of inventory pods at fulfillment centers. The grab tooling can see and feel objects simultaneously to navigate densely packed environments and understand how much force to apply. Originally developed for a facility in Spokane, Washington, Vulcan expanded last year to handle more complex picking tasks at Amazon’s Hamburg facility in Germany and will be installed at more sites. 

“Europe is at the center of how we’re building our operations for the future,” Dresser said. 

Legacy robots

Amazon actually has two Vulcan robots. The pick version can grab items up to five pounds and 14 inches in length. Each robot reaches nine feet tall. In total, a system uses 10 robot arms in a 350-square foot area. 

The stow version can grab items up to eight pounds, but nothing that can roll. This system links three robot stations together in a 500-square foot area and weighs nearly 10,000 pounds. Vulcan Stow uses an arm that carries a camera and a suction cup. The camera looks at the compartment and picks out the item to be grabbed, along with the best spot to hold it by. While the suction cup grabs it, the camera watches to make sure it took the right item. It also has the smarts to identify when it can’t move a specific item, and can ask a human partner to assist.

Sequoia, launched in Houston in 2023, is a robotic system that uses AI and computer vision systems to consolidate inventory and free up storage at the site to facilitate faster order transactions. 

Amazon says Sequoia enables it to identify and store inventory up to 75% faster at fulfillment centers. It works by having mobile robots transport inventory directly to a containerized storage system or to an employee picking out items for a customer order. Inventory is transported directly to employees at a workstation ergonomically situated for their power zone (between mid-thigh and mid-chest height), mitigating the need for employees to reach above their heads or squat down, which can lead to common workplace injuries.

Sequoia takes up four 500,000-square foot floors per building, equivalent to about 35 football fields. The Shreveport facility is five stories tall.

While Proteus is fully self-guided, other mobile robots such as Titan and Hercules, are confined to areas where only authorized robotic specialists can enter, and read barcodes that are stickered to the floor as navigation coordinates.

Hercules is a drive unit that finds and transports pods of items from areas of the fulfillment center to employees picking items for customer orders before they are packaged. It can lift up to 1,250 pounds and travel across 1 million square feet. Hercules makes key decisions about how it moves independently, but takes overall direction from centralized planning software. It then uses a forward-facing 3D camera to differentiate between people, pods, other robots, and other objects in its path to make safer decisions, the Amazon article said.

Similar to Hercules, Titan is another drive unit that uses encoded markers on the floor to bring items from across Amazon’s fulfillment centers directly to employees as they assemble customer orders. It can lift twice as much as Hercules, meaning it focuses on larger and/or bulkier items like small household appliances or pallets of food. 

Sparrow is another robotic system that supports employees who aggregate items for customer orders. This robotic arm picks up and moves individual items from containers into specific totes to send off to employees before they’re packaged. It can lift packages up to 12 pounds. Sparrow uses computer vision and AI to identify the correct item and add it to the tote on its delivery journey. 

Once all the items for a customer order are selected, Amazon uses a variety of automated packaging systems to pack orders in the smallest conveyance possible to reduce waste. One machine, for example, originally created plastic bags, but was retrofitted to create made-to-fit paper bags using curbside recycled materials. It uses sensors to measure an order’s dimensions and then creates a correctly sized, protective bag using a more durable, weather-resistant paper and heat-sealing technology. Amazon has retrofitted more than 120 of these machines across the U.S. in more than 20 fulfillment centers, helping to avoid more than 130 million plastic bags this year, according to Amazon.

Robin was the first robotic arm ever deployed by Amazon Robotics. It is made to sort packages before they’re brought to the outbound dock to be placed on a truck. Robin grabs packages from conveyor belts and puts them onto robotic drive units to be moved to the next part of the facility. It also transfers damaged packages to ensure optimal quality control. 

Amazon insists the robotics expansion isn’t costing jobs. Since introducing robotics into its operations years ago, Amazon says it has continued to hire hundreds of thousands of employees globally and created new job categories, including reliability, maintenance and engineering roles. But most job hires are seasonal workers. The Wall Street Journal last year reported that Amazon has fewer employees per facility than at any time in the past 16 years and that experts believe Amazon wants facilities that can mostly run on their own with only a handful of managers. And CEO Andy Jassey has said the company will need fewer employees over time because of AI.

Click here for more FreightWaves/American Shipper stories by Eric Kulisch.

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The post Robots drive $10B Amazon investment for European fulfillment centers appeared first on FreightWaves.

A graduate of Northern Illinois University, Kloster for the past 17 years  has been president and founder of Integrity Rail Partners, Inc., a consultant specializing in rail equipment as well as strategic planning, acquisitions, and marketing.

