Samsara is recording AI-agent interactions about seven times faster than when it launched the tools in June, with its latest 500,000 interactions accumulating in 16 days, down from 112 days initially. Samsara measures AI agent adoption by the number of interactions, which it defines as a complete agent session through chat or voice.

Voice agents surpassed chat in interaction volume within four weeks of launch and have led every week since, Samsara said.

Most voice interactions to date have been calls initiated by agents and configured by the organizations using them, Samsara said. The company said more than 1,000 organizations use Samsara agents weekly, but did not specify how many organizations use voice agents specifically.

Samsara launched Agent Studio in June, but has now made it available to all customers on Tuesday. The platform lets customers build custom AI agents using operational data to perform tasks such as compiling reports, flagging potential hours-of-service violations and answering drivers’ questions based on company policies. The company did not disclose how many customers are using agents in production or how many have built custom agents. Agent Studio is included in existing Samsara subscriptions, the company noted.

The announcement comes as logistics companies work to move AI projects beyond pilot programs and demonstrate financial returns. 

A March 2026 Boston Consulting Group survey of more than 180 logistics providers and shippers found that about 40% of logistics service providers had deployed AI beyond pilot programs, but only about 10% had scaled it across core operations. Just 13% reported measurable value from AI. Unclear returns on investment and gaps in internal capabilities were among the leading barriers to broader adoption.

A separate September 2026 survey by Descartes found that 19% of shippers and 15% of logistics service providers were using AI at scale. The findings suggest that while AI is gaining a foothold in transportation, many companies have yet to deploy it broadly across their operations.

“AI is quickly adopted when it’s useful, and in physical operations that means an agent has to understand the operation and meet people where the work happens,” said Johan Land, Samsara’s chief product officer.

Samsara cited several customers using agents for reporting, compliance monitoring and driver communication.

Grand Isle Shipyard uses an agent to compile forms, inspection reports and asset data into monthly reports. Samsara said the process takes about five minutes per division, cutting report-generation time by 99%. The company estimated the change frees up about $100,000 in annual specialist capacity, though it did not provide the calculation behind that figure.

S. Bertram Foods uses an agent to track remaining stops, driving time and shift time to flag potential hours-of-service violations three hours in advance. Samsara said the system reduced weekly manual review time by 84%.

StreamTech Industrial uses an agent to identify trips in which drivers have not logged into their vehicles. Samsara reported a reduction of 500 hours in unassigned driving over two months.

The customer results were supplied by Samsara, which did not provide detailed measurement methods for all the reported outcomes.

Voice agents bring AI into the cab

Samsara says its voice agents can call drivers with instructions when trucks arrive at unfamiliar facilities, including information about entrances, parking, yard speed limits and required safety equipment. Drivers can ask follow-up questions, while managers can use operational data to investigate issues such as extended facility stops.

Specifically, Samsara said its voice agents deploy through its dash cams and operate hands-free. The hands-free design is significant because federal rules prohibit commercial drivers from holding a phone while driving, while allowing hands-free phone use. Organizations can configure agents to activate under specified conditions, such as when a vehicle enters or exits a designated geofence.

The company also offers Samsara Assistant, which lets users query operational information through its software dashboard, and Samsara MCP, which connects authorized Samsara data to external AI tools such as ChatGPT, Claude and Microsoft Copilot. Agent Studio adds a way for customers to create custom chat and voice agents for their own workflows.

For freight and logistics operators, the potential benefit is less time spent gathering information, monitoring compliance and answering routine questions. But the announcement offers limited evidence of how widely the agents are being deployed or whether the reported time savings translate into sustained financial returns. Those questions will matter as logistics companies weigh further investment in AI.

Why this matters: 

Freight and logistics companies are looking for ways to turn AI pilots into tools that deliver measurable operational value. Samsara’s usage figures suggest growing engagement with AI agents, but the company has not disclosed how many customers have deployed them or provided detailed methods behind customer-reported efficiency gains. Those metrics will help determine whether AI agents can deliver sustained returns beyond early use cases.

The post Samsara makes AI agent platform generally available, reports 7x adoption growth appeared first on FreightWaves.

Record quarter

September imports totaled 546,000 loaded TEUs, up 19% year over year and 26% above the port’s five-year average. Exports rose 10% to 126,000 loaded TEUs, while the port handled a record 371,000 empty containers as carriers repositioned equipment to Asia.

July through September was the port’s strongest quarter on record at nearly 3 million TEUs, and June through September moved nearly 4 million containers. Through September, 2026 volume stood at nearly 8.1 million TEUs, up about 3% from the same period in 2025.

Seroka said the port expects October volume of about 900,000 TEUs. He cited typhoon-related schedule disruptions in Asia, cargo “roll pools” before China’s national holiday, and continued holiday-season replenishment as reasons volumes should remain elevated.

Trade and sourcing shifts

Seroka in a media briefing said Vietnam is now the port’s second-largest trading partner behind China, while Thailand has entered the port’s top five for the first time. Vietnam-origin volume through Los Angeles has quadrupled over the past decade, he said.

He said China’s share of port business has fallen from 60% to 40%, but added that diversification has been slower than many importers would like. Harvard Business School Professor Willy Shih, the briefing’s guest, said companies are increasingly “optimizing for options” rather than lowest cost, because frequent policy changes make long-term commitments difficult.

Shih said apparent shifts away from China often reflect changes in final assembly rather than a true reduction in upstream dependence, since Vietnam and Mexico still rely heavily on Chinese components. Building comparable supplier networks in Mexico could take about a decade, he said.

Tariffs and outlook

Seroka said tariffs remain a central source of uncertainty, with importers making rapid decisions based on cost, demand, and policy deadlines. He said purchase orders in Asia remain solid, but November and December are difficult to forecast.

He also said ocean carriers and shippers are shifting more cargo to Los Angeles from Panama Canal routings because of drought-related constraints and higher fuel costs tied to Middle East conflict. Shorter, faster transits have become more valuable, he said.

On operations, Seroka said the port is generally flowing smoothly, with truck turns healthy and large vessels turning in about four days. But he flagged rail dwell times as an area requiring close monitoring as the port moves holiday cargo inland.

Read more articles by Stuart Chirls here.

Read more:

Shippers waiting an extra week for US-bound containers

1 million boxes set new Los Angeles port record

Retailers say extended peak shipping season winding down

US West Coast container rates edge lower

Global container volumes hit record 17.46 million TEUs

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Exports totaled 12,707 units, up 144.6% from September 2025, marking a significant acceleration in cross-border commercial vehicle shipments, according to figures from Mexico’s National Institute of Statistics and Geography (INEGI) presented by the National Association of Bus, Truck and Tractor-Trailer Producers (ANPACT).

The September rebound comes as Mexico’s domestic heavy-duty vehicle market continues to struggle with weak sales, delayed fleet replacement decisions and uncertainty surrounding U.S. trade policies.

Rogelio Arzate, executive president of ANPACT, said growing demand from U.S. customers preparing for new emissions standards has been a major factor behind the increase in production and exports.

“The reason why production and exports are growing at the levels they are is precisely because the United States, our main trading partner, is currently undergoing this technology shift,” Arzate said during an October news conference.

Arzate pointed to the transition toward U.S. Environmental Protection Agency emissions standards scheduled for 2027, which is prompting manufacturers and customers to adjust their purchasing and production plans.

“Clients are currently requesting a significant number of units as well, and that is why this production and export toward the United States is increasing,” Arzate said.

The growth highlights Mexico’s role as a major production hub for commercial trucks sold throughout North America, even as manufacturers navigate tariffs, evolving emissions requirements and the upcoming review of the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement.

US remains Mexico’s largest heavy-duty truck export market

Mexico exported 98,394 heavy-duty vehicles during the first nine months of 2026, an increase of approximately 12% compared with the same period last year, according to ANPACT.

Of those shipments, 98,389 were freight vehicles, representing a 12.1% year-over-year increase.

The U.S. remained the industry’s dominant export destination, receiving 90,967 Mexican-built heavy-duty vehicles from January through September, up 9.6% from the comparable 2025 period.

That means the U.S. accounted for approximately 92.5% of Mexico’s heavy-duty vehicle exports during the first nine months of the year.

Canada also recorded gains, with shipments increasing 47.6% year over year through September. During September alone, Mexico exported 680 heavy-duty vehicles to Canada, more than doubling the volume recorded a year earlier.

Other markets showing year-to-date growth included Colombia, Peru, Honduras and Guatemala, while exports to Chile, El Salvador, Ecuador and Costa Rica declined.

The export gains accompanied a broader recovery in Mexican commercial vehicle manufacturing.

During the January-through-September period, Mexican factories produced 117,121 heavy-duty vehicles, an increase of 10.3% from the same period in 2025.

Freight vehicles accounted for 114,443 units of that production.

Diesel-powered vehicles continued to dominate the industry’s manufacturing and export activity. ANPACT reported no electric or natural gas-powered heavy-duty vehicles produced or exported during September.

Domestic truck sales continue to struggle

Despite stronger manufacturing and export activity, Mexico’s domestic heavy-duty vehicle market remained under pressure.

Cristina Vázquez, coordinator of economic studies at the Mexican Association of Automotive Distributors (AMDA), said retail sales totaled 2,980 heavy-duty vehicles in September, down 11.3% from the same month in 2025.

The decline marked the eighth consecutive month of year-over-year decreases in Mexico’s heavy-duty vehicle retail market.

Through the first nine months of 2026, retail sales totaled 25,289 vehicles, a 17.5% decline from the comparable period last year.

Sales of tractor-trailers were particularly weak.

Mexican dealers sold 1,153 tractor-trucks during September, down 14% year over year. Sales of other freight trucks increased slightly, rising 0.5% to 1,378 units.

Combined, the freight vehicle segment recorded 2,531 retail sales, down 6.7% from September 2025.

Passenger vehicle sales, including buses, fell 30.5% to 449 units.

Vázquez said Mexico’s commercial vehicle market has yet to recover from a surge in purchases during 2024, when fleet operators accelerated acquisitions ahead of regulatory changes.

The record sales that year effectively pulled forward demand that otherwise might have occurred in 2025 and 2026.

She also cited uncertainty surrounding U.S. trade policies and the upcoming USMCA review as factors discouraging fleet operators from making major investments.

The market’s continued weakness comes despite signs of improvement in Mexico’s broader economy, including a rebound in fixed investment.

AMDA projected annual heavy-duty vehicle retail sales of approximately 36,051 units in 2026 but cautioned that actual results could fall below that estimate if purchasing activity remains subdued.

ANPACT pushes for tariff relief, fleet renewal programs

Arzate said ANPACT is working with Mexican authorities to address U.S. tariffs on commercial vehicles and components as the North American automotive industry prepares for the USMCA review.

The association is seeking lower tariffs and wants to preserve existing regional rules of origin, which require manufacturers to meet increasing North American content thresholds.

Arzate said manufacturers have made substantial investments in their supply chains and production facilities to comply with the agreement.

He said the industry’s preferred outcome would be eliminating U.S. tariffs imposed under Section 232 of the Trade Expansion Act, although reducing those duties may be a more achievable near-term goal.

“In an ideal world, we should have zero tariffs,” Arzate said.

ANPACT is also working with Mexico’s Ministry of Finance and Ministry of Economy on programs aimed at encouraging domestic fleet replacement.

The initiatives include accelerated depreciation, financing guarantees and a proposed scrappage program designed to remove older commercial vehicles from service.

Arzate said the association is coordinating with Nacional Financiera, Mexico’s development bank, on additional financial incentives to help carriers purchase newer equipment.

September 2026: Key industry figures

Why it matters: The surge underscores Mexico’s importance to North American truck manufacturing as fleets prepare for regulatory changes and trade uncertainty.

More FreightWaves articles by Noi Mahoney:

• Mexico trucker shortages, visa restrictions squeeze cross-border capacity
• Texas trucking firm sued over age limits on drivers
• New Jersey CDL school lawsuit questions evidence behind FMCSA shutdown

The post Mexico truck exports soar 145% as US demand accelerates appeared first on FreightWaves.

• U.S. gross federal debt passed $40 trillion in August 2026; about $32.4 trillion of it is held by the public.
• Net interest on the debt now runs above $1 trillion a year and eats roughly 18.5% of federal revenue, a record.
• Heavy Treasury borrowing competes with private borrowers for capital (“crowding out”), adding upward pressure on interest rates, though the near-term rate story is still mostly inflation and the Fed.
• Freight feels it first: truck loans start around 7.9% to 8.9%, Class 8 orders are down year over year, small carriers are under strain, and warehouse development costs more to finance.
• Anyone planning a fleet replacement cycle or a long-term warehouse lease should model both Fed policy and the structural deficit.

On last week’s Freightonomics show, we discussed CBO rule-of-thumb numbers on how much an increase in the interest rate (as shown by the Effective Federal Funds Rate) would impact the debt. I had in my mind publicly held debt when I said it was somewhere in the neighborhood of $34T. Turns out I transposed a couple numbers and was thinking 34.2 (getting old stinks). It’s actually $32.4T, which is still not good. I looked this morning to see what the total U.S. debt total currently is. That number is worse yet.

Source: usdebtclock.org, 09/23/2026

Gross federal debt crossed $40 trillion in mid-August 2026, months earlier than most forecasters had penciled in, as the Washington Post reported at the time, and it has held in that neighborhood since, touching $40.12 trillion in Treasury’s own daily debt-to-the-penny data as of September 21. Of that total, $32.4 trillion is debt held by the public and $7.7 trillion is intragovernmental, per Congress’ Joint Economic Committee Debt Dashboard. Debt held by the public alone is now running close to 100% of GDP (Debt Clock’s 122.75% is gross federal debt, public plus intragovernmental), and the Congressional Budget Office projects that ratio to reach 120% by 2036 and 175% within thirty years, surpassing the 1946 postwar record of 106% along the way. The debt has roughly doubled in under a decade.

Before we go further, we need to talk about scale. “Trillion” looks fine on paper, but it is difficult to wrap our heads around just how big that number is. To be perfectly honest, one almost needs a metaphor to understand the metaphor, but I’m going to try my best. I don’t want to bore you with too many conversions, but we need to establish some foundations for this. Let’s assume that each dollar of federal debt is one drop of water, 1/20th of a milliliter, or 1/100th of a teaspoon. On my kid’s medicine syringe, 1 tsp = 5 ml; so that math checks out. Following our earlier assumption, that means each teaspoon is a $100 bill of debt. According to World Aquatics, a long-run Olympic-sized swimming pool is 50m x 25m x 2.5m or about 164’1” x 82’ x 8’2”. This means it holds 3,125,000 liters of water, or 825,538 gallons. That means each pool holds 62.5 billion drops. For a federal debt of $40.1T, that means almost 642 pools. Imagine trying to swim that, much less drink that much. If you drank a gallon of water a day, it would take you 2,260 years to down all that. (See what I meant about the metaphor needing a metaphor?)

For freight and logistics, the headline number is not the worrying thing by itself. It’s what a debt stock this large, growing this fast, does to the price of capital, and freight is one of the most capital-intensive, most interest-rate-sensitive sectors in the economy.

Interest on the national debt now tops $1 trillion a year

One small bit of good news is that neither we nor the federal government need to drink that much pool water, at least not all at once. Federal debt gets bought and sold, comes due and gets reissued, on a constant basis. One credit card gets paid off, another gets issued. But, the feds have to pay interest on the money they borrow, just like everyone else. This cost is called “servicing” the debt. And, since the feds both borrow debt and gain interest on balances held (just like in your savings account), the reported numbers are the net of the two.

Net interest on the debt ran $1.02 trillion for the first eleven months of FY26, up 9% from $933 billion over the same span in FY25, and annualized interest costs crossed the $1 trillion mark in August, according to the Peterson Foundation’s interest tracker. Interest is now the second-largest line in the federal budget after Social Security, ahead of defense and Medicare individually and, on a 2025 full-year basis, ahead of the entire defense budget outright, Fortune reported this month. Interest payments now consume roughly 18.5% of federal revenue, above the prior record of 18.4% set in 1991, and CBO projects that share to reach 25% by 2036, with cumulative net interest over the next decade totaling $16.2 trillion. None of that money buys roads, ports, or anything else freight moves for. It is a pure transfer to whoever holds the debt.

How federal debt raises the cost of capital

The 10-year Treasury yield sits at 4.97% as of this week, near a 19-year high, with hawkish Fed commentary on further rate hikes doing a good part of the near-term work, per Trading Economics’ yield tracker. That’s a useful caveat before reaching for the debt as the sole explanation: a meaningful share of the current move is monetary policy responding to inflation, not fiscal policy responding to the deficit. It’s also worth noting the 30-year yield, at roughly 5%, is ordinary by the standards of the last fifty years: it was around 8% in 1991 and over 10% before that, the same Fortune piece notes. Rates this high aren’t historically unprecedented, even if they’re a shock relative to the 2010s.

That said, the deficit is doing its own work on the margin. FY26’s deficit is running around $1.9 to $2 trillion, or 5.8% of GDP, a level CBO itself flags as historically unusual with unemployment below 5%, a point the Peterson Foundation has made as well. That’s the textbook crowding-out setup: the Treasury needs buyers for an ever-larger volume of new debt, and it has to compete for the same pool of savings that would otherwise fund corporate bonds, mortgages, and equipment loans. As economist Ed Yardeni told Fortune, capital flowing into corporate bonds is capital not flowing into Treasuries, and Treasury yields have had to rise to clear the market. Treasury has also doubled its buyback operation size to $4 billion per transaction, a form of direct market management that analysts have described as blurring the line between routine cash management and yield control, which is itself a signal that debt absorption is not frictionless right now.

The academic version of this is the Penn Wharton Budget Model’s capital crowd-out estimates: in a partially open economy where foreign investors finance about 40% of new issuance, each additional trillion dollars of non-productive borrowing is estimated to reduce the private capital stock by roughly 0.65% to 0.78% by mid-century and GDP by 0.23% to 0.28%. Scale that to the trillions being added annually now, and the effect compounds, though it is partly cushioned as long as foreign capital keeps showing up to buy Treasuries.

Where higher interest rates show up in freight and trucking

Equipment financing. Trucking runs on borrowed capital for its rolling stock, and commercial truck loan rates are currently starting around 7.90% to 8.90% for well-qualified borrowers, per LendingTree’s lender survey. That rate environment is a direct pass-through of the Treasury curve plus a lender’s margin. It shows up in the order books: preliminary Class 8 net orders for August 2026 came in around 13,000 to 13,200 units, down 14% to 19% year over year, the eighth straight year-over-year decline, and well below the ten-year average of roughly 23,100 units, Commercial Carrier Journal reported. FTR’s Dan Moyer points to fleets extending truck lifespans and absorbing higher maintenance costs rather than replacing equipment, with high interest rates cited as one factor among several, alongside tariff uncertainty and the 2027 EPA NOx standard. Financing cost isn’t the only story here, but it’s a real one.