Kloster brings to three the number of Republican board members, including Chairman Patrick Fuchs and Michelle Schultz, both Trump appointees and the statutory maximum for the party. Vice Chair Schultz’s term runs through November 30, 2030. Longtime member and Vice Chair Karen Hedlund was appointed by President Joe Biden in 2021 and is awaiting confirmation after being nominated by Trump for a second term this past May that runs through December 31, 2030. A fifth seat remains vacant.

The newest appointee joins the board as it evaluates the proposed merger of Union Pacific (NYSE: UNP) and Norfolk Southern (NYSE: NSC) in a deal that would create the first all-freight transcontinental railroad.

Kloster’s resume includes working as director of business and market intelligence for railcar lessor GE Rail Services from 1991-2007, and in a senior role at consultant FTR from 2007-2019. He has served as an executive board member of the National Industrial Transportation League for two decades, and on the board of the Railway Supply Institute since 2020. He also holds several patents covering railcar technology.

Subscribe to FreightWaves’ Rail e-newsletter and get the latest insights on rail freight right in your inbox.

Read more articles by Stuart Chirls here.

Related coverage:

House endorses 25-year old rules for rail merger review

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The post Kloster sworn in as STB member appeared first on FreightWaves.

San Francisco-based Samsara (NYSE: IOT) reported total revenue of $479 million, a 31% year-over-year increase, for its 2027 fiscal first quarter ended May 2. It added $101 million in incremental annual recurring revenue during the period, pushing the full-year run rate to nearly $2 billion.

Among the wins were 11 new $1-million-plus contracts, Samsara’s second-highest quarter for large deals. It now has 3,363 customers spending at least $100,000 annually on the platform and 190 customers spending over $1 million.

“Our customers are facing unprecedented demand and are constrained by worker capacity,” said Sanjit Biswas, Samsara CEO and co-founder. “We see a massive opportunity to transform physical industries with Operational AI and AI Agents – automating work, unlocking capacity, and driving greater productivity across the sectors that power the global economy.”

The company raised its full-year revenue guidance to a range of $2.005 billion to $2.013 billion, which would be a 24% y/y increase. The prior outlook called for a 21% to 22% y/y increase.

First-quarter adjusted earnings per share of 17 cents was 6 cents higher y/y. The company achieved net profitability on an unadjusted basis for a third consecutive quarter.

Full-year adjusted EPS guidance was raised to a range of 70 to 72 cents, 6% higher than the prior forecast.

Many of Samsara’s customers are rapidly scaling their businesses to participate in a global infrastructure buildout. They continue to look to Samsara to digitize operations and save money.

“Our customers are operating at a scale most people don’t see,” said Amit Vyas, chief revenue officer. “They’re building power grids, maintaining road networks, and running distribution systems that touch every part of daily life.

“As those operations grow, so does the complexity of keeping them safe, efficient, and connected. Every vehicle, asset, and job site they bring onto our platform generates data that makes the entire system smarter. It’s why our largest customers keep expanding their partnership with us, and why we’re seeing so much momentum in this market.”

Samsara’s Connected Operations Platform uses sensors, cameras and telematics devices to capture over 25 trillion data points annually.

More FreightWaves articles by Todd Maiden:

• ArcBest raises Q2 outlook for LTL, asset-light units
• Knight-Swift founder, executive chairman Kevin Knight retires
• XPO’s Q2 tonnage trending ahead of guidance

The post Samsara raises guidance amid data center boom appeared first on FreightWaves.

The freight brokerage industry has operated for decades under a legal assumption that is now gone.

On May 14, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled unanimously in Montgomery v. Caribe Transport II, LLC that state-law negligent-hiring claims against freight brokers are not preempted by the Federal Aviation Administration Authorization Act (FAAAA). The 9-0 decision, authored by Justice Amy Coney Barrett, resolved a longstanding split among federal circuit courts and eliminated the preemption defense that brokers had used for years to defeat tort claims arising from carrier selection decisions.

The implications of this case are immediate and far-reaching for brokers. The ruling does not impose automatic liability, but it opens the door for plaintiffs to challenge how brokers vet and select carriers in state courts nationwide. And according to Josh Lovan, Industry Business Advisor at J. J. Keller & Associates, Inc., the significance of this moment is difficult to overstate.

“For brokers, this is everything,” Lovan said. “One of the biggest changes that’s occurred in transportation in the last two decades. It fundamentally shapes how freight is going to be moved.”