Small-carrier attrition. More than twenty trucking and logistics firms filed for bankruptcy in May 2026 alone, FreightWaves reported. The primary drivers FreightWaves points to are erratic demand and elevated operating costs, fuel chief among them, plus margins that stay thin even when spot rates rise, rather than financing costs specifically. But for the segment of the industry running on leased or financed equipment, a higher cost of debt is a background pressure that compounds every other stress carriers are already under, even where it isn’t the headline cause.

Warehouse and DC development. Industrial building loan rates were around 6.58% as of June 2026, per SelectCommercial, and industrial bridge loans are running 7.5% to 9.5% this year, according to PeerSense. That raises the hurdle rate for new distribution center development at exactly the moment e-commerce and nearshoring are pushing demand for well-located industrial space. Slower new supply growth is a second-order effect worth watching for anyone modeling warehouse rents and network footprints over the next few years.

Current market backdrop. For context, SONAR’s national snapshot as of September 22 shows tender rejections (STRI) at 14.21, up about 1% week over week and up 5.6% over the past month; spot rates at $3.43 per mile, up 48.7% year over year; and contract rates at $2.66 per mile, up 15.7% year over year. Diesel, meanwhile, is at a record national average of $6.53 per gallon, but that’s mostly a geopolitical story (the Iran conflict, Russian refinery strikes, a Russian export ban, and historically low inventories), not a debt story, as Logistics Management’s coverage of the EIA data makes clear. It’s worth keeping that distinction clean: rising rates are being driven by a mix of tight capacity, fuel cost pass-through, and the financing backdrop described above, and it would be a mistake to attribute all of it to Washington’s borrowing.

SONAR Ticker: STRI.USA

The honest takeaway for carriers, shippers and brokers

The crowding-out case for freight isn’t that the debt is single-handedly setting truck loan rates or capping warehouse construction. It’s that a structurally larger, faster-growing debt load adds a persistent upward bias to the cost of capital across the economy, and freight, as one of the most financing-dependent, thin-margin sectors there is, feels that bias earlier and more acutely than most. The near-term rate story is still mostly about inflation and the Fed. The multi-decade story, with interest costs on a path to a quarter of federal revenue and debt-to-GDP heading well past the postwar record, is increasingly about the deficit itself. Anyone underwriting a fleet replacement cycle or a ten-year warehouse lease should be modeling both.

Frequently asked questions

How big is the U.S. national debt in 2026?

Gross federal debt passed $40 trillion in mid-August 2026 and stood at about $40.12 trillion on September 21, per Treasury’s Debt to the Penny data. About $32.4 trillion is debt held by the public and $7.7 trillion is intragovernmental.

How much does the federal government pay in interest on the debt?

Net interest ran $1.02 trillion in the first eleven months of FY26, up 9% from the same span in FY25, and annualized interest costs crossed $1 trillion in August. Interest now takes about 18.5% of federal revenue, and CBO projects that share to reach 25% by 2036.

What is crowding out, and how does it affect freight?

Crowding out happens when heavy government borrowing competes with private borrowers for the same pool of savings, pushing interest rates higher. Freight is one of the most capital-intensive, rate-sensitive sectors, so higher borrowing costs show up quickly in truck financing, equipment orders, carrier margins, and warehouse development.

Is the national debt the reason freight rates are rising?

Not primarily. As of September 22, SONAR data shows tender rejections (STRI) at 14.21 and spot rates up 48.7% year over year, driven by tight capacity, record diesel prices, and the financing backdrop. The debt acts as a persistent background pressure on the cost of capital rather than the direct cause of today’s rate moves.

Want to see how capacity, rates, and costs are moving in your lanes? Subscribe to SONAR for real-time freight market data.

The post How National Debt Affects Freight Costs and Financing appeared first on FreightWaves.

The SONAR Pricing Power Index (PPI) fell to 70 this week from 71, its fourth straight weekly decline, but freight carriers still hold the upper hand in rate negotiations. Softer intermodal contract rates and ocean import bookings drove the dip, while truckload tender rejections held steady near 13.9%.

On the PPI’s 0–100 scale, 50 represents a historically balanced market. A reading of 70 means pricing power continues to favor carriers over shippers heading into the fourth quarter.

Key takeaways: SONAR PPI, week of Oct. 12, 2026

• PPI: 70 (down from 71). Fourth consecutive weekly decline, still firmly carrier-favorable.
• Three-month outlook: 76 (down from 79). The model gave back most of last week’s gain but still expects carrier leverage to build into mid-January.
• Capacity is steady. The national tender rejection rate (STRI) was 13.85%, in the 83rd percentile of the past five years.
• Intermodal contract rates fell to $1.61 a mile from $1.68, the single biggest drag on the index.
• Spot rates are holding near July levels. The national spot rate eased to $3.52 a mile from $3.56, still in the 95th percentile.
• Rail volume remains elevated in the 99th percentile as truck-to-rail conversion continues.

What pulled the index lower

Two metrics accounted for most of this week’s decline. Intermodal contract rates dropped to the 36th percentile from the 54th, taking roughly 0.9 points off the score on their own. Ocean import bookings slipped about 2% to the 48th percentile from the 56th, costing about 0.6 points. Small gains in van contract rates, the spot-contract spread, rejections and accepted volume clawed back about half a point.

Capacity: rejections hold in carrier territory

The national tender rejection rate was essentially flat at 13.85% versus 13.84% last week. Weekly rejections have stayed between roughly 13.3% and 14.4% since early August, well below the 17–18% peak of late June but still more than two and a half times the level of two years ago.

The full report explains why SONAR’s model expects rejections to move higher from here rather than hold at current levels.

Demand: rail stays strong, truckload volume stays soft

Rail volume eased less than 1% to 35,575 loaded containers but held in the 99th percentile. Truckload carriers continue to be more selective about the freight they accept, pushing loads onto rail on lanes of roughly 550 to 1,500 miles. Accepted truckload volume rose about 1% but remains near the bottom of its range, in the 13th percentile. Ocean import bookings softened yet are still running above last year’s levels.

Pricing: contract rates catching up to spot

Van contract rates ticked up to $2.74 a mile, moving to the 84th percentile, as carriers reprice contracts upward. The spot-contract spread narrowed to negative $0.11 from negative $0.15. It has been negative since mid-September because spot rates have pulled back from their early-July peak of $3.80 while contract rates keep rising.

What the three-month outlook signals

The three-month PPI outlook trimmed to 76 but remains well above today’s reading of 70. The model projects tender rejections reaching the 93rd percentile by mid-January, with spot rates and rail volume at the very top of their historical ranges. The full report breaks down the forecast metric by metric.

Read the full PPI report

The complete SONAR Pricing Power Index report includes charts and analysis for all eight underlying metrics, plus the full three-month forecast.

Read the full SONAR Pricing Power Index report inside SONAR Research or in FreightWaves Market Monitor.

Look for more data? Request a SONAR demo.

About the SONAR Pricing Power Index

The SONAR Pricing Power Index is a weekly composite score that measures whether carriers or shippers hold negotiating leverage in the U.S. freight market. It combines eight SONAR metrics (tender rejections, accepted volume, rail volume, ocean TEU bookings, spot rates, van contract rates, the spot/contract spread and intermodal contract rates), ranks each against its own five-year weekly history and weights them into a single score from 0 to 100. A 50 is a historically balanced market. Higher readings favor carriers; lower readings favor shippers.

Frequently asked questions

What is the SONAR Pricing Power Index (PPI)? The SONAR PPI is a weekly 0–100 score built from eight SONAR freight metrics that shows whether carriers or shippers hold pricing power. A 50 is balanced; above 50 favors carriers; below 50 favors shippers.

What is this week’s PPI reading? The SONAR PPI was 70 for the week of Oct. 12, 2026, down from 71 the prior week. It was the fourth consecutive weekly decline.

Why did the PPI decline this week? Intermodal contract rates fell to $1.61 a mile from $1.68 and ocean import bookings dropped about 2%. Together they subtracted roughly 1.5 points, partly offset by small gains elsewhere.

Do carriers or shippers have pricing power right now? Carriers. At 70, the PPI sits well above the balanced level of 50, supported by tender rejections near 13.9% and spot rates in the 95th percentile.

What is the PPI outlook for the next three months? The three-month outlook is 76, down from 79 last week. The model expects tender rejections to climb toward the 93rd percentile by mid-January.

The post SONAR Pricing Power Index Slips to 70 as Intermodal Contract Rates Fall appeared first on FreightWaves.

Financial terms of the transaction were not disclosed.

Livingston VTS operates one of Canada’s largest vehicle-hauling networks, using its own fleet of trucks and car haulers. It has seven locations nationally and partners with Canadian National (NYSE: CNI) for transcontinental moves. Its customer base spans auto manufacturers to individuals.

Livingston VTS was an operating unit of Livingston International, one of Canada’s largest customs brokers.

“Livingston VTS has a very solid customer base, dedicated, long-term staff and drivers with assets in most major cities across Canada,” said Chad Doiron, CCT Auto Trans president and CEO, in a news release. “This acquisition positions CCT as the only company in Canada delivering open, enclosed and rail vehicle transport. It provides us with an asset-based, national footprint and the ability to expand in those locations with our current customers.”

Parent company CCT Group of Companies will operate Livingston VTS under CCT Vehicle Transportation Solutions. Livingston VTS employees and drivers will transition to the new operation.

“We value the contributions our VTS associates have made and are proud of the work they have done over the years to support our customers,” said Livingston CEO Robert Smith. “This is a win for both organizations, allowing VTS operations to continue to grow under the management of a company with a long and successful history in vehicle hauling while enabling Livingston to focus on its core business.”

CCT provides finished vehicle transportation with a fleet of 90 open auto carrier units and more than 80 employees, including drivers.

The announcement follows other recent deals in the car haul space.

In August, finished vehicle transportation provider Acertus announced it acquired Fisher Shipping. The same month, Proficient Auto Logistics (NASDAQ: PAL) acquired Hansen & Adkins for $130 million. Jack Cooper closed its doors in early 2025.

Left Lane Associates represented Livingston in the transaction.

Why it matters? This acquisition highlights a clear trend toward consolidation within the car haul sector as operators look to gain scale, expand geographies and integrate service offerings.

More FreightWaves articles by Todd Maiden:

• Cass: TL linehaul rates up 10% in September, shipment counts remain positive
• Yellow Corp., Teamsters settle on WARN Act claims
• LTL survey: Old Dominion, Daylight Transport take home top honors again

The post CCT Auto Trans expands car haul coverage map in Livingston VTS deal appeared first on FreightWaves.

With the weekly average retail diesel benchmark release delayed a day due to the Columbus Day holiday Monday, that lagging indicator is likely to show another decline even as most of the industry discussion these days has been decidedly bullish.

Since the Department of Energy/Energy Information Administration price was most recently published October 6, the futures price of ultra low sulfur diesel (ULSD) has been moving in its usual crazy volatility, a feature of the current market since the U.S. and Israel commenced military action against Iran at the beginning of March. 

But the overall futures market trend in the last week has been higher. ULSD settled October 6 at $4.5694/gallon. Within two days it was more than $4.88/g. It then sunk to a settlement Monday of $4.7232/g, but it wasn’t clear that the Trump diesel deal had any impact; for all of the boasting President Trump did about the transaction, it was only down 1.52 cts/g on the day. (Permitting red dye diesel to be used over the road also has hit a regulatory maze and is largely being dismissed as well).

On Tuesday at 10:45 a.m. EDT, ULSD was turning in another typical day of volatility. It was at $4.8185/g, up 9.53 cts/g, or 2.02%. But it had been as low as $4.6431/g on the day, for a low to high swing at that point of about 17 cts/g. 

Will Russia deal bring relief?

The DOE/EIA price to be released Wednesday will be the first since the Trump administration announced a deal to purchase Russian diesel, a transaction that has largely been dismissed as irrelevant to supply/demand trends (and the Tuesday upward movement at publication time suggests the broader market was dismissing it as well). The deal with Russia also has been criticized by some members of Congress and others as illegal.

While the DOE/EIA number used as the basis for most fuel surcharges is only a weekly number, and can be delayed during a holiday week, there are other price indicators about what’s happening at the pump.

The AAA daily diesel price recently completed a 17-day run where the national average fell every day. At the start of that slide on September 22, the price was $6.5276/g. When it ended Friday, AAA said the average daily diesel price was $6.2785/g. It moved up and down slightly the next four days and Tuesday was largely unchanged from Friday.

The DTS.USA average retail diesel price in SONAR Tuesday was $6.32/g. The latest DOE/EIA diesel price was $6.199/g, effective October 5.

Part of the volatility in the market the past few weeks has been the swing in reports about how much oil is getting through the Strait of Hormuz. Without the one definitive number for the market to agree on, that sort of uncertainty will lead to volatility. 

Shipments need help

But even if the number is high, as long-time analyst Paul Sankey told CNBC in an interview, what’s getting out is not transiting through the free flow of tankers that was the state of play before the war started.

“It’s supplied at enormous military cost,” Sankey said. “That’s how you’re getting the ships through, also with the shuttle tinkering. That’s another level of cost.”

He estimated those costs are probably worth about $35/b.

Under the terms of the diesel deal announced by President Trump, Russia is to immediately supply more than 300,000 metric tons of diesel to the world market. At a conversion rate of 7.45 barrels of oil per metric tonne, the formula used by S&P Global Energy in its calculations, that works out to 2.235 million barrels. 

The rest of the deal would be another 500,000 tonnes in November and 1 million tonnes soon after. At the conversion rate of 7.45 barrels per metric ton, that is 3.725 million b/d for the November quantity and double that for the supply to come after that. 

U.S. daily consumption of all non-jet fuel distillates, according to the most recent report from the EIA, is about 3.65 million b/d. For the members of the OECD, which consists of most Western economies, daily diesel consumption is estimated at about 13 million b/d.

A report from S&P Global Energy quoted Masha Kotkin, a fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, as saying “the amount of diesel Russia can provide would be a drop in the bucket compared to global demand. If you are asking about US diesel prices, I don’t think it’s going to make a difference. It is not very much in the scheme of things.”

It’s the products, not the crude

The move by the Trump administration to secure additional diesel supplies ultimately goes back to the reality that even if flows out of the Strait of Hormuz are increasing, irrespective of whether they only got there through U.S. military support, consumers buy refined products, not crude.

In a separate CNBC interview, Ellen Wald of Transversal Consulting said markets have been able to avoid even higher spikes in price through a wide variety of steps, including drawdowns from strategic stocks. But that has limits.

“We have seen some incredible resilience in the market,” Wald said. “We’ve seen an ability to work around and for the market to find workarounds. But at a certain point, things are going to start to give, and we’re seeing that as prices are creeping higher and higher. Any attempts to bring them down that aren’t actual new sources of supply don’t really last.” 

(Editor’s note: the picture is AI-generated.)

Beyond the latest Russian diesel deal, and before that the agreement by G7 nations earlier this month to release additional strategic stocks, reportedly after a U.S. threat to implement a diesel export ban if they did not, there are the broader stock releases that were agreed upon by the members of the International Energy Agency in March.

IEA executive director Fatih Birol on Saturday tried to give a push to the ongoing releases and have them go faster.

“Members that have not yet fully delivered the volumes pledged under the March Collective Action look to see if they are able to accelerate the remaining releases to fulfil this prior commitment, prioritising diesel,” he said in his statement. He also noted that “some members have already released greater volumes than they initially pledged in March.”

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Cass’ TL linehaul index, which tracks rates excluding fuel and accessorial surcharges, increased 10.1% year over year, according to Tuesday data from the payments management company. The dataset was up 0.6% from August to the highest absolute reading in four years.

The linehaul index is historically heavily weighted to contract rates but includes for-hire spot rates. September marked the 21st straight month of y/y growth (12.9% higher on a two-year-stacked comparison).

The report noted the sequential growth rate was 30 basis points below the year-to-date average. It cited a pullback in spot rates and fewer contractual bids “this time of year.”

“Even as spot rates slow with modest sequential declines, the much larger contract market is still adjusting higher.”

Truckload carriers on hand at investor conference last month noted they remained in a position of strength this bid season. Executives believe that the capacity exodus is growing, not slowing, and that the regulatory crackdown will likely remove thousands more unsafe operators. Management teams were also unfazed earlier this summer when the spot market entered its typical seasonal slowdown.

Werner Enterprises’ (NASDAQ: WERN) third-quarter guidance calls for a 10% to 13% y/y increase in rate per total mile at its one-way fleet. Earnings season starts on Thursday when J.B. Hunt Transport Services (NASDAQ: JBHT) reports results after the market closes.

Freight shipments recorded by Cass increased 1.9% y/y in September. The y/y increase was the second consecutive following 42 months of declines. Shipments were up 2.3% from August (1.4% higher seasonally adjusted).

All domestic transportation modes are included in the index, with TL and less-than-truckload shipments representing the bulk of the dataset. Road-to-rail conversion has weighed on the trucking-centric index in recent months as fuel prices have surged.

“With modest retail and industrial growth, and some inventory restocking as container imports surge, freight demand is recovering,” the report said. “The combination of a smaller private fleet and rising new equipment sales also supports higher for-hire volumes.”

U.S. manufacturing activity remained in positive territory for a ninth straight month during September. The Institute for Supply Management’s Manufacturing PMI registered a 54.5 reading, with the new orders dataset logging a 55.3 reading. (A reading above 50 for the index signals expansion, while one below 50 indicates contraction.)

Cass’ shipments index is forecast to increase 4% y/y in October, assuming normal seasonal patterns hold.

Cass’ expenditures index, which measures total freight spend including fuel, jumped 20.4% y/y (up 6.7% sequentially). An increase in shipments, higher freight rates and surging diesel prices drove the index higher. Diesel prices were up 68% y/y in September, 15% higher than August.

The expenditures index is expected to increase 23% y/y in October.

Data used in the indexes comes from freight bills paid by Cass (NASDAQ: CASS). Cass processes $37 billion in freight payables annually on behalf of customers.

Why it matters? September data from Cass highlights a continued surge in TL contract rates, with only modestly improving demand. The dataset confirms the impact strict regulatory enforcement is having on non-compliant capacity.

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The post Cass: TL linehaul rates up 10% in September, shipment counts remain positive appeared first on FreightWaves.

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The single-vehicle crash occurred at approximately 3:08 a.m. Oct. 12 near milepost 62 in Ada County, along the eastbound lanes of I-84, according to Idaho State Police.

Authorities said the driver was operating a 2024 International semi-truck pulling a trailer when the vehicle left the roadway, traveled along an embankment for a short distance and overturned.

The driver was transported by ground ambulance to a local hospital, where he later died from his injuries.

Authorities said the driver was not wearing a seat belt at the time of the crash.

The driver’s identity had not been released in the initial police report.

The crash blocked the right eastbound lane of I-84 for approximately three hours while emergency crews responded and investigators examined the scene.

Authorities have not disclosed what caused the truck to leave the roadway. The incident remains under investigation.