The shield is gone

For years, brokers relied on the FAAAA’s broad preemption of state laws related to prices, routes, and services as a blanket defense against negligent hiring claims. That legal posture often stopped cases cold before they reached a jury. The Montgomery decision turns on the FAAAA’s safety exception, which was a carve-out preserving state authority to regulate safety with respect to motor vehicles. The Court held that negligent-hiring claims fall squarely within that exception.

Justice Brett Kavanaugh, in a concurrence joined by Justice Samuel Alito, acknowledged the ruling could increase insurance costs for brokers but stressed that the FAAAA was an economic deregulation statute, not a safety deregulation statute. He also pushed back on fears that the decision would bury brokers in litigation, writing that brokers who select reputable carriers “should be able to successfully defend against state tort suits.”

But the key word there is “defend.” Brokers can no longer sidestep the question entirely. They now have to demonstrate that their carrier selection was reasonable, and that means documentation, consistency, and verifiable safety criteria.

“Brokerage has exploded in recent years, and this ruling is pulling the shield away from many brokers who have gotten away with negligence,” Lovan said.

The ruling doesn’t prescribe a specific federal standard for what constitutes reasonable care in carrier selection. Instead, that question will be answered by state courts, creating what several industry groups have warned could become a patchwork of varying requirements across jurisdictions.

What it does make clear is that basic vetting, such as confirming a carrier has active authority and insurance on file, is no longer sufficient.

“J. J. Keller’s Carrier Risk Review Service is validating that the carrier has an active USDOT number, the right operating authority, the right insurance forms filed with FMCSA, MCS-90, and a satisfactory rating,” Lovan said. 

Brokers must now approach carrier selection as a question of defensibility, not just availability. “The question is no longer just ‘Who can I use to move this?’” said Lovan. “The question is, ‘Can I defend this carrier if an incident occurs?’ Conventionally, a lot of brokers cut corners to fill trucks, but now you have the responsibility to defend the carrier.”

That shift echoes what legal analysts have said about the ruling’s practical effect. Ron Leibman, a partner at McCarter & English who represents brokers, told Trucking Dive that the decision is straightforward in its scope: “A state law negligent claim can be brought against you. You can defend it. That is all the court said.” But defending it requires a paper trail, a process, and a standard applied consistently across every load.

A documentation problem becomes a litigation problem

Lovan identified three operational shifts brokers need to make immediately in response to the ruling.

“First, elevate carrier vetting to a defensible standard,” he said. “The Court made it clear that brokers have a duty to exercise reasonable care when selecting carriers, and that decision can now be challenged in court. Reviewing authority and insurance is no longer enough. Brokers need to consistently evaluate safety ratings, inspection history, and patterns in violations such as driver qualification, hours of service, and maintenance.”

“Second, document every carrier selection decision,” Lovan continued. “The biggest shift from this ruling is not just liability exposure — it is the need to prove your process. The legal defense is no longer based on preemption, but on whether the broker acted reasonably in selecting the carrier. That means brokers need a consistent, repeatable vetting process with clear records of what was reviewed, what risks were identified, and why a carrier was approved. In a post-incident environment, the file matters just as much as the decision itself.”

“Third, standardize and enforce your safety criteria across the network,” Lovan said. “This ruling will push brokers to tighten their networks and apply more consistent thresholds for carrier approval. If standards are inconsistent or loosely applied, that creates exposure. Brokers need clear policies for what is acceptable, what requires escalation, and what disqualifies a carrier, and those policies need to be followed every time.”

That last point matters in a legal environment where plaintiff attorneys will scrutinize not just what a broker did in a single transaction, but whether the broker’s broader practices reflect a pattern of due diligence or a pattern of cutting corners.

The data gap makes this harder

One of the most significant complications underlying the ruling is the state of federal safety data itself. According to FMCSA data, roughly 90% of active interstate motor carriers do not have a formal safety rating. The agency’s compliance review process (the mechanism through which carriers receive satisfactory, conditional, or unsatisfactory ratings) has reached only a fraction of the industry due to limited staffing and resources.

Brokers often rely on carriers who often don’t have a safety rating, Lovan said, because otherwise it would be difficult to compete in moving freight.

That reality now makes the broker’s own vetting process all the more critical. When the federal rating system covers only a sliver of the carrier population, the burden of identifying risk shifts to the party making the selection decision. Lovan pointed to Caribe Transport’s documented deficiencies (the kind of red flags visible in publicly available data) as the type of signal brokers must now actively screen for.

“A lot of carriers with a conditional rating simply haven’t gone through an audit,” Lovan said. “This lawsuit indicated things that motor carriers should take an interest in. DQ files and hours of service violations are two of the most often cited during an FMCSA audit. You can’t just select who’s next up and who’s cheapest.”

Chameleon carriers, public scrutiny, and the proliferation problem

The ruling arrives at a moment of heightened public awareness around carrier safety. In April, CBS News’ 60 Minutes aired an eight-month investigation into chameleon carriers, trucking companies that accumulate safety violations, shut down, and reopen under new names with clean records. The investigation revealed that carriers connected to one network alone had logged nearly 15,000 safety violations and 500 accidents in just two years, according to Department of Transportation data. Chameleon carriers are four times more likely to be involved in severe crashes.

These types of mainstream stories, according to Lovan, are a sign that the conversation around carrier safety has moved well beyond the industry press. “The general public is watching this,” he said.

Lovan also flagged a broader structural concern: “The barrier to entry is lower for brokers, so there are many new entrants,” he said. “There’s been a surge in the brokerage world, and we’ve seen an increase in the unsafe carriers that brokers are using.”

The brokerage industry has expanded rapidly in recent years, with approximately 28,000 freight brokers now arranging about a third of all U.S. freight shipments. The combination of lower barriers to entry, fragmented safety data, and the speed at which loads are tendered has created an environment where vetting can become an afterthought. That’s precisely the kind of environment that the Montgomery ruling now exposes to legal risk.

“A lot of brokers do have a good vetting process, but you have to have a consistent program in documentation,” Lovan said. “They have to demonstrate why they selected a carrier and demonstrate the threshold for what criteria they’re using.”

Where plaintiff attorneys will focus

The litigation exposure created by the ruling is not distributed evenly. In states without meaningful caps on noneconomic damages (including states like New York, Pennsylvania, and Illinois, where constitutional provisions or court decisions have blocked or limited tort reform), plaintiff attorneys will find the most favorable conditions for pursuing high-value claims.

According to ATRI’s 2025 forensic analysis of trucking litigation, the national median total award in trucking tort cases was $1.3 million, and the numbers escalate sharply from there. The median nuclear verdict reached $36 million in 2022, roughly 50% higher than in 2013, and the share of verdicts exceeding $50 million rose by 6.4 percentage points over that span.

Cases involving hours-of-service violations or a history of driver violations resulted in plaintiff verdicts 100% of the time in ATRI’s dataset, and these are the exact categories of deficiency cited in the Montgomery case.

“That’s how you end up with a $50 million judgment,” Lovan said. “Those states [without tort reform] and those cases are where plaintiff attorneys will focus their efforts. Plaintiff attorneys across the country have taken note.”

The decision will drive up the number of legal cases going forward. Industry analysts indicate that the ruling will push volumes toward compliant capacity while driving non-compliant carriers out, further tightening supply-and-demand dynamics in favor of carriers with strong safety records.

Building a defensible process

The Montgomery ruling is framed primarily as a broker liability case, but its downstream effects reach carriers directly. Brokers will prioritize carriers with clean inspection histories, documented compliance programs, and stable safety metrics. Carriers with poor CSA scores or unresolved deficiencies face the real prospect of being shut out of broker freight.

“This will affect the supply chain in a positive way,” Lovan said. “It will force unsafe carriers who rely on brokers to get their safety metrics in order. A lot of these carriers should be eliminated before they get a load.”

CSA scores remain in a company portal for two years and carry a severity rating. “Creating a culture of safety takes time,” Lovan said. “Begin today. Eighteen months down the road, you can be a compliant carrier.”

J.J. Keller’s Carrier Risk Review Service provides a structured evaluation of carrier safety risk using publicly available DOT data, including USDOT and MC numbers, operating authority, insurance coverage, FMCSA safety ratings, Inspection Selection System scores, and CSA BASIC scores. Clients receive a detailed report with a four-tiered risk rating for carriers: low, elevated, high or extreme.

“Following this ruling, it’s not enough for companies to simply check a carrier’s authority or confirm registration,” said Dustin Kufahl, Vice President of Consulting and Training Services at J. J. Keller, in a company statement. “They need to be able to demonstrate that they exercised reasonable care when selecting a carrier, and that means thoroughly evaluating safety data and documenting their decision-making methodology.”

The window to act is narrowing for brokers who still rely on informal judgment and inconsistent screening. The preemption defense is gone. Plaintiff attorneys are mobilized. The question every broker will face after a serious incident is no longer whether federal law shields them from liability, but whether their records can prove they made a reasonable decision.

“Carriers have to have a system that validates who they select to move their freight,” Lovan said. “Brokers that have a poor vetting process are not going to be able to wait. They’re going to have to start vetting carriers immediately.”