Interstate 84 is a major east-west freight corridor connecting Idaho with Oregon and Utah, serving commercial trucking operations throughout the Pacific Northwest and Intermountain West.

Fatal truck crashes remain a national safety concern

Federal crash data show thousands of fatal crashes involving large commercial trucks each year, although complete figures for January through September 2026 are not yet available.

The Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration’s preliminary Motor Carrier Management Information System data, updated Aug. 28, recorded 1,607 fatal crashes involving large trucks nationwide in 2026, resulting in 1,768 deaths. 

The figures represent crashes reported through the agency’s available data snapshot, not a complete January-through-September tally.

For comparison, FMCSA’s database lists 3,784 fatal large-truck crashes and 4,209 fatalities for calendar year 2025. Those figures also remain provisional and subject to revision.

The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration reported that 5,340 people died in crashes involving large trucks in 2024, down 2.5% from 2023. About 70% of those killed were occupants of other vehicles.

In Idaho, preliminary figures released Sept. 11 by the Idaho Transportation Department showed 150 traffic deaths statewide in 2026, compared with 174 during the corresponding period in 2025. Those totals include all vehicle types, not just commercial trucks.

The department identified failure to wear a seat belt, failure to maintain a lane, impairment, inattention and speeding among the leading contributing circumstances in fatal crashes statewide.

Investigators in Idaho have not determined whether any of those factors, other than the driver’s reported lack of a seat belt, played a role in Monday’s crash.

Why it matters: The fatal rollover highlights the risks commercial drivers face in single-vehicle crashes and the importance of seat belt use.

More FreightWaves articles by Noi Mahoney:

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Average vessel delay rose to 6 days across all arrivals, up 2.4 days since the start of the second quarter.

The analyst said the deterioration reflects the cumulative effects of powerful typhoons that struck Asia from July through early September, combined with bunker-cost pressure and strong peak-season demand. It does not expect a firm floor in October as Asian trade disruption continues.

Asia trades deteriorate

Asia-linked services recorded some of the worst performance, with the Far East-to-Europe trade collapsing to 4% on-time and an average delay of 9.9 days. That was the lane’s worst monthly result since September 2021, when on-time performance reached 3% during the Covid pandemic.

Asia-to-North America reliability was unchanged at a dismal 20%, but average delay increased 0.8 days month over month to 6.9 days. Xeneta said Chinese port congestion is increasingly translating into berth-arrival delays for shippers in Europe and North America.

The rate environment compounded the operational pressure. Xeneta’s spot-market average for China to the U.S. West Coast reached $7,717 per FEU in early October, more than four times the $1,778 recorded in September 2025 and 8% above the start of September 2026. Long-term rates rose 26% month over month to $3,649 per FEU on Oct. 1.

Carriers post delay highs

Every carrier tracked by Xeneta posted its highest average delay of the past 12 months in September. Four carriers also reached 12-month lows in on-time arrivals: CMA CGM at 30%, Cosco (1919.HK) at 18%, Hapag-Lloyd at 45% and Yang Ming (2609.TW) at 4%.

The performance spread between carriers narrowed to 43 percentage points, from 45 points in August. Maersk (OTC: AMKBY), the month’s most reliable carrier, fell from 51% to 47%, while Yang Ming marked the low end at 4%.

Xeneta said the Gemini network of Maersk and Hapag-Lloyd — launched on a premise of on-time performance — declined more sharply than other alliances, falling from 70% on-time in June to 40% in September. Its weekly on-time rate dropped from 62% in the first week of August to 34% in the week ended Sept. 28, and partial data for the week of Oct. 5 showed 28%.

Singapore congestion doubles

Port congestion spread downstream from China into Southeast Asia. Singapore’s average daily vessel queue nearly doubled to 22 ships, while average wait time rose from 1.9 to 3.1 days, as the transshipment hub absorbed effects of congestion at Chinese gateways.

Southeast Asia recorded a 2.0-day average vessel wait, with 23% of vessels waiting. Africa remained the most congested region despite improvement, with a 2.5-day average wait and 32% of vessels waiting.

In Northeast Asia, 30% of vessels at port were waiting, and average wait rose 0.3 days to 1.6 days. Shanghai’s anchorage queue shortened from 101 to 86 vessels per day, although average wait lengthened from 1.9 to 2.7 days.

Capacity cuts may increase

Carriers blanked — cancelled or delayed — only 6% of planned capacity on Far East-to-Europe and 8% on Far East-to-North America in September, their third-lowest blanking levels in 21 months, as delays and pre-Golden Week demand absorbed available capacity.

However, announced blank sailings are set to rise in October to at least 17% of planned capacity on Far East-to-Europe and 13% on Far East-to-North America. Planned Far East-to-Europe capacity in October is the highest of any month in a 22-month window, leaving limited slack to offset delays through cancellations.

Xeneta advised shippers to allow more lead time for October bookings and to ask carriers which services will be protected from capacity cuts. It also warned that reliability, port rotations, unscheduled calls and capacity management should be central to carrier accountability discussions ahead of 2027 contract tenders.

Read more articles by Stuart Chirls here.

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Cory will work with the leadership team to ensure a smooth transition, the company said, and will provide transition services through May 8, 2027.

Rather than immediately naming a successor, CSX (NASDAQ: CSX) said two senior operations executives will now report directly to President and Chief Executive Steve Angel:

• Doug Ryhorchuk, senior vice president of Operations, who oversees transportation, engineering, and mechanical functions. He spent nearly four decades at CN before joining CSX in 2024.
• Casey Albright, senior vice president of Network Operations and Service Design, who has nearly 30 years at CSX.

Angel credited Cory with helping drive safety and productivity to record levels while developing a strong bench of operations leaders. 

“Mike has dedicated his career to the railroad industry and has made significant contributions to CSX, our customers, and our employees,” Angel said in the company’s announcement.

Cory previously served as executive vice president and COO at CN (NYSE: CNI), retiring from that railroad in 2019 before joining CSX four years later.

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

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The AD1 goes into Bot Auto trucks starting in the first quarter of 2027. Bot Auto expects the full hardware bill of materials for its autonomy system, compute and sensors included, to run $50,000 per truck.

That is three to eight times less than other systems, Bot Auto said. The comparison rests on “Self-Driving Truck ROI: Costs and Benefits Explained,” a Heavy Duty Journal cost guide that puts a complete autonomous truck at $350,000 to $600,000, a range the company said implies $150,000 to $400,000 for the autonomy system alone.

Bot Auto now moves about 350 loads a month across Texas. The company said revenue grew 270% from May to August as it increased its focus on commercial freight and fleet utilization. In April it ran its first fully humanless commercial load, a 231-mile overnight trip on Interstate 45 from Houston to Hutchins, just south of Dallas, with no safety driver, remote operator or in-cab observer.

It had 12 tractors at the time of that run. Founder and CEO Xiaodi Hou has tied fleet growth to the computer inside each truck.

“Standard servers can take you a long way during development, but they are not the architecture we want to replicate across hundreds or thousands of commercial trucks,” Hou said.

Bot Auto’s driverless trucks run today on a single Nvidia GeForce RTX 4090 per server, a setup Hou credits to the efficiency of the company’s neural networks.

“The AD1 takes that efficiency into a production automotive platform with the compute, safety, reliability, and manufacturing characteristics required for scale with better unit-economics per truck,” he said.

Rated for Class 8 duty

The AD1 is rated for continuous operation from minus 40 to 85 degrees Celsius (minus 40 to 185 degrees Fahrenheit) and built for the shock and vibration of a heavy-duty chassis. It runs on Nvidia DRIVE AGX Thor and Nvidia Halos OS and delivers up to 2,000 FP4 teraflops of AI compute.

The unit carries two Thor compute domains and two safety controllers, each on independent primary and backup power, so the system can isolate a single fault without going offline. Lenovo designed it to support the ISO 26262 functional-safety standard up to ASIL D and the ISO 21434 automotive cybersecurity standard.

Dedicated liquid cooling holds performance steady under sustained load. Lenovo also folded vehicle control, networking and inertial sensing into the one box, which cuts the parts count on every truck.

Other driverless truck developers are building on the same Nvidia hardware. Aurora said in January 2025 that its primary computer would use a dual DRIVE Thor configuration, and in September Einride agreed to build its next-generation driver on Hyperion.

Lenovo’s vehicle computing business

Lenovo builds the AD1 at automotive volumes. Its other announced AD1 partners include WeRide, whose GXR robotaxi debuted a computing platform built on the controller in July 2025, and autonomous-driving company Nuro, which announced a collaboration with Lenovo in March 2025.

“Our collaboration with Bot Auto marks another milestone for Lenovo Vehicle Computing in the U.S. as we expand our footprint in the critical commercial transportation market,” said Peter Xu, vice president of Lenovo and general manager of vehicle computing.

Bot Auto and Lenovo plan to show the system at CES 2027 in Las Vegas in January.

Deployment widens across Texas and the Southwest

Bot Auto will expand the AD1 rollout as it adds autonomous capacity across Texas and the Southwest. The company has set a goal of 1 billion autonomous miles by 2031.

Until now, the company said, it has held back significant capital from fleet expansion while it validated its driving system and its freight operation. Hou said in September 2025 that Bot Auto had spent $41 million to reach its first driverless run, a hub-to-hub validation trip in Houston.

“We made a deliberate choice not to scale our fleet until the compute platform itself is scalable,” Hou said.

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“Fleet teams are pressed for time to configure reports and piece together answers,” said Avneesh Agrawal, CEO of Netradyne, in the announcement. “Agents give managers an easy and scalable way to draw on Netradyne Intelligence. They describe what matters and agents bring it to them, with people staying in control. The impact is already clear: customers created more than 250 agents within a month of release.”

The San Diego-based driver safety and fleet management company unveiled Netradyne Intelligence in June, built on more than 30 billion miles and 150 billion minutes of real-world driving data. Agrawal said then that fleets had invested in visibility into their operations, but “the real challenge now is execution.” Coaching and incident response agents were available at launch. Netradyne added a Collision Management Agent and an MCP connector in August.

At the June launch, Chief Product Officer Pramod Akkarachittor said the agents “reason about context, execute multi-step workflows, and follow through on behalf of managers.” Tuesday’s update lets managers decide what that work is.

Campaign Agent scores driver competitions

The new Campaign Agent turns coaching into a competition. Managers choose the safety priorities and the driver groups. The agent runs the scoring, daily standings and driver updates. Comparisons from before, during and after a campaign show where drivers improved and where they still need support.

The new agent joins two ready-made agents that Netradyne says take on fleets’ most time-consuming safety work. The Collision Management Agent handles incidents from first report to resolution. The Coaching Agent, according to the June release, identifies which drivers need attention based on goals managers set. It prepares each session with driver history, top alerts and a recommended improvement plan.

Managers build their own agents

To build a custom agent, a manager describes in plain language what it should do, such as compiling a shortlist of drivers for recognition or preparing fuel-efficiency coaching packs. The manager then picks the driver groups, conditions and schedule.

The agent delivers updated findings and recommendations in the Netradyne portal or by email. That gives each customer analysis shaped to its own priorities without rebuilding reports, the company said.

Answers from live fleet data

Managers can also ask questions about their fleet and get answers from live data. Follow-up questions dig into what changed and why, broken out by driver, group, behavior or time period. When an answer proves useful, the manager can turn it into an agent that runs on a schedule.

Those questions also work outside Netradyne’s portal. The MCP connector, which Netradyne describes as a secure bridge to fleet-specific insights, extends fleet context into AI tools such as ChatGPT and Claude. Teams can ask questions and build agents inside those tools.

Netradyne will show the capabilities at the American Trucking Associations’ Management Conference & Exhibition, which runs Oct. 17-20 at the Charlotte Convention Center in Charlotte, N.C.

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Executives at logistics provider TRAFFIX told FreightWaves driver shortages, regulatory restrictions and rising operating costs could limit the number of trucks available to haul goods between the U.S., Mexico and Canada.

The challenges are being compounded by higher interest rates and tighter lending conditions that are discouraging new trucking companies from entering the market, preventing the kind of capacity expansion that followed the freight rate surge during the COVID-19 pandemic.

“We’re only four or five years later and we’re not seeing that,” Alex Fuller, vice president of commercial intelligence at TRAFFIX, told FreightWaves in an interview. “And it’s like, OK, well, what’s different?”

Fuller said two factors stand out: tighter regulations governing who can operate commercial trucks and the increased cost of purchasing equipment.

During the pandemic, prospective owner-operators could finance trucks with relatively inexpensive loans and government stimulus funds. Today, Fuller said, financing costs can reach 8% to 9%, making it much more difficult for drivers to enter the industry or established carriers to expand their fleets.

“Because of that, yeah, rates are going to stay higher for longer,” Fuller said. “And we’re not going to see the immediate drop like we saw a couple of years ago in rates.”

The comments follow the release of TRAFFIX’s October North American Cross-Border Index, which measures freight market pressures along the U.S.-Mexico and U.S.-Canada corridors.

The index registered 57 for Canada and 54 for Mexico, down one point each from September. Readings above 50 indicate tighter market conditions, including elevated costs, limited truck capacity and regulatory challenges.

Although shipment volumes remain relatively soft, TRAFFIX said available truck capacity has shown little improvement, leaving shippers with fewer alternatives when contracted carriers are unable to cover loads.

The index tracks four components — transportation costs, capacity, demand and trade policy — using more than 10 economic, freight and trade indicators.

Fuller said the index relies primarily on publicly available government and trade data, which TRAFFIX compares with its internal freight activity to assess whether the findings reflect conditions experienced by its customers and carriers.

As of Oct. 11, FreightWaves SONAR’s Outbound Tender Volume Index (STVI.LRD) for Laredo has climbed sharply from 39.95 in mid-September to 51.95, indicating a solid uptick in cross-border freight demand. This demand push is reflected in the SONAR Weighted Rejection Index (SWRI), which flipped from -0.74 last week to +0.65, confirming that capacity in Laredo and its adjacent areas is actively tightening.

Mexico faces driver shortages, visa restrictions

Patricio Gutierrez, TRAFFIX’s Manzanillo, Mexico-based carrier sales manager, said the country’s cross-border trucking industry is confronting a combination of driver shortages, U.S. immigration restrictions and structural bottlenecks at border crossings.

“I think that the main issue here is a lack of qualified drivers,” Gutierrez said, pointing to Mexican drivers holding valid B-1 visas and the limited number of trucks authorized to operate in the United States.

He said cross-border operations require drivers and equipment that meet specific regulatory requirements, reducing the number of carriers able to handle international shipments.

Border delays and longer transit times further restrict usable capacity by keeping trucks occupied longer, even when overall shipment demand remains relatively stable.

Gutierrez also highlighted Mexico’s longstanding difficulties recruiting younger truck drivers.

He said many drivers are in their 50s and 60s, while younger workers are reluctant to enter the profession because of security concerns and relatively low compensation.

“The shortage of drivers in Mexico is a real problem,” Gutierrez said.

The capacity constraints are especially important at major commercial gateways such as Laredo, Texas, where large concentrations of cross-border freight make certain routes particularly sensitive to equipment and driver availability.

A separate October freight market report from C.H. Robinson supports concerns about Mexico’s shrinking pool of qualified cross-border drivers.

The company’s Edge Report said U.S. authorities have withdrawn visas from approximately 25,000 Mexican freight drivers, citing Mexican trucking association CANACAR.

C.H. Robinson said continued B-1 visa withdrawals and temporary border disruptions reduced usable truck capacity during September, even as load-to-truck ratios and freight volumes remained relatively stable at major Texas crossings.

The report also highlighted restrictions on southbound empty-truck crossings at Eagle Pass and Brownsville, Texas, from Sept. 9-14.

During the disruptions, daily commercial crossings reportedly fell from approximately 1,000 to between 300 and 400, while nearly 700 tractors were stranded on the U.S. side of the border.

Some carriers were forced to reposition equipment through Laredo, adding mileage, fuel costs and transit time.

C.H. Robinson warned that qualified driver availability could tighten further as fourth-quarter shipping volumes increase.

Canada carriers struggle with imbalanced freight flows

On the U.S.-Canada border, TRAFFIX executives said trade tensions and changing freight patterns are creating a different set of challenges.

Lance Halliday, TRAFFIX’s Toronto-based regional director of carrier sales, said trucking companies are struggling with an imbalance between freight moving from Canada into the United States and shipments returning north.

He said demand for Canadian exports remains relatively strong, but weaker south-to-north freight flows make it difficult for drivers to find return loads.

“There’s still a severe lack of inbound,” Halliday said. “So there’s not a lot of freight coming in from the U.S. into Canada right now.”

That imbalance has made some carriers unwilling to accept shipments into certain U.S. markets without significantly higher compensation.

Halliday singled out Florida as an especially challenging destination because drivers may have to wait days for a return shipment or travel hundreds of miles empty to find another load.

“Florida is a no-go zone,” Halliday said. “Guys just won’t go because they’re getting stuck down there for days.”

He said carriers are also increasingly reluctant to accept freight into markets where the cost of returning empty equipment could eliminate profits.

The imbalance is contributing to rising transportation rates, particularly on lanes where shippers have limited carrier alternatives.

Halliday said rates on some corridors have climbed 25% to 35% over roughly the past month to month and a half, although he did not identify specific lanes or provide a marketwide average.

Contract freight shifts toward spot market

TRAFFIX executives also described a growing shift toward transactional freight as carriers reject previously negotiated contract rates.

Halliday said some carriers are returning freight commitments because rates established months earlier no longer cover their operating costs.

That has forced shipments farther down shippers’ carrier-selection lists, increasing reliance on spot-market transportation.

“We’re seeing a lot of that contractual freight handed back by their primary carriers,” Halliday said.

He said the volume of transactional freight opportunities TRAFFIX is seeing on the Canadian side has surpassed levels experienced during the COVID-19 freight market, based on his observations of the company’s operations.

Gutierrez said similar conditions are emerging in Mexico, where rising diesel costs and capacity restrictions are pushing carriers to seek higher rates.

He said some Mexican shippers remain reluctant to accept higher transportation costs, creating tension between carriers trying to maintain profitability and customers accustomed to lower contract pricing.

Both executives said the situation reflects broader structural challenges rather than a temporary increase in diesel prices.

Halliday pointed to higher driver wages, insurance expenses and reduced access to financing as additional pressures preventing carriers from expanding.

Capacity constraints could extend into 2027

Looking ahead, TRAFFIX executives said they expect cross-border truck capacity to remain tight through the end of 2026 and into next year.

Halliday said he does not expect significant relief over the next three to six months, citing continuing driver shortages, trade uncertainty and seasonal capacity reductions.

“I think that in the short term, it’s going to continue to tighten up,” Halliday said. “I don’t think that there’s any way that this changes over the next three to six months.”

Gutierrez said Mexico faces similar longer-term challenges unless the industry finds ways to recruit drivers and improve cross-border operating efficiency.

Fuller said the lack of new capacity entering the market could keep freight rates elevated even without a substantial recovery in demand.