For more information about J. J. Keller’s Carrier Risk Review Service, visit JJKellerConsulting.com/riskreview or call 844-803-0172.

The post The Supreme Court Just Stripped Brokers of Their Biggest Legal Shield appeared first on FreightWaves.

The retail behemoth on Thursday announced that customers in six states can order a Subway meal directly through the Walmart (NASDAQ: WMT) app or website and have it delivered in as little as 30 minutes or less, either on its own or alongside an express delivery order transported by gig delivery drivers. Subway is Walmart’s largest in-store restaurant tenant.

Integrating restaurant delivery within Walmart’s Express Delivery service for store merchandise and groceries is designed to add another level of convenience for customers.

Subway delivery from Walmart stores is now available in select Walmart stores in Connecticut, Florida, Georgia, Ohio, Pennsylvania and Texas and will be expanded to about 1,400 locations by the end of the summer, according to a Walmart news release.

Earlier in the week, Walmart said it is launching 30-minute-or-less delivery from stores across 33 U.S. markets, formalizing an ultra-fast delivery service it often already achieves with one-hour-or-less express delivery. More than 100,000 items are eligible for the 30-minute service. 

The service is available in Austin, Dallas and Houston, Texas; Denver; Chicago, St. Louis; Atlanta; Tampa, Florida; Oklahoma City and several others, with additional expansion planned over time.

Walmart has regularly expanded its delivery capabilities to more communities over time as its store footprint grows. A proprietary algorithm determines which store should fulfill an order based on the basket size, driver availability and distance from the store. In the first quarter, Walmart completed millions of deliveries in 30 minutes or less to more than 19,000 zip codes. 

“We’ve been delivering orders in 30 minutes or less for more than a year, and today 26% of our Express Deliveries are already arriving in that timeframe,” said Tracy Poulliot, Chief eCommerce Officer, Walmart U.S. “As customers continue to look for more immediate shopping options, we’re making this service more prominent where it’s available.”

Walmart has noticed a trend in demand for faster delivery related to immediate essential needs and last-minute occasions, such as batteries, party supplies, dog food and cold and flu medication. In grocery, customers use express delivery for forgotten items and last-minute meals, including coffee pods and canned goods. 

In addition to 30-minute and Express (one hour), Walmart customers can choose from multiple same-day delivery options: 30-minute, Express (one hour), three-hour and scheduled.

In early April, Sam’s Club launched an express delivery service from local stores, with items arriving in as soon as one hour.  

Last month, Amazon rolled out 30-minute delivery across four major U.S. cities and said it is expanding the service to dozens more communities this year. Amazon says people tend to buy more when they have convenient delivery options. Amazon has set up micro fulfillment centers, which hold about 3,500 popular fresh grocery, personal care products, electronics and household items, to support the ultra-fast delivery service. Amazon also offers one-hour and three-hour delivery on a wider assortment of merchandise.

New Canada delivery option

Meanwhile, Walmart’s membership program, Walmart+, is now available in Canada with unlimited same-day delivery from stores on orders over $35, free next-day and two-day shipping from Walmart distribution centers and a subscription to the standard tier of the Crave video streaming service. The membership program costs $8.97 per month or $89 annually.

Canada is the first Walmart market outside the United States to launch Walmart+. Customers that already subscribe to Delivery Pass for $89 will be automatically rolled into Walmart+.

And there was more news on the delivery front. Walmart said it completed its one millionth drone delivery as it rapidly expands drone delivery capabilities across 66 stores in four states serving five metro markets. Forty percent of the total deliveries were made in the fiscal year 2027 first quarter (February-April). The average drone delivery time is 23 minutes. 

Walmart began drone delivery on a limited basis in 2021.

Click here for more FreightWaves/American Shipper stories by Eric Kulisch.

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The companies signed a memorandum of understanding formally establishing a working relationship in Guangzhou, China, where China Southern Air Logistics is based and where FedEx (NYSE: FDX) operates a large hub.

Under the agreement, the companies will explore cooperation opportunities in several areas, including capacity sharing, routes, hub connections, network planning, fleet resources, ground operations and digitalization. 

“By integrating FedEx global air network resources with China Southern Air Logistics’ operational experience in both domestic and international markets, we will further enhance route connectivity and operational efficiency,” said FedEx China President Poh-Yian Koh in a news release. “Together, we will build a smarter, more agile, and more resilient air logistics ecosystem — better serving the growing cross-border logistics needs of Chinese customers and injecting new momentum into the smooth flow and development of the global supply chain.”