Unlike the pandemic-era trucking boom, when high rates encouraged new carriers to purchase equipment and enter the industry, today’s financing environment is discouraging that response.

Why it matters: Shippers face the prospect of elevated freight rates and fewer carrier options even as shipment demand remains relatively soft, TRAFFIX executives say.

More FreightWaves articles by Noi Mahoney:

• Texas trucking firm sued over age limits on drivers
• New Jersey CDL school lawsuit questions evidence behind FMCSA shutdown
• TA Services acquires 2 Texas cross-border carriers, adds 133 trucks

The post Mexico trucker shortages, visa restrictions squeeze cross-border capacity appeared first on FreightWaves.

Louisiana Economic Development awarded the loan under its FastSites program, helping close a funding gap on the $7 million project. 

The port, on a 400-acre site, has direct access to the Ouachita River and U.S. Route 165, and is adjacent to UP’s (NYSE: UNP)Monroe Subdivision. Columbia is about 30 miles south of Monroe, La.

“For a rural port like Columbia, FastSites provides critical gap financing that allows us to turn committed infrastructure funding into a project under construction,” Columbia Port Commission President Darron McGuffee said in a release. He pointed out that the project already has funding from the Louisiana Department of Transportation and Development, as well as federal funding through the Delta Regional Authority’s Community Infrastructure Fund.

“The FastSites investment gives the port the financial flexibility needed to keep the project moving and maintain our construction schedule,” McGuffee said. “More importantly, this rail spur will provide public access to Union Pacific’s main line for our region, creating new transportation opportunities for existing businesses while strengthening our ability to attract future industrial investment like Louisiana Green Fuels.”

“Adding rail access at the Port of Columbia opens another path for businesses across Northeast Louisiana to move goods and reach markets,” state Sen. Glen Womack said. “That kind of connectivity strengthens our ability to support the industries already operating here while creating more possibilities for companies looking to invest in the region.”

The port expects to open the project for bids in November. Construction is expected to begin in the first quarter of 2027 and be completed by 2028.

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The post State loan to aid Louisiana port’s new rail connection appeared first on FreightWaves.

Throughput exceeded the previous monthly record, set in July 2025, by more than 20,000 TEUs. The port handled nearly 3 million TEUs from July through September, its busiest quarter, and nearly 4 million TEUs from June through September, its strongest four-month stretch.

Volumes that reflected an extended peak season on reliable demand defied economic uncertainty, rising interest rates, chaotic tariff policy, and assorted geopolitics.

Loaded imports reached 545,696 TEUs in September, up 19% from a year earlier. Loaded exports increased 10% to 125,751 TEUs, while empty-container volume totaled approximately 371,206 TEUs, the highest monthly total in port history.

Through the first nine months of 2026, Los Angeles handled nearly 8.1 million TEUs, more than 3% ahead of the same period a year ago.

Port Executive Director Gene Seroka in a media briefing attributed the cargo surge to resilient consumer demand, inventory replenishment and shippers allocating more freight to Los Angeles amid challenges along other global trade routes.

“September was a month for the record books, and it was part of an extraordinary run for the Port of Los Angeles,” Seroka said.

Seroka said tariffs had fallen from levels seen earlier this year, providing importers with greater cost certainty and allowing them to replenish inventories. He also cited continued consumer spending and challenges along the Suez and Panama Canal routes as contributors to the record cargo run.

Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass said the port’s performance reinforced its role as a local and national economic engine. She praised Seroka’s leadership and members of the International Longshore and Warehouse Union for their work handling the cargo.

“Los Angeles is strong because our Port is strong, and none of this would be possible without our talented, dedicated, and skilled workforce,” Bass said.

Read more articles by Stuart Chirls here.

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The post 1 million boxes set new Los Angeles port record appeared first on FreightWaves.

Freight fraud can leave victims wondering whether anyone else has faced the same attack. Stolen identities, deceptive pickups and double brokering can strike businesses across transportation. Many companies never publicly discuss what happened afterward. Freight Fraud Awareness Day wants to change that.

Freight Fraud Awareness Day returns Oct. 14 with advocates across transportation and insurance. This year’s campaign focuses on education, awareness and advocacy. Organizers encourage open dialogue about criminal schemes, industry impacts and available prevention resources. Verified Carrier, Truckstop, Northland Insurance, Travelers, GenLogs, FreightValidate and Freight Bites support the effort.

Andrey Drotenko, president of strategic relations at Verified Carrier, discussed the campaign in a September interview with FreightWaves. “It’s a moment to slow down, compare notes, and just act together,” Drotenko explained. Participants can discuss incidents without revealing safeguards criminals might exploit. That approach allows useful intelligence to circulate while protecting sensitive procedures.

This marks the third annual Freight Fraud Awareness Day. FreightWaves covered the inaugural campaign in October 2024. Early efforts focused on building awareness around transportation scams. Organizers plan new opportunities for professionals to share expertise in coming years.

‘It’s not just me’

Drotenko compared fraud victims with friends discovering they share similar struggles. Another person might reveal an experience that suddenly feels familiar. “Oh, it’s not just me,” he recalled. That realization reflects the campaign’s push for more open dialogue across transportation.

Gary Thomas, manager of risk and mitigation at SPG Cargo & Logistics, has watched criminal tactics evolve. Traditional offenders once needed physical proximity to targeted freight. Digital tools now allow identity manipulation from almost anywhere. Modern security providers must counter methods that barely existed a decade ago.

“We went from a traditional bad guy waiting at the truck stop,” Thomas explained. Criminals can now “digitally manipulate somebody’s identity and the supply chain.” Technology has changed the threat facing commercial transportation. “By working together we hope to bridge that gap.”

Criminal methods keep changing

Retired Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Detective Gerardo Pachuca has watched offenders exploit transportation knowledge. “Cargo theft has been exploding,” Pachuca explained. Some criminals understand legitimate operations before turning that experience against businesses. “They know how to exploit and misuse those loopholes on the dark side of the industry.”

Federal investigators are seeing similar threats. The FBI’s Memphis Cargo Theft Task Force has warned that cyber-enabled schemes allow criminals to identify valuable shipments before arriving for pickup. Those tactics demonstrate how deception can turn legitimate freight movements into theft opportunities.

Chuck Forsaith, vice president of the Pharmaceutical Cargo Security Coalition, has witnessed another shift. Earlier cases often involved thieves physically taking merchandise. Modern schemes increasingly rely on deception instead. Pharmaceutical losses create additional risks when stolen products return to legitimate commerce.

“Back then it was almost exclusively what we would call straight theft,” Forsaith explained. Today’s methods depend more heavily on some form of fraud. Criminals may ignore required quality controls after taking pharmaceutical products. “That can significantly impact the integrity of the products once they are reintroduced into a supply chain.”

Freight Fraud Awareness Day gives transportation professionals an opportunity to bring those experiences into the open. Companies can discuss what happened without exposing every security measure protecting their operations. Those accounts may reveal threats another business has never encountered. They can also remind victims of something much simpler.

It’s not just me.

Why It Matters

Criminals benefit when fraud stays hidden. Sharing real incidents can expose patterns, close information gaps and help stop the same scheme from hitting someone else.

CFCO

In my opinion, awareness matters most when professionals know what to do next. The FreightWaves Certified Fraud Compliance Officer course turns fraud prevention into a repeatable verification process. Training helps teams question inconsistencies, recognize warning signs and make stronger decisions before freight moves. A consistent approach can stop one overlooked detail from becoming an expensive loss.

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

Man gets 2 years for $3.5M Amazon fraud using 23 trucking accounts – FreightWaves

LAPD uncovers $1M in stolen BNSF and Union Pacific rail cargo at Los Angeles–area shoe retailer – FreightWaves

Thieves clone $60K shipment, redirect 41,000 pounds of glycerin in Illinois – FreightWaves

The post Freight Fraud Awareness Day returns as strategic cargo theft reshapes trucking appeared first on FreightWaves.

Many transportation executives seem to place vehicle compliance in the same mental category as expense reports and badge renewals. It’s necessary, but it’s largely forgettable and delegated to the back office. That might have made sense when fleets were smaller and simpler, but it breaks down as soon as a fleet crosses state lines, adds vehicles faster than it adds people, or absorbs another company’s assets through acquisition.

Registrations, titles, taxes, permits, credentials, filings, and renewals aren’t paperwork about the fleet. They’re the legal condition the fleet operates under. A truck that’s fueled, inspected, and road-ready but sitting on an expired registration isn’t a viable fleet asset for a customer waiting on a load. It’s unavailable for an inexcusable reason.

Scale and geography multiply the complexity of vehicle compliance in ways that are easy to underestimate. Every additional state brings its own agency, its own deadlines, its own exceptions, and its own system quirks. A fleet that operates in five states is managing five sets of rules that rarely line up; a fleet that operates in thirty is managing a level of administrative complexity that requires a lot more than simple back-office delegation.

“Leading fleets are not focused on compliance alone; they are focused on operational continuity,” said Stephanie Schmidt, Vice President of Client Service at J. J. Keller & Associates, Inc. “Expert-led vehicle compliance can reduce administrative burden, improve visibility into fleet assets, and help ensure critical compliance activities are executed consistently. As an example, outsourcing vehicle compliance allows internal teams to stay focused on customers, growth, and day-to-day operations rather than managing complex regulatory processes.”

Executives often underestimate how directly administrative compliance affects asset availability. A vehicle that is mechanically ready but administratively unable to operate is still an unavailable asset, turning what appears to be a paperwork issue into an operational and financial one.

Compliance work absorbs more than clerical hours. It requires staff who understand deadline cadences across jurisdictions, who can validate data against agency requirements, who know how to chase down an agency that’s slow to respond, and who can handle the exceptions that don’t fit the standard process. That expertise takes years to build, and once it’s built, it’s rarely replaceable on short notice.

The real cost shows up as opportunity cost. Every hour an experienced operations or safety employee spends untangling a title problem or a registration exception is an hour not spent on customers, growth initiatives, or operational priorities. Executives are left with a narrower set of choices than they’d like: add headcount, pull people off higher-value work, accept slower turnaround on renewals and filings, or absorb more risk.

“Vehicle compliance extends well beyond renewals and registrations,” Schmidt said. “Each jurisdiction has its own requirements, timelines, processes, and regulatory nuances, making experienced professionals and established agency relationships difficult to replace. As organizations face turnover or staffing changes, having consistent access to dedicated specialists helps preserve consistency, reduce risk, and keep fleets operating legally and efficiently.”

For growing fleets, the question is less whether compliance work gets done and more whether the organization has a sustainable model for executing it at scale.

The fleets most exposed to compliance risk are often the ones that are otherwise performing well. They’re growing quickly, adding lanes, or expanding into new states. An inefficient process that worked cleanly when the fleet had a few hundred units and operated in a handful of states can show weak points at a few thousand units across dozens of jurisdictions. More vehicles mean more transactions, more renewal cycles, more exceptions, and more agency systems to navigate, each with its own quirks and requirements.

Growth by acquisition compounds the problem. Research from the J. J. Keller Center for Market Insights found that 94% of transportation organizations encountered unexpected risks or complexities during a merger or acquisition, with documentation and recordkeeping among the most common challenges. An additional 93% reported significant concerns during the transaction process, including operational disruption and delays. Vehicle compliance often sits at the center of those risks because acquired assets must be integrated into existing compliance processes without interrupting operations.

“One of the less visible challenges of an acquisition is ensuring every acquired asset can continue operating legally and without interruption,” Schmidt said. “Vehicle compliance becomes a business continuity issue when fleets inherit different registration practices, title-management processes, and state requirements. Experienced partners and proven processes can help protect operational continuity during periods of rapid growth and change.”

Institutional knowledge is one of the hardest things to scale. The person who knows why a particular state handles a filing differently, or which agency contact to call when a renewal stalls, is difficult to replace, and nearly impossible to replicate quickly when a fleet doubles in size or absorbs a new set of jurisdictions overnight.

The consequences of a compliance breakdown rarely stay contained to the back office. A missed renewal can delay dispatch on a load that’s already been sold. An incomplete filing can turn into an urgent, all-hands correction. An expired credential can create exposure at a roadside inspection that costs far more in downtime and driver disruption than the filing itself would have. None of these show up on a compliance dashboard until they’ve already become an operations problem like downtime, rework, lost productivity, customer complaints, and lost time and revenue associated with each.

The cost of noncompliance includes the cost of interruption, and those costs can compound in unpredictable ways. A delayed load, for instance, can cost a customer relationship or reputation.

Disaster preparedness is a subset of this same risk, especially as it pertains to proper storage and handling of documentation. 

“Vehicle titles are among the most critical documents tied to a fleet, yet many organizations store them across multiple offices, filing systems, or locations,” Schmidt said. “Secure offsite title management helps protect these assets from loss, damage, theft, or natural disaster while keeping records accessible when needed. As part of a broader risk-management strategy, it gives leaders confidence that ownership documentation remains protected during unforeseen events.”

None of this means every fleet should outsource compliance. It means every fleet should evaluate whether its current approach can reliably support growth, turnover, and increasing regulatory complexity.

An internal model works when an organization can sustain the specialization, staffing depth, and backup coverage that multi-jurisdiction compliance demands. A hybrid model keeps core ownership in-house while routing high-volume, specialized, or exception-heavy work to outside support. A fully externally supported model makes sense when predictable execution, geographic reach, or scalable capacity are difficult to maintain internally, especially through growth or turnover. 

The goal in any of these arrangements should be to strengthen execution wherever the organization’s internal model is stretched thin.

Executives should be asking these questions: Does current staffing have the capacity to absorb deadlines, exceptions, and growth? Is the team’s jurisdictional expertise deep enough to survive turnover? What level of risk is acceptable when work is delayed or done incorrectly? How exposed is asset availability to an administrative failure? Can the current model scale as the fleet’s footprint changes? And where should internal expertise be concentrated for the greatest return to the business?

Vehicle compliance is no longer a back-office function for complex, multi-state fleets. It is a business capability that directly influences fleet readiness, growth, and risk. The strongest operating model is the one that gives leaders confidence that vehicles can remain legally available to serve customers as the business evolves.

Click here to learn more about J.J. Keller & Associates, Inc. 

The post The Hidden Business Risk Inside Fleet Compliance appeared first on FreightWaves.

OOCL handled 2.12 million twenty-foot equivalent units in the quarter ended Sept. 30, up 9% from a year earlier, according to an Oct. 9 operational update from parent Orient Overseas (International) Ltd., itself majority-owned by China’s Cosco Shipping Holdings. Average liner revenue per TEU increased 33.1%.

Cargo growth outpaced a 3.6% increase in loadable capacity. OOIL reported that the overall load factor increased 4.2% compared with the third quarter of 2025.

Trans-Pacific leads revenue growth

The trans-Pacific trade delivered the largest revenue increase among OOCL’s reported regions. Revenue rose 71.8% to $1.44 billion, while container volumes increased 13.1% to 595,139 TEUs. That compared with revenue of $837.9 million and volumes of 526,032 TEUs in the same quarter last year.

Asia-Europe recorded the fastest volume growth, with liftings rising 15.4% to 399,162 TEUs. Revenue on the trade increased 45% to $695.8 million.

Intra-Asia and Australasia remained OOCL’s largest region by container volume, handling 981,336 TEUs, up 4.6%. Revenue increased 23.7% to $947.6 million. Trans-Atlantic volumes rose 7.3% to 147,008 TEUs, while revenue increased 11.9% to $201.8 million.

Revenue growth exceeded volume growth in each region, consistent with the company’s reported increase in average revenue per TEU. The update did not identify the market conditions behind those gains.

Nine-month revenue approaches $8 billion

For the first nine months of 2026, OOCL’s liner revenue increased 18.9% to $7.96 billion from $6.70 billion a year earlier. Container volumes rose 6.5% to 6.25 million TEUs, while average liner revenue per TEU increased 11.6%.

Loadable capacity increased 4.8% over the nine-month period, and OOIL reported a 1.4% increase in the overall load factor. Trans-Pacific revenue rose 27% to $3.16 billion, while Asia-Europe revenue increased 19% to $1.70 billion. Intra-Asia and Australasia revenue grew 13.8% to $2.55 billion, and trans-Atlantic revenue edged up 2.2% to $556.3 million.

The operational update did not include earnings or expense figures.

Read more articles by Stuart Chirls here.

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The post OOCL revenue up 45.1% on trans-Pacific surge appeared first on FreightWaves.

Both sides in the closely watched federal appellate case involving companies in the Penske network of companies now have made their case to the Fifth Circuit, as it considers whether to take up a larger hearing on an issue that has enormous disruptive potential for broker and carrier liability.

The plaintiffs in the case, all connected to the estate of Lyndon Dean Meyer who was killed in the accident at the heart of the legal dispute, last week submitted its brief arguing against the Fifth Circuit taking up an en banc hearing on the case that saw the Penske companies lose on the appellate level. That came after Penske companies had earlier won on the district court level in the Southern District of Texas on the question of liability.

But the district court decision was overturned by the Fifth Circuit. That led the Penske companies to seek an en banc hearing before the larger circuit. 

Meyer was killed on impact the day after Christmas 2018 when a truck that was on the road through a process that began with a Penske company slammed into his vehicle on Highway 202 in Bee County, Texas. Bee County is roughly located between San Antonio and Corpus Christi.

Who was calling the shots?

At issue in the case is that of control. 

The step-by-step history of the freight in question in the case known as Crane vs. Liberty Lane is that Penske Logistics was hired by car seat manufacturer Adient to ship their product; they gave the job to Penske Transportation Management (PTM), its brokerage affiliate; PTM brokered the freight to Liberty Lane, a carrier; that company in turn brokered it to OK Trans; and a driver for that company crashed into Meyer.

Penske has said it was not aware of the double brokering from Liberty Lane to OK Trans. But the fact of the double brokering is not a key issue in the case. It is cited more in passing by the Penske companies to establish it had nothing to do with the fatal accident, noting it had no idea the cargo was being transported by OK Trans.

With the Montgomery case taking any protection away from PTM that might have been been a legal argument before the Supreme Court decision in that case, the legal finding that has the trucking industry concerned is the appellate court’s ruling that Penske Logistics, the carrier at the start of the multi-step chain, was liable for the actions of Satnam Singh Lehal, the OK Trans driver who crashed into Meyer.

Big worries among the lawyers

That is being viewed in parts of trucking’s legal bar as a highly concerning precedent. 

In its request for an en banc hearing, Penske Logistics and PTM said the initial agreement was with PTM, which then brokered the load out to Liberty Lane. 

The Penske companies also cited the decision of the district court, which (quoting the lower court’s favorable finding) “found no cases where a court imposed statutory-employer liability absent an arrangement…between the motor carrier and the vehicle’s owner or driver.”

In that request, Penske said the appellate court’s decision holding it vicariously liable “as a statutory employer of the owner-operator of the truck whom it did not control, and with whom it had no arrangement, no communication and no knowledge of its existence” was a first in the annals of trucking law.

Different interpretation of the law

But the arguments put forth by the Meyer-related plaintiffs in opposing the en banc motion, not surprisingly, don’t see it that way.

“Penske (Logistics) did have ‘an arrangement’ with the operator of the truck, which it effectuated through its broker subsidiary and a relationship with another motor carrier,” the plaintiffs argued in their opposition to an en banc hearing. “The fact that this ‘arrangement’ was indirect, rather than direct, makes no difference under the unambiguous statutory text or the regulatory scheme.”

The plaintiffs argued that the “Control Statute and Regulations–49 U.S.C. § 14102 and 49 C.F.R. § 376.11-12 and 376.22–“(impose) vicarious liability (commonly known as ‘statutory employer’ liability) on a motor carrier that ‘uses motor vehicles not owned by it to transport property under an arrangement with another property,'” quoting the statute.

“Penske certainly could and should have complied with the statutory and regulatory requirements by obtaining a compliant lease of the truck and exercising the control and supervision over the truck and its driver that the (statute and regulations) require,” the plaintiffs’ brief argues. “If Penske didn’t know what a driver was doing on its behalf, it was only because Penske neglected all of its statutory and regulatory duties.”

The decision by the Fifth Circuit appellate court, the plaintiffs said, “was faithful to the text of the statute and regulations, which were adopted to eliminate the very abuses Penske…(seeks) to perpetuate. This case doesn’t warrant rehearing en banc.”

The core of the argument was revisited elsewhere in the en banc brief by the plaintiffs. 

“The right of control imposed by the statute and regulations creates ‘statutory employment,’ making the motor carrier vicariously liable for the driver’s negligence, even when he is an independent contractor,” the plaintiffs wrote.

Penske has friends

The en banc petition has drawn amicus briefs from a joint submission by the American Trucking Associations and the Truckload Carriers Association, as well as a brief from the Trucking Industry Defense Association.

In its amicus brief, that petitioner described itself as “an international organization that includes over 1,900 members comprised of motor carriers, transportation logistics companies, insurers of motor carriers, third party claims administrators, and legal counsel.”

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The post Penske request for en banc hearing gets pushback from victim’s estate appeared first on FreightWaves.

An Orlando trucking and freight brokerage owner has pleaded guilty in a scheme that collected more than $1 million, federal prosecutors announced Friday. Khayyam Arif Oglu Farajov, 40, operated Talishco LLC in Orlando, Florida. His company participated in the USPS Freight Auction program for nationwide bulk-mail transportation.

Farajov enrolled Talishco in Freight Auction during May 2022. USPS launched the program in October 2021 to secure trucking capacity through competitive spot-market bidding. A 2024 federal audit identified 102 participating transportation suppliers during fiscal years 2022 and 2023. Between June 2022 and January 2023, Farajov won hundreds of contracts while carrying out the fraudulent scheme.

Hundreds of USPS contracts

Farajov routinely failed to send trucks for the routes he secured. USPS employees contacted him when equipment did not arrive for scheduled pickups. He offered excuses involving delayed drivers or claims that he had lost contact with them. Postal officials then reassigned the work to other carriers.

Farajov later returned to Freight Auction and falsely marked those shipments delivered. Those entries triggered payments for transportation Talishco never performed. Prosecutors calculated the resulting proceeds at more than $1 million. He then moved the money through accounts connected with shell companies under his control.

USPS requires proof of delivery before paying Freight Auction suppliers. During the period under review, acceptable records included tracking scans, electronic messages and manual submissions through its Logistics Gateway. However, a 2024 federal audit found weaknesses in how the agency validated those records. Auditors identified 69,225 paid trips totaling approximately $197.9 million without reliable proof-of-delivery support.

USPS disputed the audit’s $197.9 million finding. The agency said it later found records supporting approximately $195 million in payments. USPS attributed the remaining $2.9 million to improper proof-of-delivery sources. However, auditors maintained that USPS had not properly verified the records before issuing payments.

The review covered fiscal years 2022 and 2023, overlapping Farajov’s scheme. USPS changed its delivery verification procedures during that period. The agency eliminated manual confirmation codes and stopped accepting certain electronic messages as independent proof. The report does not connect those changes directly to Farajov or Talishco.

Farajov eventually consolidated the funds into two personal investment brokerage accounts. He invested the proceeds in the stock market for personal enrichment, according to DOJ. Federal investigators traced the money and seized both accounts. The USPS Office of Inspector General handled the investigation.

Federal charges followed

A federal grand jury charged Farajov with five wire fraud counts and one money laundering count. DOJ announced the indictment on March 16, 2026. The filing detailed the Freight Auction activity and bogus delivery information. Prosecutors also sought forfeiture of the seized investment assets.

Assistant U.S. Attorney Richard Varadan prosecuted the case in the Middle District of Florida. Assistant U.S. Attorney Nicole Andrejko handled the forfeiture proceedings. Farajov later reached a plea agreement with federal prosecutors. That resolution came nearly seven months after DOJ announced the indictment.

Guilty plea confirms scheme

Farajov pleaded guilty Friday to one wire fraud count and one money laundering count. He agreed to forfeit the seized brokerage accounts and pay another $993,979 in restitution. Each conviction carries a maximum federal prison sentence of 20 years. The court has not scheduled sentencing.

Why it matters

Digital freight platforms still depend on accurate information connecting online activity with physical transportation. This case shows the financial exposure when payment controls fail to verify that movement.

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

Man gets 2 years for $3.5M Amazon fraud using 23 trucking accounts – FreightWaves

LAPD uncovers $1M in stolen BNSF and Union Pacific rail cargo at Los Angeles–area shoe retailer – FreightWaves

CBP finds $6M in cocaine hidden under floor of empty semi-trailer bound for Canada – FreightWaves

The post Orlando trucking owner pleads guilty in $1M USPS freight auction fraud appeared first on FreightWaves.

US takes 76% of vehicle exports as September shipments plunge 

More than three-quarters of Mexico’s light-vehicle exports were destined for the U.S. during the first nine months of 2026, underscoring the importance of cross-border automotive trade even as Mexican vehicle production and exports declined sharply in September.

Mexico exported 1.93 million light vehicles to the U.S. from January through September, representing 76.4% of the country’s 2.53 million vehicle exports, according to figures released Wednesday by Mexico’s National Institute of Statistics and Geography (INEGI).

The latest figures also showed that Mexico exported 277,369 light vehicles worldwide in September, an 11.9% decline from 314,656 units during the same month last year.

Vehicle production fell 15.1% year over year to 301,803 units, compared with 355,589 in September 2025.

The declines contrasted with stronger domestic demand. Sales of new light vehicles in Mexico increased 7.9% to 129,274 units, up from 119,766 a year earlier.

The figures highlight a widening gap between Mexico’s domestic automotive market and its export-oriented manufacturing sector, which depends heavily on demand from the U.S.

The U.S. accounted for 1,931,750 light vehicles exported from Mexico during the first nine months of 2026, followed by Canada with 314,185 vehicles, representing 12.4% of the total.

Germany ranked third with 64,963 vehicles, or 2.6%, followed by Brazil with 43,821 vehicles, or 1.7%.

Other international markets accounted for the remaining 173,904 vehicles, or 6.9%.

Through September, Mexico exported 2,528,623 light vehicles worldwide, down 1.5% from the 2,567,172 vehicles exported during the same period in 2025.

The September decline was considerably steeper than the year-to-date contraction, with manufacturers shipping 37,287 fewer vehicles abroad than a year earlier.

Mexico’s automotive manufacturers assembled 301,803 light vehicles in September, a decline of 53,786 units compared with September 2025.

For the first nine months of 2026, total light-vehicle production reached 2,946,943 units, down 2.4% from 3,020,006 vehicles during the corresponding period last year.

Light trucks continued to dominate Mexican automotive manufacturing, accounting for 79% of production through September.

Manufacturers assembled 2,329,189 light trucks during the nine-month period, compared with 617,754 passenger cars, representing 21% of production.

General Motors produced 58,949 vehicles in September, down 27.1% year over year, while Nissan production fell 26.3% to 44,355 vehicles.

Ford Motor’s production declined 16.4% to 29,480 units, while Volkswagen reported a 5.9% decrease to 27,475 vehicles.

Stellantis was among the manufacturers reporting gains, with production increasing 4.4% to 35,834 units.

DSV expands US-Mexico freight operations with new McAllen office

Global logistics provider DSV has opened a new office in McAllen, Texas, expanding its operations along the U.S.-Mexico border to support growing demand for cross-border transportation and supply chain services, according to ProTexas Industry.

The office will provide transportation, logistics and cross-border support for manufacturers, freight forwarders and other companies moving goods between the U.S. and Mexico.

The new location complements DSV’s existing border operations in Laredo, Brownsville, El Paso and Los Indios, Texas, as well as San Diego, California.

The expansion will strengthen DSV’s connections with manufacturers in northern Tamaulipas, Mexico, particularly maquiladora operations that depend on cross-border freight services, executives said.

DSV provides ground, air and ocean transportation, customs clearance, warehousing and supply chain management services across a global network spanning more than 90 countries.

Texas university seeks $772,700 for AI-powered Laredo freight project

Texas A&M International University (TAMIU) in Laredo, Texas, is slated to receive $772,700 in proposed federal funding for a project that would use artificial intelligence to improve freight movement through one of the busiest U.S.-Mexico commercial gateways.

U.S. Rep. Henry Cuellar, D-Texas, announced the proposed funding Oct. 2 for TAMIU’s Port Laredo Logistics Ecosystem Project, which would establish a Digital Twin and Logistics Resilience Lab in partnership with the Texas A&M Transportation Institute, according to the Laredo Morning Times.

The initiative would use AI, sensors and secure data systems to create a digital model of freight activity, helping researchers and transportation companies identify bottlenecks, anticipate disruptions and improve cargo flows across the border.

The proposed $772,700 allocation was included in fiscal year 2027 appropriations legislation, according to Cuellar’s office. The funding has not yet been finalized.

Why it matters: Mexico’s reliance on the U.S. automotive market makes falling vehicle exports a key indicator for cross-border trucking, rail and automotive supply chains.

The post Borderlands Mexico: US takes 76% of vehicle exports as September shipments plunge  appeared first on FreightWaves.

Chart of the Week: SONAR Regional Tender Rejection Rates  SONAR: STRI.URMW, STRI.URNW, STRI.URSE, STRI.URSW, STRI.URNE

National tender rejections have eased to about 13.8% over the past two weeks, but that average hides a market splitting in two. The Northwest region’s rejection rate hit 20.27% on Oct. 8. That’s more than triple the 6.2% it posted a year ago and the highest of any region. The Midwest sits right behind it at 18.61%. Every other region falls between 7.6% and 13.1% and is holding flat or drifting lower.

The two regional leaders are getting there in different ways. The Northwest is in a sudden, reefer-driven surge that began in August. The Midwest has been the tightest large region for most of 2026 and isn’t letting up.

The Northwest flipped in eight weeks

The Northwest spent most of 2026 as one of the loosest regions in the country, with rejections between 6% and 9% from January through July. That changed in August. Rejections nearly doubled during the month and have climbed almost every week since.

The split by equipment type tells the story. Northwest reefer rejections have averaged 41% so far in October, up from about 17% in July and 16% last October. Van rejections are under 5%. Reefer tender volume is up 65% since July and 35% year over year, while van volume is down 11% from last year.

Harvest freight meets a thinner fleet

The timing points to the fall produce season. Apple and potato harvests in Washington, Oregon and Idaho ramp up from late August through October, and that freight moves almost entirely in reefers. The same pattern appeared last year, but it came later and was smaller: Northwest rejections didn’t break 10% until mid-November and peaked near 13%.

A bigger crop doesn’t explain the difference. USDA estimates Washington’s 2026 apple crop at 176.2 million bushels, down 2% from last year, and the national crop is down 7% (The Packer). 

The Midwest is a different case. Its rejection rate has held near or above 15% since February and is at 18.6% now, compared with 7.6% last October. Tender volume in the region is up about 10% year over year, outpacing the 8% national gain. Unlike in the Northwest, the tightness spans equipment types. Midwest van rejections are near 15%, about two and a half times last year’s level, and reefer rejections are near 29%, up from 15%.

What it means

The Northwest spike is largely a product of regional demand volatility combined with national capacity being meaningfully lower compared to last year. For most of the year, the region generates relatively little outbound freight. Carriers plan for that by limiting contract commitments that would leave their trucks stuck in a market they can’t easily get out of. When harvest freight arrives, there isn’t enough capacity in place to cover it. This effect should fade as the harvest winds down this winter.

The Midwest matters more for the national picture. It’s  the largest freight region in the country, and it’s running about five points above the national rejection rate while volume is still growing. That makes it more of a long-term signal: the region has plenty of freight, and carriers have struggled with tender compliance there for nearly a year. Even as the national market has eased, Midwest rejections remain near their spring and summer highs, showing little improvement.

Then there are regions like the Southeast and Southwest, where shippers have turned to intermodal. Domestic intermodal volume through the Atlanta and Dallas hubs was up 15% to 20% year over year this past week. That trend started over the summer, when rejections in those regions peaked.

About the Chart of the Week

The FreightWaves Chart of the Week is a chart selection from SONAR that provides an interesting data point to describe the state of the freight markets. A chart is chosen from thousands of potential charts on SONAR to help participants visualize the freight market in real time. Each week a Market Expert will post a chart, along with commentary, live on the front page. After that, the Chart of the Week will be archived on FreightWaves.com for future reference.

SONAR aggregates data from hundreds of sources, presenting the data in charts and maps and providing commentary on what freight market experts want to know about the industry in real time.

The FreightWaves data science and product teams are releasing new datasets each week and enhancing the client experience.

To request a SONAR demo, click here.

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The U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) filed suit Sept. 24 against Pharr, Texas-based Trancasa USA Inc., alleging the company systematically rejected older truck driver applicants and imposed stricter driving-record and medical documentation requirements based on age.

The lawsuit, filed in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Texas in McAllen, alleges Trancasa violated the Age Discrimination in Employment Act (ADEA), which prohibits employment discrimination against individuals 40 and older.

Trancasa USA operates 171 power units and employs 198 drivers, with approximately 18.8 million miles reported in 2025, according to the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration. The company’s website also describes a broader transportation operation serving the U.S., Mexico and Canada, advertising more than 400 transport units and 1,000 semi-trailers.

According to the Sept. 24 complaint, Trancasa restricted driver hiring based on eligibility standards associated with a commercial liability insurance policy purchased in 2023.

The standards allegedly required drivers to be at least 23 years old and no older than 65. Drivers younger than 25 or older than 60 who had any traffic violations or accidents during the previous three years were considered ineligible.

The policy also allegedly required drivers ages 63 to 65 to provide a long-form medical examination report, known as Form MCSA-5875.

“Employers cannot discriminate against workers by claiming that the discrimination is required or authorized by a contract with another party, such as a customer or insurance provider,” said Ronald L. Phillips, acting EEOC Dallas regional attorney, in a statement.

“Such agreements and their implementation are illegal, and both parties to the contract place themselves at considerable risk of potential litigation and liability.”

Driver with clean record allegedly rejected

The complaint identifies Gilbert Cerda, a 64-year-old truck driver with more than two decades of experience and a clean driving record, as the individual whose discrimination charge led to the lawsuit.

Cerda applied for a truck driving position with Trancasa in November 2023 and met with a company recruiter, according to the complaint.

The recruiter allegedly told Cerda that his application would require review by Trancasa’s insurance carrier because he was approaching the policy’s maximum eligible age.

Several weeks later, Cerda returned to Trancasa’s facility in Pharr to inquire about his application.

According to the EEOC, the recruiter informed Cerda that the insurance provider had determined he could not be hired because of his age.

The complaint alleges Trancasa rejected Cerda around Nov. 27, 2023, despite his qualifications and driving history.

EEOC contends Cerda was not the only applicant affected. Since at least June 2023, the company allegedly refused to hire multiple applicants over age 60 under the same eligibility standards.

The agency also alleges Trancasa required drivers and applicants ages 63 to 65 to submit Form MCSA-5875 as a condition of employment while not routinely imposing the same requirement on younger drivers.

The EEOC states that federal law does not require trucking companies to obtain or be provided with the long-form medical examination report.

Insurance provider remains unverified

The EEOC complaint does not identify the insurance provider responsible for the disputed driver eligibility standards.

Trancasa switched between several insurance providers between June 2021 to June 2024.

The FMCSA filings establish a reported liability insurance relationship, but do not independently establish which insurance provider issued or enforced the specific age-based requirements described in the lawsuit.

FreightWaves contacted Trancasa and several of the company’s previous insurance providers during the time period of Cerda’s employment application seeking comment on the allegations, the insurance coverage and the company’s driver eligibility policies. None had responded as of publication.

EEOC seeks damages and changes to hiring policies

The EEOC alleges Trancasa’s practices violated federal law by denying employment opportunities to older applicants and subjecting certain drivers to different employment conditions because of their age.

The agency is seeking back pay, prejudgment interest, potential employment or front pay, and liquidated damages for Cerda and other affected applicants and employees.

The complaint also seeks a permanent injunction prohibiting discriminatory employment practices and requiring Trancasa to implement policies ensuring equal employment opportunities.

The EEOC issued a reasonable-cause determination in March and attempted to resolve the matter through its administrative conciliation process before filing suit.

The agency alleges the violations were willful. Those allegations have not been adjudicated, and no monetary damages have been awarded.

The case is U.S. EEOC v. Trancasa USA Inc., No. 7:26-cv-00457, in the Southern District of Texas.

Why it matters: The federal lawsuit against Trancasa USA Inc. raises questions about how motor carriers apply insurance underwriting requirements without violating federal age-discrimination laws.

More FreightWaves articles by Noi Mahoney:

• New Jersey CDL school lawsuit questions evidence behind FMCSA shutdown
• TA Services acquires 2 Texas cross-border carriers, adds 133 trucks
• DP World plots US port comeback with Corpus Christi container terminal
• FMCSA restores 30-day HOS relief for truckers during emergencies

The post Texas trucking firm sued over age limits on drivers appeared first on FreightWaves.

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Morgan Stanley, JPMorgan, First Citizens, Citizens and KeyBank also participated. The deal follows a $250 million Series F led by Strike Capital in May that valued Stord at $3 billion. That brings Stord’s 2026 equity and credit capacity to $650 million, the company said.

“This facility, combined with our $250 million Series F, gives us the balance sheet to match the scale, potential, and impact of what we’re building,” said Sean Henry, CEO and co-founder of Stord, in the announcement. “We will use this capital to expand our fulfillment network, accelerate our deployment of robotics, and invest aggressively in AI through Stord Labs.”

The announcement did not disclose the facility’s structure, pricing or maturity.

Nearly 100 fulfillment locations

Revenue run-rate is approaching $1 billion, and the company has grown tenfold over the past four years, Stord said. Henry told Axios Pro the company has grown materially since its May raise. Stord, which is privately held, did not disclose revenue or profit figures.