FedEx is the largest cargo airline in the world by traffic and fleet size. China Southern Airlines ranks in the top 10 carriers in the world by cargo traffic, according to the International Air Transport Association. China Southern Cargo operates 19 Boeing 777 freighters in addition to managing cargo carried in the belly hold of the parent company’s passenger planes.

FedEx has shifted some China outbound flights over the past year away from the United States and to Europe after the Trump administration’s tariff hike on Chinese goods, including e-commerce parcels, reduced U.S. import demand. 

FedEx is in the process of expanding and upgrading its Asia-Pacific hub at Guangzhou Baiyun International Airport. The project, which is expected to be completed next year, will more than double the size of the original terminal and triple the parcel sorting capacity per hour

Philippines

In related news, FedEx last month broke ground on expansion of its Clark gateway facility in the Philippines to keep pace with growth in cross-border trade. Once completed, the modernized terminal will span nearly 840,000 square feet and feature upgraded handling and operational capabilities designed to enhance regional capacity, shipment flow and service flexibility. 

Rival UPS is also expanding its air hub in the Philippines.

Click here for more FreightWaves/American Shipper stories by Eric Kulisch.

Write to Eric Kulisch at ekulisch@freightwaves.com.

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Tozer, a naval aviator who spent 13 years flying helicopters in theaters worldwide, brings extensive operational and leadership experience. His military honors include Squadron Pilot of the Year, Wing Tactician of the Year, and Tactical Development and Evaluation Officer of the Year.

“John represents exactly what Veterans in Logistics is all about,” said Dan Lindsey, founder of the Broker-Carrier Summit. “His service to our country, his leadership experience and his impact on the freight industry make him the ideal person to help guide this initiative as we continue building opportunities for veterans throughout transportation.”

From naval aviation to freight technology

Tozer’s military career included overseas deployments across the Baltic region, the Middle East and the South China Sea. Beyond flying, he held leadership roles and earned recognition for tactical development.

After leaving the Navy, Tozer co-founded Newtrul, a digital freight-matching marketplace focused on zero-touch transactions in the over-the-road spot market. He served as the company’s chief operating officer. Newtrul was later acquired by Highway. Today, Tozer leads the Capacity Business Unit at Highway, overseeing the Trusted Freight Exchange platform that connects pre-vetted carriers with qualified brokers.

The transition gap

The challenges veterans face when leaving service run deeper than many civilians realize, Tozer said. He described mentoring peers who received inaccurate guidance about their market value and transferable skills.

“You’ll have some folks that will say, ‘Well, you’re worth this in the private sector. This is the type of job you should do and this is the pay you should receive.’ And that’s coming from folks who have absolutely no idea,” Tozer said. “So you have either this underinflated or overinflated number, depending on who you’re talking to.”

Military personnel often develop specialized vocabularies full of acronyms, and sometimes profanity, that become second nature but are incomprehensible to civilian employers.

“I can have a full conversation with somebody in the military using just acronyms, and nobody else can understand it,” Tozer said.

Technology is helping close the gap. What once took months with a transition assistance counselor can now happen in hours using artificial intelligence and large language models, Tozer said.

“You can essentially give it: ‘These are the MOS’s. This is the speak. This is an example of a CV.’ Throw it all into an LLM and have it naturalize that for the specific role, and match an MOS to a role in logistics,” Tozer said. “It’s going to hallucinate a little bit. But when you have the folks that have actually done it before, you can break that down and get a really good, really quick and really accurate product. Additionally, military culture and the logistics culture are wildly similar, which gives me confidence in the ability to provide value to both these underserved communities”

Building a two-sided marketplace

Veterans in Logistics is designed as a two-sided marketplace. Sponsors — including shippers, brokers, carriers and logistics companies — sit on one side seeking veteran talent. Veterans seeking meaningful placements sit on the other.

“It’s not just to place them in something so that they start making money. It’s to place them in something that makes them feel comfortable, because it’s incredibly uncomfortable getting placed in a position that you have no business being in — for both sides,” Tozer said.

The initiative plans to host job fairs and networking events. It is filling five chair positions to guide the organization. Tozer has begun networking with former commanding officers who now run base transition programs, creating a direct pipeline to reach service members before they separate.

For Tozer, the mission is both personal and professional.

“God, I wish I had this, man. And I know a lot of people wish they had it too,” Tozer said. “That’s what we’re looking at for the next six months as we build out the pipelines and the sponsorships and the community.”