The company says it runs nearly 100 fulfillment locations worldwide for more than 1,000 brands and processes more than $15 billion in gross merchandise volume a year. Its packages reach 1 in 4 U.S. households annually, according to Stord.

Acquisitions built part of that footprint: ProPack Logistics and Pitney Bowes’ e-commerce fulfillment unit in 2024, Ware2Go from UPS in May 2025 and Shipwire from Ceva Logistics in January. Ware2Go alone added 21 e-commerce warehouses with about 2.5 million square feet of storage capacity, and Shipwire brought 12 fulfillment centers.

Two hires from public companies

Bill Zerella, the new chief financial officer, has led finance at three public companies and took all three to the public markets, including Fitbit in its 2015 IPO. He most recently served as CFO of ACV Auctions.

Mark Wayland, the new chief revenue officer, was most recently chief revenue officer at Box and held the same title at Tanium before that. He spent more than a decade at Salesforce, where he rose to senior vice president of Marketing Cloud.

Both men come to Stord from NYSE-listed companies.

The new lenders and executives are “a vote of confidence in the foundation we’ve created at Stord, as well as a signal of where we are headed,” Henry said.

The post Stord lands $400M Citi-led credit facility, adds CFO and CRO appeared first on FreightWaves.

A safety driver is behind the wheel for now. The companies plan to move the lane to driverless operations once Kodiak completes its safety case.

Kodiak’s long-haul Autonomy Readiness Measure, which tracks the share of claims and evidence in that safety case, reached 96% at the end of September. That was up from 93% at the end of August and 84% in February. The company plans to launch long-haul driverless service by the end of 2026 on its Dallas-Houston lane along Interstate 45. Its driverless trucks have operated in commercial service in the Permian Basin since December 2024.

Refrigerated and dry van freight to Laredo

Laredo is the highest-volume commercial land port of entry in the U.S., and the Charger lane is Kodiak’s first route serving it. The Port of Laredo handled more than $350 billion in international trade in 2025, nearly 40% of all U.S. trade with Mexico, according to the Kodiak press release.

Consumer packaged goods and food and beverage freight moves in steady, high-volume flows tied to retail replenishment schedules, Kodiak said, which makes predictable transit times and longer operating hours worth more.

Charger is an asset-based carrier operating in the U.S. and Mexico, with temperature-controlled freight among its core service lines. It runs its network on a proprietary transportation management system and a set of in-house applications.

“Autonomy lets us build a network that serves both our customers and our drivers,” said Andy Khera, president of Charger Logistics, in the announcement. “Combining our in-house TMS, managed transportation, and the Kodiak Driver creates a nearly fully automated ecosystem that gives our customers long-term capacity continuity through changing labor markets and freight demand, while bringing our drivers home every night.”

Expansion into Charger’s fleet

Under its Driver-as-a-Service model, Kodiak deploys the Kodiak Driver on trucks its customers own and operate. The companies expect to add lanes in Charger’s network over time as the carrier integrates the Kodiak Driver into its own fleet.

Charger also has an autonomous trucking agreement with Aurora Innovation on the same lane. Aurora announced in late July that Charger would deploy Aurora’s second-generation driverless trucks between Dallas and Laredo. That deal, reported in August, is a transportation-as-a-service agreement, under which Aurora holds the U.S. Department of Transportation operating authority, controls the truck and carries the insurance.

“Charger came to us knowing what they wanted from autonomy and what they need to see before scaling it,” said Don Burnette, founder and CEO of Kodiak. “The Dallas–Laredo lane extends the Kodiak Driver into a new corridor, and gives both companies the operating foundation we need to scale driverless service.”

The post Kodiak AI, Charger Logistics launch autonomous Laredo lane appeared first on FreightWaves.

The executive order (EO) from President Donald Trump on implementing the red dye diesel tax break has been formally published, but it is thin on fixing a fundamental problem with the policy: state and federal rules are not in sync.

The executive order was published in the Federal Register Friday. It is just four pages in length.

After citing unspecified “historic efforts to ensure fuel affordability for our citizens,” the executive order says “it is clear that further temporary relief is necessary.”

The EO directs Secretary of the Treasury Scott Bessent to “use his authority to defer certain diesel fuel tax payment obligations.” Bessent also is to look at waiving penalties that might other be incurred for the use of red dye diesel in over the road applications.

Red dye diesel gets its name through the fact that it is red in appearance because a dye has been blended into it. The dye has no impact on its performance.

The dye is blended so that certain end uses, primarily agricultural, can consume red dye diesel and avoid paying the federal excise taxes of 24.3 cts/g. Federal excise taxes on diesel also include a 0.1 cts/g fee for the Leaking Underground Storage Tank Trust Fund Fee.

Break goes through December 31

The deferral period, if it is declared following a five-day review period, would be for October 5 through the end of the year.

But the goal is that the deferral be made permanent, so that the tax break for the remainder of the year ultimately would not need to be paid. 

“The Secretary shall explore avenues, including legislation, to eliminate the obligation to pay the amounts deferred pursuant to the Secretary’s exercise of authority described in section 2 of this order,” the EO said.

But states have laws that prevent the consumption of red dye diesel on their respective roads. Wholesale and retail outlets are set up to provide a supply chain for non-dyed diesel which remains liable for the federal excise taxes, and that means they in only rare cases would have segregated tanks and pipelines that are targeted at red dye diesel.

The EO calls on the Treasury Secretary to “engage with State governments, relevant industry leadership as determined by the Administrator, and relevant labor organizations as determined by the Administrator to encourage safe and expedient coordination between the Federal Government and these various stakeholders in furtherance of the policies of this order.”

Some states already have acted

A wide range of states have changed their policies in recent weeks to allow red dye diesel on their roads. Texas, Indiana, Illinois, Nebraska, North Dakota, Ohio, Oklahoma, North Carolina, Arkansas and Alabama are all states that have made some sort of concession in their state rules to promote the use of red dye diesel and its lower cost.

But as has been noted by several critics of the red dye diesel policy, crossing from a state with a waiver into one that doesn’t have it is going to create a tax-paying nightmare for trucking companies. The extra bookkeeping effort may not be worth the tax break.

As Breakthrough Fuel said in a summary of the proposed change, after rating the impact from the tax shifts to be “low” at the retail level, it noted that “Highway lanes rarely carry dyed fuel, interstate routes cross non-relief states, and clear diesel pricing is unchanged by the order.”

The order also targets greater distribution by ordering the Treasury Secretary to “(coordinate) with agricultural cooperatives, rural fuel distributors, farm supply organizations, and other agricultural stakeholders, as determined by the Secretary of Agriculture, to ensure adequate distribution of dyed diesel for their use in high-demand areas.”

More articles by John Kingston

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The post Formal EO order on red dye diesel short on specifics appeared first on FreightWaves.

The latest Global Port Tracker report, produced by NRF and Hackett Associates, indicates August was likely the busiest month of 2026, replacing September as the anticipated peak. Imports are expected to ease through the remainder of the year as retailers shift from stocking holiday merchandise to replenishing inventories and preparing for early 2027.

“Even with any fluctuations in final data, we’re likely past the busiest part of the year,” said Jonathan Gold, NRF’s vice president for supply chain and customs policy. “The truth is that the peak season started early and was stretched out through the summer and early fall, with the difference from month to month often amounting to little more than a rounding error.”

Ports covered by Global Port Tracker handled 2.3 million twenty-foot equivalent units in August, the latest month with finalized figures. That was up 0.4% from July but down 0.7% from August 2025.

The trade group lowered its September forecast to 2.28 million TEUs from the previously projected 2.31 million. The revised estimate would still represent an 8.2% increase from a year earlier. October imports are forecast at 2.25 million TEUs, up 8.5% year over year, before declining to 2 million TEUs in November.

Hackett Associates founder Ben Hackett said imports have been bolstered by robust consumer spending despite weakening economic indicators, declining consumer confidence and increasing inflation.

The projections point to a gradual retreat from summer highs rather than an abrupt drop in cargo demand. Despite the expected month-to-month slowdown, September and October volumes would remain above their year-earlier levels.

Gold said most holiday merchandise has already arrived, with “last-minute replenishment and preparation for early 2027” driving shipments for the balance of the year. 

The retailers forecast full-year imports at the ports covered by the report at 25.8 million TEUs, up 1.4% from 2025.

Read more articles by Stuart Chirls here.

Read more:

US West Coast container rates edge lower

Global container volumes hit record 17.46 million TEUs

Samsung seeks $186M from CMA CGM in container charges dispute

Zim lifts profit forecast 72% on strong demand

New submarine plant planned at Baltimore multimodal hub

The post Retailers say extended peak shipping season winding down appeared first on FreightWaves.

The 900,000 square foot facility, located in Stockton, California, expands capacity for processing online orders and the ability to provide faster shipping and delivery for customers across the West Coast, the retailer announced on Thursday.

Walmart Fulfillment Services, the company’s end-to-end third-party fulfillment service, will also leverage the space to fulfill items sold by merchants on Marketplace. 

The next-generation e-commerce center features advanced automation, technology and AI-powered systems to move products more efficiently. A high-density storage and retrieval system reduces the traditional 12-step fulfillment process to five steps, reducing repetitive, manual tasks while allowing Walmart (NASDAQ: WMT) to move products throughout the building more efficiently, resulting in increased storage and order capacity compared to a traditional fulfillment center.

Walmart said the facility’s location in California’s Central Valley adds significant fulfillment capacity closer to West Coast customers, helping the company offer faster shipping options on millions of items and taking pressure off other fulfillment centers in its network. 

Walmart operates four other next-gen fulfillment centers in Joliet, Illinois; McCordsville, Indiana; Greencastle, Pennsylvania; and Lancaster, Texas. They are located in strategic markets to enable next-day or two-day shipping to 95% of the U.S. population, according to the company.

E-commerce sales now represent 23% of total sales at Walmart. The company says faster delivery helps motivate customers to place orders.

In August, it announced plans to build a sixth ultra-modern e-commerce logistics hub, covering 1.5 million square feet, in Carnesville, Georgia. Construction is expected to begin towards the end of the year. Walmart said its total investment in the project, which includes hiring, will be $1.3 billion.

Both the Stockton and Carnesville location will employ more than 1,000 workers at full operation.

Why It Matters: Walmart is competing with Amazon, Target and other retailers for online sales and fast fulfillment capability helps motivate customers to complete digital checkouts.

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

Write to Eric Kulisch at ekulisch@freightwaves.com.

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The post Walmart activates automated e-commerce logistics center in California appeared first on FreightWaves.

North Arlington officers responded to Porete Avenue following a report of suspicious activity involving commercial freight. They discovered an active transfer between two vehicles at the location. The merchandise included frozen shrimp, salmon, conch meat and branzino. The cargo remained at the scene while investigators examined the circumstances surrounding the attempted theft.

Fraudulent calls and texts redirect the driver

According to the North Arlington Police Department, the truck driver received telephone calls and text messages before arriving. The sender falsely claimed an association with the legitimate freight broker responsible for the shipment. Those communications instructed the driver to divert part of the load for a supposed transfer. Following those directions brought the refrigerated trailer to an unauthorized location.

Jonathan Pollaguari, 18, of the Bronx, New York, arrived alongside a juvenile in a 26-foot box truck. Both individuals began transferring pallets of seafood into their vehicle. Questions about the transaction’s legitimacy emerged while the activity continued. A subsequent investigation established that the person directing the diversion had no affiliation with the actual brokerage.

Authorities determined that the unidentified individual impersonated a company representative to fraudulently obtain the merchandise. Officers secured the scene and stopped further movement of the products. Their intervention prevented the suspects from leaving with the cargo.

Police recover shipment and arrest two suspects

North Arlington officers took Pollaguari and the juvenile into custody without incident. Investigators recovered the entire seafood shipment before either suspect could leave the scene. Frozen shrimp accounted for the primary commodity, alongside several other varieties. Police documented the attempted theft and announced criminal charges following their investigation.

Authorities charged Pollaguari with second-degree theft by deception, false representation and conspiracy. He also faces a first-degree charge involving the employment of a juvenile in committing a crime. Officers issued additional motor vehicle summonses for driving without a license and operating an uninsured vehicle. Another citation involved failure to possess an insurance card.

Investigators have not disclosed how the suspects obtained shipment information or who coordinated the fraudulent communications. Authorities also have not identified the legitimate broker, carrier or shipper involved. Questions remain about what initially raised suspicion and prompted police intervention. The investigation remains active, with officials declining to release further details.

Why It Matters

Criminals impersonating trusted freight brokers can redirect high-value shipments without ever taking control of the truck. This case highlights why carriers must independently verify unexpected delivery changes before following instructions.

CFCO

In my opinion, this case demonstrates why verification cannot stop once a carrier accepts a load. The Certified Fraud Compliance Officer (CFCO) course teaches transportation professionals to recognize suspicious activity and challenge unexpected instructions. A legitimate driver can unknowingly participate in cargo theft when criminals impersonate trusted contacts. Training helps establish consistent procedures for confirming shipment changes before freight reaches the wrong hands.

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

Man gets 2 years for $3.5M Amazon fraud using 23 trucking accounts – FreightWaves

LAPD uncovers $1M in stolen BNSF and Union Pacific rail cargo at Los Angeles–area shoe retailer – FreightWaves

CBP finds $6M in cocaine hidden under floor of empty semi-trailer bound for Canada – FreightWaves

The post Fake freight broker redirects $273K seafood shipment in New Jersey cargo theft attempt appeared first on FreightWaves.

Ask carriers what’s changed about trucking compliance lately, and you’ll likely hear about the accumulation of new rules that change faster than most back offices can absorb them. David Vincent has had a front-row seat to that accumulation. He’s co-founder of Visionary Ventures, the technology company that built and operates Dotra Compliance, a platform designed to serve as what Vincent calls a virtual compliance department.

FreightWaves sat down with Vincent to talk through where carriers are losing ground and where a software layer can realistically help. He laid out a picture of an industry squeezed from multiple directions at once, including a faster enforcement, a Supreme Court ruling that rewrote how brokers vet carriers, and a volume of paperwork that outpaces small compliance departments.

The current compliance environment, Vincent says, feels more difficult than it used to because it is. Carriers have been dealt a stretch of regulatory change that would challenge any safety department. 

“In the last 18 months alone, carriers have absorbed English proficiency becoming an out-of-service violation, revoked ELDs, a non-domiciled CDL crackdown, a new FMCSA registration system and a Supreme Court ruling that changed how brokers choose carriers,” Vincent said. None of that replaces the baseline workload that never stops, including medical cards, MVRs, testing, inspections, and filings.

The disparity in who can absorb that load, according to Vincent, comes down to headcount rather than intent. 

“A large carrier has a safety department, while a 10-truck fleet has the owner,” Vincent said. “The volume of change is the same for both, and that’s the gap we built Dotra to close.”

The data backs up the sense that enforcement has intensified. Roadside inspections, Vincent says, fell to about 2.6 million in 2020 and passed 3.1 million in 2025, with more than 23.5 percent of trucks inspected placed out of service. 

Part of that climb is a pandemic-era rebound, but Vincent pointed to something more deliberate behind the numbers: “The bigger driver is policy, with enforcement focused on things that stop a truck on the spot, like English proficiency, revoked ELDs and driver qualification,” he said.

What makes a violation expensive is rarely the citation itself. 

“An out-of-service order parks a truck and a load,” Vincent said. “Violations feed safety scores, which brokers, shippers and insurers all screen on. And most carriers who get hurt aren’t cutting corners. They missed a date nobody was watching.”

That last point has taken on new weight since May, when the U.S. Supreme Court ruled 9-0 in Montgomery v. Caribe Transport II that freight brokers can be sued under state law for negligently selecting an unsafe carrier. 

Vincent says the ruling has changed what compliance is actually for: “It means compliance is now how you get loads, not just how you avoid fines.”

The carrier at the center of that case carried a conditional safety rating along with problems in driver qualification, hours of service, and maintenance, all things a broker could have checked. 

With the legal shield brokers used to lean on gone, Vincent says that buying behavior has already shifted. 

“Brokers are checking,” Vincent said. “They’re asking for safety records and compliance documents before tendering freight, and they’ll pass on carriers who can’t produce them.”

There’s no uniform definition yet of what “safe enough” means from a broker’s perspective, which Vincent says is part of the problem. “The broker association has even asked FMCSA to write a federal standard for what a safe carrier looks like,” he said. “Until that exists, every broker sets their own bar, and a clean, documented compliance record is the surest way to clear it.”

If brokers are screening harder, the next question is where carriers are most likely to come up short. According to Vincent, it’s rarely a single document causing trouble. 

“Most carriers are struggling with the volume [of documents],” Vincent said. “Between driver files, medical cards, MVRs, testing records, inspections, registrations and filings, it’s hard to keep everything in order. And even a carrier who does still has to remember to check what needs updating.”

The items most likely to slip, Vincent says, are the ones without a built-in reminder, such as the annual MVR review, the annual Clearinghouse query, random testing rates, the biennial MCS-150 update, and annual inspections.

Hiring is the single riskiest moment in a driver’s file, according to Vincent, and fleet size tracks closely with exposure. 

“The riskiest moment is hiring, when a driver file gets built in a rush and a pre-employment test or previous-employer check gets missed,” Vincent said. “By size, it’s fleets of roughly 1 to 50 trucks, where compliance is one person’s side job.”

That “side job” dynamic is exactly where legacy tracking methods fall apart. Filed information doesn’t do anything for you unprompted. 

“A spreadsheet only works if someone remembers to open it,” Vincent said. “It doesn’t warn you, it doesn’t know a rule changed, and when the person who keeps it is out or leaves, the system leaves with them.”

When something does slip, the fallout tends to land all at once rather than trickle in. 

“The cost shows up all at once: a driver placed out of service, a late load, a broker asking questions, or two days of digging through binders for an auditor,” Vincent said. “And after Montgomery, a carrier who can’t produce clean records quickly may not get the load at all.”

A Virtual Compliance Department

Dotra’s answer to that fragility is a platform Vincent describes as a “virtual compliance department,” meant to do the thinking, not just the filing. 

“It means Dotra does the work a compliance person does, not just the filing,” Vincent said. “A reminder app only reminds you about what you already knew to enter. A document locker stores files but doesn’t read them. Both assume you already know every rule that applies to you.”

The platform starts by mapping an operation (whether that’s a for-hire or private fleet, CDL or non-CDL, which states it runs in) and builds a requirement list from there, tracking every deadline, reading incoming documents and watching a carrier’s FMCSA safety data for changes. “It’s what a full-time safety manager does, at a price a 5-truck fleet can afford,” Vincent said.

Day to day, the mechanics are built to remove friction rather than hand a carrier a new system to babysit. 

“A document comes in, either uploaded by the office or photographed by a driver who scans a QR code, with no app or login,” Vincent said. Dotra reads the file, pulls the relevant dates, and files it under the right driver or vehicle, turning every date into a tracked deadline with escalating email and text alerts as it approaches—replacing, as Vincent put it, the work of “keying dates into spreadsheets, checking SAFER by hand, tracking annual reviews from memory, digging through binders when a broker asks, and reading FMCSA notices to see whether they apply.”

Document-reading capability pays off most during onboarding, when a new customer is migrating years of paper records into the system. 

“A new carrier might have a few hundred documents across drivers and trucks, and typing every date from each one is where most people give up,” Vincent said. Once a fleet is running, the priority shifts from speed to precision, since a platform is only as useful as the data it holds. “After setup, it’s about accuracy: a mistyped expiration date is worse than none, because it gives you false confidence,” he said.

Proof in Practice: The Motus Transition

Vincent points to FMCSA’s rollout of Motus, the agency’s new registration system, as a concrete example of what regulatory intelligence is supposed to catch before it becomes a crisis. Motus replaced the previous patchwork of portals for USDOT numbers, authority, and biennial updates with a single system that required carriers to confirm a handful of account details to move over cleanly. Miss any of it, Vincent says, “and you could be locked out of managing your own USDOT number.”

Most small carriers heard about the transition secondhand, if at all. Dotra’s customers got something more specific. 

“Dotra customers got it as an alert with a step-by-step checklist,” Vincent said. “That’s the point of regulatory intelligence: the rule is the same for everyone, but it reaches you as a checklist instead of a surprise.”

Audit-Ready, Not Audit-Scrambling

Few moments expose a weak compliance program faster than an audit notice or a broker’s vetting request, and Vincent says that’s exactly the scenario Dotra is built to defuse. “It turns audit prep from a project into a download,” he said.

Without a system in place, an audit notice typically kicks off a scramble. 

“In Dotra, the gaps show up on the dashboard every day, so most are fixed long before anyone asks,” Vincent said.

When a broker or auditor does come calling, the platform generates a readiness packet directly from records the carrier has already been maintaining. According to Vincent, that capability matters more now than it used to. 

“Brokers now need to show they vetted the carriers they hire, and a carrier who can hand over a clean packet the same day makes that easy for them,” Vincent said.

Non-CDL Fleets

One misconception Vincent said Dotra runs into constantly involves operators who assume federal compliance is strictly a CDL problem. 

“A landscaper or contractor running pickups with trailers assumes no CDL means no DOT,” Vincent said. “But federal rules start at 10,001 pounds in interstate commerce, and a one-ton pickup towing an equipment trailer crosses that easily.” 

Once that threshold is crossed, Vincent says, most of the core requirements apply regardless of license class, including a USDOT number, driver files, DOT medical cards, hours-of-service rules, and annual inspections. Drug and alcohol testing generally remains tied to CDL drivers specifically.

To serve that segment, Dotra built a separate onboarding path that generates a requirement list suited to a private, non-CDL fleet rather than a trucking company’s checklist. 

“It’s a big part of why we call Dotra transportation compliance, not just trucking compliance,” Vincent said.

Whether it’s a 200-truck carrier bracing for a broker’s vetting request or a three-truck landscaping outfit, the rules aren’t written differently for small operations. Dotra is pairing AI-driven document reading with deadline tracking and regulatory monitoring to give any fleet, regardless of size, the kind of compliance posture that used to require a dedicated department. Increasingly, that dedication to compliance decides whether a broker picks up the phone at all.

Click here to learn more about Dotra Compliance.

The post A Virtual Compliance Department for Every Fleet appeared first on FreightWaves.

Spot rates from Asia to Europe also continued to fall in early October, the analyst said in an update, giving European shippers greater leverage in annual contract negotiations.

Trans-Pacific shows first small dip

Far East-U.S. West Coast spot rates fell $2 per FEU on Oct. 7, the first daily decline in weeks.

“It is a marginal move, but the first dip since mid-September,” Xeneta Chief Analyst Peter Sand said.

Despite that decline, West Coast rates remained 1.1% above their Sept. 30 level at $8,336 per FEU. Asia-U.S. East Coast rates averaged $11,512 per FEU, up 0.5% over the week.

On the trans-Atlantic trade, North Europe-U.S. East Coast spot rates declined 1.1% week over week to $2,854 per FEU.

Bank of America Institute’s Oct. 9 Consumer Checkpoint report shows broad-based consumer spending strength in September, with gains across retail and services categories and a narrowing gap among income groups. Total credit and debit card spending per household increased 6.2% year over year, or 5.1% excluding gasoline, the third-strongest growth rates in four years. However, seasonally adjusted spending rose just 0.2% from August and was little changed excluding gasoline.

The Mediterranean has recorded the steepest decline since the post-Hormuz crisis peak in July. Market-average spot rates on the trade have fallen 43% since July 1, compared with a 34% decline from the Far East to North Europe, Sand said.

“The pace of the decline has eased a little, but rates are still elevated and the trend is still downward, so we are not at the floor yet,” Sand said.

As of Oct. 7, Asia-Mediterranean spot rates averaged $4,007 per 40-foot container, or FEU, down 5.9% from Sept. 30. Far East-North Europe rates averaged $3,645 per FEU, down 2.5% over the same period.

Europe-bound rate gap narrows

The sharper Mediterranean decline has compressed the premium over North Europe to roughly $400 per FEU, below the approximately $500 spread recorded on Oct. 1, 2025, and well below the $2,000 gap reached on Jan. 1, 2026, Sand said. The Oct. 7 market averages put the difference at $362.

“The spread between the Mediterranean and North Europe shows that no two trades are alike and that volatility differs depending on where you ship from and to,” he said.

Sand said carrier rerouting away from the Suez Canal route around Africa may help explain the pricing relationship. The diversion has lengthened journeys into the Mediterranean compared with North Europe, although North Europe historically has been the more expensive destination.

Falling short-term rates are arriving as European shippers negotiate long-term contracts, which are also benchmarked against the spot market.

“For European shippers, tender season is in full force and falling short-term rates are a welcome development as they negotiate long-term contracts,” Sand said.

Demand has remained strong throughout the year, particularly into Europe, but could not continue growing at double-digit rates indefinitely, he said. As demand eases from a high level, competition for vessel capacity is diminishing, improving negotiating conditions for shippers.

“Even freight forwarders are now getting better deals from carriers in long-term contract negotiations,” Sand said.

This article was updated Oct. 9 to add analysis on consumer spending from Bank of America.

Read more articles by Stuart Chirls here.

Read more:

Global container volumes hit record 17.46 million TEUs

Samsung seeks $186M from CMA CGM in container charges dispute

Zim lifts profit forecast 72% on strong demand

New submarine plant planned at Baltimore multimodal hub

The post UPDATED: US West Coast container rates edge lower appeared first on FreightWaves.

What does it cost to run a truck in 2026?

The American Transportation Research Institute’s 2026 Operational Costs of Trucking study puts the average cost of operating a truck at a record $2.336 per mile in 2025, up 3.4% from 2024. Excluding fuel, costs rose 4.2%, 1.5 points faster than inflation.

Nearly every cost line set a record. Tolls (+13.2%), repair and maintenance (+8.6%), driver benefits (+6.6%) and tires (+6.4%) led the increase. Early 2026 data shows insurance (+6.4%) and fuel (+5.9%) leading the next leg up, and SONAR’s diesel index (DTS) now sits at $6.38 a gallon.

How far did rates fall behind costs?

SONAR’s dry van contract linehaul rate (VCRPM1) averaged $2.81 a mile in 2022. By 2024 and 2025 it had fallen to $2.32, while truckload carriers’ non-fuel costs rose 30% from 2021 to 2025.

• In 2022, contract linehaul cleared non-fuel cost by about $1.01 per loaded mile.
• By 2025, that cushion had shrunk to $0.26.
• Spot linehaul (NTIL) sat below non-fuel cost every year from 2023 through 2025.

In Q3 2026, contract linehaul averaged $2.69. That is still below Q4 2021 and has rebuilt only about half the cushion carriers had in 2022.

If demand is flat, why are rates rising?

Capacity is leaving faster than freight. SONAR’s tender rejection index (STRI) is up 268% since October 2023, while tender volume (STVI) is up about 9%. For-hire tractor counts fell by about 51,000 in a single month, and ATRI found carriers cut effective capacity 5.5% in 2025. ATRI calls this a supply-side recovery, and SONAR’s data agrees.

Why can’t carriers just run more miles?

The Sitrep models a typical dry van truck at Q3 2026 benchmark rates. It covers its marginal costs but contributes only about 15% of revenue toward overhead, against roughly 26% that ATRI’s truckload carriers needed in 2025. Closing the gap takes rates about 14% higher. Even running near the hours-of-service ceiling, the truck still falls about 5% short.

That is why rates have to rise before carriers can responsibly add trucks. Capacity added at today’s rates would finance new equipment on margins that don’t yet cover overhead.

What’s inside the full Sitrep

The full report goes further, with:

• A mode-by-mode breakdown showing why reefer contract rates are furthest behind the market.
• Market-level rejection data showing where carriers are already repricing.
• A Chicago-to-Atlanta lane analysis with SONAR’s projection into 2027.
• An interactive calculator that tests contract/spot mix, miles, diesel and deadhead against carrier costs.
• Takeaways for shippers, carriers and brokers heading into 2027 bids.

All SONAR Sitreps and the data cited to support them can be found in the SONAR platform. Request a demo. Sitreps are also available with a subscription to FreightWaves Market Monitor. Get more info at getfreightdata.com.

Frequently asked questions

Why are truckload rates going up in 2026? Capacity is leaving the market faster than freight. Tender rejections have nearly quadrupled since late 2023 while volume is up only modestly, so fewer trucks are competing for roughly the same freight.

What is the cost of operating a truck per mile? ATRI’s 2026 study puts the 2025 average at $2.336 per mile, or $1.854 excluding fuel. Truckload carriers averaged $2.21 per mile.

Are trucking rates high right now? Not relative to costs. Dry van contract linehaul averaged $2.69 a mile in Q3 2026, below Q4 2021 levels, while carriers’ non-fuel costs are about 30% higher than in 2021.

Will truckload rates keep rising? The math says they need to. At benchmark rates, a typical dry van truck needs roughly 14% more to cover overhead, and SONAR’s lane projection for Chicago to Atlanta shows rates holding near current levels into 2027.

What is a tender rejection rate? It is the share of contracted loads that carriers turn down. SONAR’s STRI tracks it daily; a rising rate means carriers have better options than their contracted freight.

Sources: SONAR (VCRPM1, NTIL, NTI, STRI, STVI, DTS, TCFH); ATRI, Analysis of the Operational Costs of Trucking: 2026 Update (July 2026).

The post Why Trucking Rates Are Rising Without More Freight appeared first on FreightWaves.

The Cinnaminson, New Jersey-based truck driving school said the FMCSA improperly used drivers’ later English-proficiency violations to justify shutting down its federally regulated training operations, according to a complaint filed Oct. 2.

But the 236-page complaint and exhibit packet presents questions beyond that legal dispute: A six-driver spreadsheet names another training provider, the attached roadside reports concern 10 different drivers, and a scanned removal notice makes substantive findings against a third school.

The school’s own account also contains unresolved date discrepancies, including an English-assessment certificate dated after the roadside inspection it allegedly preceded.

Start CDL filed the suit Oct. 2 in the U.S. District Court for the District of New Jersey against the U.S. Department of Transportation, FMCSA and Administrator Derek D. Barrs, seeking reinstatement and relief from the agency’s action.

FMCSA’s Aug. 31 notice immediately removed Start CDL from its training provider registry, along with more than 100 other schools. 

The notice to shutdown arrived as federal regulators crack down on hundreds of commercial driver training providers and attempt to create stricter enforcement of CDL training.

The FMCSA notice prohibited Start CDL from conducting entry-level driver training, enrolling new trainees, certifying completion or uploading training certifications.

FMCSA cites safety risks

The agency said six trainees certified by Start CDL subsequently received English-language-proficiency violations during roadside inspections. FMCSA inferred that the drivers lacked the required proficiency when the school submitted their certifications, concluding that the provider had material deficiencies and demonstrated willful disregard of applicable requirements.

The notice invoked both an immediate public safety rationale and willful disregard as grounds for emergency removal.

English proficiency is a longstanding federal driver-qualification requirement. Enforcement guidance included in the exhibits describes restoration of out-of-service treatment for English-proficiency violations in June 2025.

Several attached inspection reports in the Oct. 2 complaint document specific communication problems or incorrect highway-sign responses. An Arkansas report describes difficulty answering questions about cargo, documents and air pressure. A Missouri report records four incorrect sign responses. Those accounts provide factual support for officers’ findings at the roadside.

They do not, by themselves, establish when the drivers completed training or their proficiency when certifications were uploaded — the connection at the center of the school’s challenge.

Driver records do not line up

The spreadsheet attached to the removal materials lists six drivers under Star CDL Training LLC. Its provider identifiers differ from Start CDL’s registry identifier.

None of those six names appears among the 10 unique drivers in the attached inspection reports. The report numbers also differ. Start CDL’s exhibits include training agreements connecting the school to three of the inspection subjects, but do not provide a reconciled six-driver roster with completion dates and certification upload records.

The notice describes the inspection reports as a representative sample, yet the packet does not explain how they correspond to the six drivers in the spreadsheet.

A scanned version of the notice also names Punjabi School of CDL Inc. in findings addressing deficiencies, immediate safety necessity and willful disregard. Another version is called Start CDL.

The discrepancies raise questions about how the FMCSA may have assembled and matched its evidence. The filing does not establish whether they reflect attachment errors, underlying data errors or another explanation.

School’s timeline also needs clarification

Start CDL argues in the complaint that later roadside violations do not establish deficient instruction or proficiency at the time of training. It also disputes FMCSA’s interpretation of a training provider’s responsibilities under federal entry-level driver training requirements.

However, the complaint and administrative petition describe cited inspections occurring between May and August 2026. The attached roadside reports instead span July 2025 through May 2026.

The complaint says driver Viacheslav Iroltuev passed the school’s English assessment with an 84% score in February 2026, before a May 13 roadside inspection. Both attached certificate copies show a date of July 2, 2026. The packet does not establish whether that is an issuance date documenting an earlier assessment.

School owner Vasyl Kushnir also says a July 23 DOT inspection prompted process corrections but identified no English-proficiency deficiencies. The exhibits contain no completed inspection report verifying that account.

Start CDL says it submitted an administrative-review petition and emergency-stay request Sept. 10. According to the complaint, those requests remained undecided when the lawsuit was filed Oct. 2.

The latest docket supplied for review lists no subsequent government response or judicial ruling. The administrative stay request included in the exhibits is directed to FMCSA; it is not a separately filed federal injunction motion.

FMCSA and Start CDL attorney Anton Kaminsky did not respond to requests for comment by publication time.

Why it matters: Removal prevents Start CDL school from providing federally required entry-level driver training, while the case raises questions about how FMCSA connects roadside safety violations to training providers.

More FreightWaves articles by Noi Mahoney:

• Mexico remains top US trading partner as August commerce hits $94.3B
• TA Services acquires 2 Texas cross-border carriers, adds 133 trucks
• DP World plots US port comeback with Corpus Christi container terminal

The post New Jersey CDL school lawsuit questions evidence behind FMCSA shutdown  appeared first on FreightWaves.

The Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration (FMCSA) is moving closer to launching a pilot program that could results in amending split sleeper berth requirements, with an eye on allowing more flexibility in how a driver spends the required daily minimum of 10 hours off-duty. 

In a Federal Register notice released Wednesday, FMCSA opened the “information collection activities” that would provide it with data on whether a change in the 10 hours split, which now allows only 10 consecutive hours, or an 8-2 split or a 7-3 split, would meet safety goals if it was 5-5 or 6-4. Those new splits would become possible if the minimum length of the required sleeper berth period drops to five hours from seven.

The program needs as many as 256 volunteers to participate. It can be a team of drivers. Drivers will receive $1,600 for their participation, according to a press release published by the Department of Transportation in late August.

As FMCSA said in a September 2025 Federal Register notice that first called for comments on the proposal, the current law says the 10 hours of off duty time “may either be accumulated consecutively, or alternatively, split into 1 consecutive period of at least 7 hours in the sleeper berth and a second period of at least 2 consecutive hours of time in the sleeper berth, off duty time, or any combination thereof, provided that the total of the periods is at least 10 hours. In practice, this allows drivers to utilize any split of sleeper berth time including and between a 7/3 split and an 8/2 split.”

The September 2025 notice was more detailed on the issue, and was described as a “notification of proposed pilot program; request for comments.” The notice Wednesday was just described as a “notice and request for comments.”

Following up on the April 2025 EO

The April 2025 executive order on trucking from the Trump administration that was notable mostly for its English language proficiency requirements and restrictions on non-domiciled CDLs also had in it a general goal for the Secretary of Transportation Sean Duffy to “identify and begin carrying out additional administrative, regulatory, or enforcement actions to improve the working conditions of America’s truck drivers.”

In the Federal Register recap of the steps that have led to the pilot program, FMCSA said the experiment would be part of that call to action.

The pilot program involves taking those 256 commercial motor vehicle drivers and giving them flexibility over 16 weeks to spend their 10 off duty hours in the sleeper berth as they choose. Participants in the study are volunteers.

Chris Eckhart, a partner with the trucking-focused Scopelitis law firm, said the Federal Register notice this week is the follow to the September 2025 notice which sought comment on the split sleeper berth proposal with the goal of seeking flexibility for drivers. 

“The notice published Wednesday requests comments on the information collection the FMCSA will seek through the pilot,” Eckhart said in an email to FreightWaves. “I don’t think it breaks any new ground on the FMCSA’s plans for the pilot or other potential changes to the split-sleeper berth rule.”

The comment period is open until December 7. 

Not a quick process

Even though the actual testing of drivers and their daily submissions on their activities is scheduled to go on for 16 weeks, the September 2025 announcement of the program said the entire pilot program would take 34 to 36 months.

The Federal Register notice recaps the long tortuous road to the launch of the study. 

It cites a joint submission by the American Trucking Associations and the Minnesota Trucking Association to FMCSA in 2013 for what the two groups called a “flexible sleeper berth pilot program.” That came after three FMCSA listening sessions on the issue in 2010. 

When the Hours of Service rule was implemented in 2011, according to the Federal Register notice, the split sleeper berth beyond 7-3 was not included. “FMCSA determined that the issue should be explored in greater depth to determine whether additional flexibility would achieve an equivalent or improved level of safety relative to compliance with the current regulations,” the Federal Register notice this week said.

In the September 2025 Federal Register notice, FMCSA said a review of the issue conducted in 2015 “suggested that sleep split into multiple segments is restorative, and when implemented strategically, does not negatively impact performance. Further, split sleep does not negatively affect daytime ‘‘neurobehavioral performance’’ when compared to a consolidated sleep period of the same total duration.”

OOIDA checks in

Lewie Pugh, executive vice president of the Owner Operator Independent Drivers Association (OOIDA), said his group is “always in favor of more hours of service flexibility for the driver.”

Pugh discussed the length of time that the issue of a split sleeper berth HOS flexibility has been discussed.