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According to court filings and an announcement from the Manhattan District Attorney’s Office, the defendants are accused of participating in a scheme that targeted shipments moving through logistics facilities in New Jersey, Pennsylvania and Virginia between October 2025 and April 2026. Prosecutors allege the group stole approximately $4.49 million worth of products, including lamb, cheese, beef, copper and cigarettes, through six separate cargo theft incidents.

The defendants named in the indictment are Murodullo Khasanov, Nodir Kobilov, Shavkatbek Mamadjanov, Rakhmiddin Abdullaev, Aleksey Vorobyev, Nizom Ismoilov, Doston Mardoev and Dilshod Nabiev. Each is charged with one count of conspiracy in the fourth degree and varying counts of grand larceny. The identities of the eight defendants in this article are drawn from the publicly filed indictment and accompanying court filings.

The indictment identifies legitimate trucking carriers whose names and registration information prosecutors allege were used without authorization during the scheme. Those carriers are identified in the indictment as victims of the alleged conduct. This article does not suggest that any legitimate carrier, its employees or its customers participated in, authorized or bear responsibility for the conduct alleged in the indictment.

FreightWaves contacted counsel for Aleksey Vorobyev, Nodir Kobilov and Murodullo Khasanov on June 4, 2026, seeking comment regarding the allegations described in the indictment. Counsel were asked to respond by 8:00 a.m. ET on June 5, 2026. No response was received before publication.

FreightWaves was unable to independently identify counsel for Shavkatbek Mamadjanov, Rakhmiddin Abdullaev, Nizom Ismoilov, Doston Mardoev and Dilshod Nabiev despite reviewing court records, contacting the New York County Supreme Court Criminal Term Clerk’s Office and contacting the Manhattan District Attorney’s Office. On June 5, 2026, the Manhattan District Attorney’s Office indicated that counsel information for those defendants existed and would be provided. As of publication, that information had not yet been received. FreightWaves continues efforts to identify and contact counsel for those defendants and will update this article if responses are received.

The identities of the eight defendants named in this article are drawn exclusively from the publicly filed indictment and the Manhattan District Attorney’s Office announcement of June 3, 2026. FreightWaves has not independently verified these identities against booking records, court appearance records, or other sources outside the prosecutorial filing.

The central claims in this article are drawn from the publicly filed indictment, the accompanying Statement of Facts filed in New York County Supreme Court under case number IND-71638-26 and public statements issued by the Manhattan District Attorney’s Office. FreightWaves has not independently verified the underlying allegations contained in those filings.

All eight defendants are presumed innocent unless proven guilty in court. The charges described in this article are allegations made by prosecutors. FreightWaves has not independently verified the underlying criminal allegations contained in the indictment.

Prosecutors allege thefts relied on carrier impersonation

According to the indictment, manufacturers and shippers contracted freight brokers to arrange transportation of cargo through online load-matching platforms. The indictment identifies the legitimate carriers whose names and registration information were allegedly used as victims of the scheme, not participants. This article does not suggest that any legitimate carrier, its employees or its customers participated in or bear responsibility for the alleged conduct described in the indictment.

According to the Statement of Facts filed in the case, prosecutors allege members of the group obtained shipment information associated with legitimate motor carriers and used that information to impersonate those carriers during the pickup process. Prosecutors allege participants displayed carrier names, MC numbers and DOT numbers on tractor-trailers and presented themselves as legitimate transportation providers when arriving at pickup locations.

Court filings further allege shipment details, pickup information and carrier identities were distributed among participants through encrypted messaging applications, including WhatsApp and Telegram. Prosecutors allege stolen freight was then transported into New York City, transferred to secondary vehicles, stored and sold or otherwise disposed of, according to prosecutors.

According to the indictment, prosecutors allege the defendants arrived at logistics facilities, took possession of cargo and transported it to New York City. Prosecutors further allege the cargo was sold or otherwise disposed of. FreightWaves has not independently verified these allegations.

According to the indictment, prosecutors allege the following six cargo theft incidents occurred during the scheme. The dollar amounts listed represent figures alleged in the indictment. FreightWaves has not independently verified the value of any shipment or confirmed these figures through shippers, insurers or any source outside the prosecution.

• Approximately $165,000 in frozen lamb allegedly stolen in November 2025.

• Approximately $432,000 in cheese allegedly stolen in December 2025.

• Approximately $295,000 in frozen beef allegedly stolen in December 2025.

• Approximately $266,000 in copper allegedly stolen in February 2026.

• Approximately $709,000 in cigarettes allegedly stolen in March 2026.

• Approximately $2.6 million in cigarettes allegedly stolen in a second March 2026 incident.

Prosecutors allege the combined value of the shipments exceeded $4.49 million.

Indictment details alleged scheme

According to prosecutors, the alleged operation involved obtaining shipment information associated with legitimate carriers and using that information to impersonate those carriers at freight pickup locations.

According to prosecutors, the alleged activity spanned multiple states and involved shipments moving through logistics facilities in New Jersey, Pennsylvania and Virginia. Prosecutors allege the defendants used information associated with legitimate carriers to obtain freight that had been assigned to those carriers for transportation.

The Manhattan District Attorney’s Office announced the indictment on June 3 following an investigation involving multiple law enforcement agencies.

Context: Carrier impersonation schemes in freight industry reporting

FreightWaves is providing this background solely for industry context. This contextual description is not offered as evidence that the allegations in this indictment are true, and no inference about the guilt of any named defendant should be drawn from it.

Carrier impersonation and freight diversion are categories of commercial cargo loss that have been described in prior industry reporting by FreightWaves and other publications. Law enforcement agencies and industry groups have, in prior contexts unrelated to this case, used the term “cargo fraud” to describe similar categories of conduct. FreightWaves is not applying that characterization to the allegations in this indictment, and no inference about the guilt of any named defendant should be drawn from this contextual description.

The allegations against all eight defendants remain unproven and will be decided through the court process.

What FreightWaves independently verified

FreightWaves independently verified that a criminal case bearing the case number IND-71638-26 was filed in New York County Supreme Court through direct communication with the New York County Supreme Court Criminal Term Clerk’s Office. FreightWaves reviewed the publicly filed indictment and Statement of Facts associated with that case number and confirmed that the eight defendants named in the Manhattan District Attorney’s Office announcement of June 3, 2026, appear in those court documents.

FreightWaves contacted the Manhattan District Attorney’s Office media relations office on June 4, 2026, as the prosecuting party, to seek comment and confirm public details. This contact was not an independent verification step.

FreightWaves has not independently verified the underlying criminal allegations, the alleged value of any shipment, or the defendants’ alleged participation in the conduct described in the indictment.

FreightWaves reviewed the indictment, Statement of Facts and public materials associated with New York County Supreme Court case IND-71638-26.

FreightWaves has not independently verified the underlying allegations contained in the indictment, the alleged value of the stolen cargo, the defendants’ alleged participation in the scheme or the ultimate disposition of the shipments identified by prosecutors.

The identities of the eight defendants as listed in this article are drawn exclusively from the publicly filed indictment and the Manhattan District Attorney’s Office announcement of June 3, 2026. FreightWaves has not independently verified those identities through law enforcement booking records, court appearance records, or any source outside those documents. FreightWaves has not independently corroborated the identity of any defendant through court appearance records, defense counsel confirmation, booking records or other independent means. Readers should be aware that FreightWaves’ identification of these individuals relies entirely on prosecutorial filings.

Because FreightWaves was unable to identify counsel for five of the eight defendants, FreightWaves cannot confirm through an independent representative that the individuals named in the indictment are the persons who appeared in the proceedings under those names.

FreightWaves was unable to independently verify defendant identities through sources beyond official prosecutorial and court records. FreightWaves has not independently verified the identities of the legitimate carriers whose names and registration information prosecutors allege were used without authorization during the scheme and was unable to confirm those identities through direct outreach prior to publication.

FreightWaves has not independently verified the identities of the legitimate carriers whose names and registration information prosecutors allege were used during the scheme.

The central claims in this article are drawn from materials produced by or filed through the Manhattan District Attorney’s Office, including its June 3, 2026, public announcement and the indictment and Statement of Facts filed in New York County Supreme Court under case number IND-71638-26. These materials originate from a single institutional source. FreightWaves has not obtained independent corroboration of the indictment’s underlying allegations from a law enforcement agency outside the prosecuting office, from any named defendant or their counsel, or from any shipper, insurer or freight broker identified in the court filings.

FreightWaves has not adopted the prosecution’s underlying factual allegations as independently verified fact.

FreightWaves contacted the New York County Supreme Court Criminal Term Clerk’s Office on June 4, 2026, seeking confirmation of the case and defendant information. The clerk’s office was able to locate records associated with some defendants but did not provide complete confirmation for all defendants. FreightWaves subsequently obtained case number IND-71638-26 through communication with the Manhattan District Attorney’s Office and reviewed the associated indictment and Statement of Facts

The charges described in this article are allegations. All defendants are presumed innocent unless and until proven guilty in a court of law. This article is based on publicly filed court documents and official prosecutorial announcements.

Click here for more articles on cargo theft and freight fraud by Phillip Brink.

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