He said OOIDA “was pushing for the three hours back in 2018,” he said. But a key feature needs to be that the use of those hours are at the driver’s discretion. 

What OOIDA doesn’t want, he said, is “either the carrier or the shipper saying, hey, you got an extra three hours? Just go off near whatever, and use that extra three hours while we jack you around to load you.”

Pugh’s discussion of control and driver discretion is one that his organization has been sounding since soon after the September 2025 Federal Register notice. 

Eligibility to participate as a driver in the study will not be available to drivers with a list of several disqualifying marks, including having an “unsatisfactory” rating from FMCSA, having an Out of Service (OOS) rate more than the national average. Eligible drivers also can not have had any  FMCSA enforcement actions in the last three years. 

More articles by John Kingston

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The post FMCSA split sleeper berth pilot program moves closer to launch appeared first on FreightWaves.

It replaces four three-month waivers Aurora has operated under since October 2025. Kodiak AI, Waabi and Stack AV opted in along the way.

“Going from a temporary waiver to a five-year exemption gives the industry a lot of confidence,” said Jeff Farrah, CEO of the Autonomous Vehicle Industry Association, in an interview with FreightWaves. “As these companies scale, raise money in the capital markets and set up business partnerships, there are often questions about what they are going to do about the warning-triangle issue. Now there is a firm answer.”

Bart Teeter, director of fleet and operational safety at Bot Auto, said in a statement that the exemption “will give the autonomous freight industry a key piece of regulatory certainty that will allow us to continue to scale safely.”

Federal rules require the driver of a truck stopped on a road or shoulder to turn on hazard flashers and place warning devices in front of and behind the truck within 10 minutes. The required devices are three bidirectional reflective triangles or at least six fusees.

“Now, with autonomous vehicles, we need to evolve some of these requirements, since with an autonomous truck there is not going to be somebody who can get out and put warning triangles behind the vehicle,” Farrah said.

Beacon specifications and operating limits

The beacons must be amber, meet the Class 1 photometric requirements of SAE J595 and sit at least 100 inches off the ground, at or above the top of the side mirrors. Each truck needs at least one rearward-facing light on each side of the cab and one forward-facing light on the front, with redundant power to prevent a single-point failure.

They must activate within five minutes of a stop and keep flashing, alongside the standard hazard flashers, until the truck moves again or is recovered. FMCSA called the five-minute limit “a clear, verifiable safety improvement” over the 10 minutes drivers get to place triangles.

Trucks may run only on roads inside their validated operational design domain. Carriers cannot haul hazardous materials or passengers, or run any operation that would require an H, X, P or S endorsement if a human were driving. Doubles are limited to two 28-foot trailers, and triples are barred. Tankers are permitted.

Every carrier other than Aurora must email FMCSA before starting, certifying under penalty of perjury that it has the beacons and will follow the terms. Carriers must report any crash while the beacons are on, or should have been on, within five calendar days. Annual reports on beacon malfunctions and power issues are due by Nov. 1. States may not enforce conflicting rules on interstate operations covered by the exemption.

“Aurora filed the exemption, and Aurora was part of the first waiver process, but this allows any similarly situated company to use it,” Farrah said. “It is not just Aurora. It is any other autonomous vehicle company doing these operations.”

From 2024 denial to five-year exemption

FMCSA denied Aurora and Waymo’s 2023 request for the same relief in December 2024. Exempting “a class of unspecified carriers using unspecified equipment on unspecified vehicles only further undermines the claimed likely equivalent level of safety,” the agency wrote at the time.

The new exemption names the equipment and the vehicles, and it makes every carrier identify itself.

After the denial, FMCSA issued Aurora a narrow waiver. From Oct. 10, 2025, through Jan. 9, 2026, Aurora ran the beacons on 34 trucks that traveled more than 500,000 miles, the company reported in its application. The beacons were active for nearly 10 hours, and Aurora reported no faults, malfunctions or power issues. FMCSA said the trucks were not involved in any collisions while stopped with the beacons on. Aurora filed its new five-year request in April with limits similar to the waiver’s.

Two studies filed with both applications got a second look. In 2024, the agency flagged that Aurora’s October 2022 “Naturalistic Study of Warning Device Equivalency” showed a slightly lower share of drivers responding to beacons than to triangles in five of eight scenarios. This time it pointed to response distance from the same study: motorists began evasive moves an average of 135.71 meters from the beacons and 133.24 meters from the triangles. A Virginia Tech Transportation Institute study prepared for Waymo in August 2022 found beacons drew earlier braking at night.

Opponents cite trailers, power and weather

Aurora’s application drew 402 comments. Opponents included the Owner-Operator Independent Drivers Association (OOIDA), the Truck Safety Coalition, Advocates for Highway and Auto Safety, REAL Women in Trucking and many individual truck drivers. Supporters included the American Trucking Associations, Waymo, Kodiak AI, Volvo Group North America, Amazon and the National Fraternal Order of Police.

Critics argued a jackknifed or angled trailer could block cab-mounted lights and that a single electrical failure could knock the beacons out. Others said the studies did not cover the range of weather, road and lighting conditions trucks face. Advocates said nearly 10 hours of beacon use during planned stops was not a sufficient basis for a five-year exemption. The Small Business in Transportation Coalition said granting the exemption “would open a can of worms” by holding driverless trucks to more lenient standards than trucks driven by humans. OOIDA urged FMCSA to wait for its own study of warning devices for stopped trucks.

FMCSA answered that the terms confine trucks to their validated operational design domains. It said it lacks data showing triangles significantly improve driver reaction time, and that whether such devices improve traffic safety at all is a historically unresolved question.

The Autonomous Vehicle Industry Association and Volvo urged FMCSA to allow beacons on traditional trucks. The agency wrote that updating warning device requirements for all commercial vehicles “may be ripe for future regulatory action.”

“High-visibility, cab-mounted warning beacons are a critical, 21st-century solution that enhances roadside safety by immediately alerting other road users without ever needing to put a person in harm’s way,” said Gerardo Interiano, senior vice president of government relations and public affairs at Aurora, in a statement.

The industry has coalesced around cab-mounted beacons, an idea Waymo and Aurora first conceived, Farrah said.

“This is a critical step, because this is one of the issues that has been really problematic for the deployment of autonomous trucks,” he said. “Now we have a pathway to deploying in the U.S.”

The post AV truck fleets win 5-Year exemption on warning beacons appeared first on FreightWaves.

August liftings surpassed the previous record set in July and increased 3.7% from August 2025. Through the first eight months of 2026, global volumes were up 4.7% year over year, CTS said in its Oct. 8 report.

The figures show continued growth in container trade despite elevated fuel prices, disruption in the Arabian Gulf, Panama Canal constraints and changing tariff conditions. August volumes were 7.2% higher than in the same month of 2024 and 12.9% above August 2023 levels.

Freight pricing rises alongside volumes

CTS’ Global Price Index rose two points from July to 117 in August, its highest reading since July 2024, when Red Sea shipping disruption was putting pressure on rates. The index was approximately 50% above its January level and 44% higher than in August 2025.

CTS said the increase reflected pricing pressures that had developed since late February, as disruptions to key shipping routes affect available capacity and operating costs as vessels are rerouted.

North American imports recover

North American container imports were up 2% through August compared with the same period last year, extending a gradual recovery that began in May after negative year-to-date growth earlier in 2026.

Increased cargo flows from Asia supported the recovery, with trans-Pacific trade up 5% year-to-date. CTS described that performance as a notable improvement from the trade’s earlier weakness amid tariff uncertainty and severe typhoon-related congestion at originating ports.

Sub-Saharan Africa posted the strongest percentage growth in imports, with volumes up 13% through August. Growth came from across its major origin markets, with the Indian Sub-Continent and Middle East the notable exceptions.

The combined Indian Sub-Continent and Middle East region was the only region to record declining imports, down 5% year to date. It also was the only region with lower exports, which fell 10%, representing just under 1 million fewer TEUs than in the first eight months of 2025.

Far East drives export growth

Asia exports increased 8% year to date, adding approximately 6.3 million TEUs compared with the same period of 2025. Every destination region recorded growth in cargo originating in the Far East, with Sub-Saharan Africa and South and Central America leading in percentage terms.

European exports, meanwhile, returned to roughly flat year-to-date growth after declines earlier in the year. CTS attributed the improvement to stable or increasing cargo flows across most destination regions.

Despite the new volume record, CTS cautioned slowing month-to-month growth could signal a moderation in demand, making growth and elevated rates a key issue heading into the final quarter of 2026.

Read more articles by Stuart Chirls here.

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Zim lifts profit forecast 72% on strong demand

New submarine plant planned at Baltimore multimodal hub

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DP World plots US port comeback with Corpus Christi container terminal 

The post Global container volumes hit record 17.46 million TEUs appeared first on FreightWaves.

Shipments were virtually unchanged at $658.6 billion, the first stall after eight monthly gains. New orders rose 0.1% to $663.5 billion. The ratio of unfilled orders to shipments rose to 6.87 from 6.81. Census does not adjust the figures for inflation.

Orders for motor vehicle bodies, parts and trailers rose 0.8%. Machinery orders rose 1.1%. Nondefense capital goods orders excluding aircraft rose 1.6%. Durable goods orders fell 0.1%, with transportation equipment down 0.7% and nondefense aircraft and parts down 4.3%.

A fabricated metal products respondent told the Institute for Supply Management the company has orders through year-end above forecast levels. “Our biggest challenge continues to be a severe shortage of workers, limiting our production output to meet demand. The second challenge is general availability of steel; the market is getting worse, and more production delays are expected as we gap out of needed material.”

Freight, diesel and steel cost more

ISM’s manufacturing index registered 54.5 in September, a tenth of a point below August, the group said in its Oct. 1 report. ISM said it was the ninth straight month of expansion after a 10-month contraction. The prices index climbed 6.8 points to 77.9, the largest move in the report. ISM said 58.6% of respondents reported paying higher prices, up from 46.2% in August.

Freight was on ISM’s list of commodities up in price for a seventh month. Diesel fuel was on it for a second. No commodity was reported down in price. The Energy Information Administration’s weekly benchmark diesel price, the figure most fuel surcharges use, set a record of $6.529 a gallon on Sept. 21, FreightWaves’ John Kingston reported.

“The Prices Index reading is still being driven by (1) increases in steel and aluminum prices that impact the entire value chain, (2) tariffs applied to many imported goods and (3) increases in petroleum-based products as a result of the Middle East conflict,” said Susan Spence, chair of ISM’s Manufacturing Business Survey Committee.

A food, beverage and tobacco products respondent told ISM that “fuel costs are still affecting transportation costs and the overall cost of goods.” A machinery respondent said higher interest rates are slowing new construction and that “we also have to face up to the higher cost of components from overseas due to tariffs and freight rates.”

ISM’s inventories index fell 2 points to 48.6 in September, back in contraction. The customers’ inventories index slipped to 41.6, a 24th month in “too low” territory. “A ‘too low’ status for the Customers’ Inventories Index is usually considered positive for future production,” Spence said.

Canada tariffs and the August import jump

The August trade figures predate Canada’s retaliation. The U.S. goods deficit with Canada widened $4.1 billion to $7.1 billion as imports from Canada rose $4.6 billion to $37.1 billion, the Census Bureau and Bureau of Economic Analysis said. Ottawa put retaliatory tariffs of 15% to 50% on about C$27.6 billion in U.S. goods on Sept. 8, FreightWaves’ Noi Mahoney reported, matching U.S. duties after talks broke down in August.

“Canada tariffs have impacted cross-border costs and left our supply chain team scrambling — those supply chains took years to develop and nurture — hurting the very lead times government buyers are concerned about,” a machinery respondent said. That respondent said orders and delivery times had both doubled in semiconductors, electronics and government work.

Goods imports rose $17.2 billion to $342.2 billion in August, and the goods deficit widened $12.8 billion to $136.6 billion. Industrial supplies accounted for $9.1 billion of the import increase. Crude oil was up $3.3 billion and nonmonetary gold $3.1 billion. Capital goods imports rose $6.2 billion, including $2.4 billion in semiconductors and $1.3 billion in other industrial machinery.

Real goods imports, in 2017 dollars, rose 4.1% to $267.7 billion, against a 5.4% nominal increase. Year to date, the goods and services deficit is down 19.9% from the same period in 2025, and total imports are up 4.4%.

“This month, it is the trade war with Canada, which every day is getting worse — causing prices to go up and uncertainty that creates massive disruption,” a transportation equipment respondent said. “Buying continues to get pushed out indefinitely as customers don’t want to spend on capital expenditures until there is more certainty of costs and demand.”

The post Factory backlogs build as freight and steel costs climb appeared first on FreightWaves.

SONAR, the freight market intelligence platform, has added intermodal rates to Rate Intelligence, giving shippers, freight brokers and carriers a new way to evaluate truckload-to-intermodal conversion potential on any lane.

Users can now view intermodal contract and spot rates, compare them side by side with van pricing, and estimate the savings per load from converting truckload freight to intermodal. On the Chicago-to-Elizabeth, New Jersey lane, for example, intermodal contract pricing runs 21.1% below van contract, about $593 per load.

At a glance

• What: Intermodal rates, ramps, trends and Conversion Savings inside SONAR Rate Intelligence
• Who it’s for: Shippers, freight brokers, 3PLs and carriers evaluating mode shifts
• Data included: Intermodal contract rates, intermodal spot rates on covered corridors, rate and volume trends
• How to access: Select intermodal as an equipment type, or drill into it from any van lane
• Available: October 2026, for Rate Intelligence users

What can you do with intermodal in SONAR Rate Intelligence?

• See intermodal pricing. View intermodal contract rates, plus intermodal spot rates where coverage is available.
• Know the resolved lane. See the resolved intermodal lane, including suggested in-gate and out-gate ramps and their distance from origin and destination.
• Compare modes side by side. Line up intermodal and van pricing across rate per mile (RPM), flat rate, fuel surcharge, and month-over-month and year-over-year change.
• Track trends. Review intermodal rate and volume trends over the last 12 months, in absolute or relative view.
• Size the opportunity. Evaluate Conversion Savings, including estimated savings per load, total lane savings, intermodal volume and conversion potential. Enter your own rate and annual volume to personalize the math.
• Work your way. Select intermodal directly as an equipment type, or drill into the intermodal view while researching a van lane.

Example: Chicago to Elizabeth, New Jersey intermodal vs. truckload

On the Chicago-to-Elizabeth lane, intermodal contract pricing runs about 21% below van contract, worth roughly $593 per load.

• Rail miles: 808 average intermodal miles
• In-gate ramp: Chicago 14th Street (Global I), Union Pacific, 1 mile from Chicago
• Out-gate ramp: Norfolk Southern ramp in Elizabeth, New Jersey, 3 miles from Elizabeth

How the modes compare

What the conversion view shows

• Savings: Intermodal contract is 21.1% below van contract, or $592.96 per load.
• Confidence: The intermodal contract rate of $2,220 sits within a $2,075 to $2,435 range, built on 46 observations over a 41-day lookback.
• Volume: 283 domestic intermodal containers support the lane, and conversion potential is rated High.
• Trend: Intermodal contract rates are up 11.55% year over year.

Figures reflect SONAR data at the time of publication.

Why does intermodal in Rate Intelligence matter?

Mode decisions no longer need a separate data source or a side spreadsheet.

• Faster answers: Compare intermodal and truckload on the same lane, in the same workflow.
• Clearer opportunities: Flag lanes where intermodal offers a real cost-saving alternative to truckload.
• Stronger conversations: Bring conversion math, not guesses, to customer, carrier and procurement discussions.

Frequently asked questions

What is truckload-to-intermodal conversion?

Truckload-to-intermodal conversion means moving freight that travels by over-the-road truck onto rail in containers, with truck drayage at each end. Shippers typically convert longer-haul lanes to lower cost per load when transit time allows.

What intermodal data does SONAR Rate Intelligence include?

Rate Intelligence includes intermodal contract rates, intermodal spot rates on covered corridors, the resolved intermodal lane with in-gate and out-gate ramps, rate and volume trends, and Conversion Savings estimates.

How does SONAR calculate Conversion Savings?

Conversion Savings compares the van flat rate to the intermodal contract flat rate on the same lane. Savings per load is the difference between the two, and total lane savings applies that figure to the annual volume you enter.

Does every lane have intermodal spot rates?

No. SONAR’s intermodal spot index covers roughly 100 high-volume corridors. Lanes outside that set show intermodal contract rates for comparison.

How do I find intermodal rates in SONAR?

Select intermodal as the equipment type in Rate Intelligence, or open the intermodal view while researching a van lane. Saved intermodal lanes are labeled with an “I.”

Who should use intermodal rates in Rate Intelligence?

Shippers, freight brokers, 3PLs and carriers use it to test mode shifts, price lanes, support procurement and bid decisions, and identify lanes where intermodal can lower transportation costs.

See it for yourself

Intermodal is live in Rate Intelligence now.

• Learn more at gosonar.com
• Request a demo

The post SONAR Rate Intelligence Adds Intermodal Rates and Truckload-to-Intermodal Conversion Savings appeared first on FreightWaves.

Freight transportation companies are rapidly scaling up capabilities, especially to support semiconductor supply chains in Asia, the epicenter for production and distribution of advanced chips used to power AI applications, data centers, connected devices and next-generation vehicles.

Two reports issued on Wednesday show how AI-related goods such as semiconductors and data-transmission equipment have become a major driver of international trade growth, spawning increasingly complex regional and global supply chains that depend on speed, visibility, cross-border expertise and resilience.

Unlike traditional consumer electronics, AI infrastructure requires the coordinated movement, including customs clearance and storage, of oversized, high-value and highly sensitive equipment from manufacturers across Asia to hyperscale data centers under construction around the world.

Semiconductors, data transmission equipment and data center hardware accounted for 42% of all goods trade growth in 2025, and that share rose to about 76% during the first quarter, according to an annual report on globalization trends by the New York University Stern School of Business, and commissioned by DHL Group. Trade in critical minerals, batteries, and electric vehicles also expanded rapidly during the first quarter, it said, relying on research by the World Trade Organization and the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development.

The large-scale AI buildout in the U.S. has fueled import growth, while imports of other goods have declined. The Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis estimates that without the AI investment boom, U.S. imports would have declined 10% in 2025 rather than increasing modestly. The second-largest trade bump was in East Asia & Pacific, supported by that region’s leading role in producing AI-enabling hardware, the DHL report added. 

“The biggest story in global trade right now is AI – not tariffs,” said John Pearson, CEO of DHL Express, in a news release promoting the report. “Every AI query ultimately depends on logistics. Chips, networking equipment and the many other goods behind this technology must be in the right place at the right time.” 

A report this week from Frost & Sullivan underscored how AI is influencing trade patterns. Production and investment in semiconductors and related digital infrastructure is accelerating in the Asia-Pacific region, which now accounts for about 58% of global semiconductor industry revenue, amid insatiable demand for artificial intelligence, high-performance computing, electric vehicles and advanced communications, it said.

The research, sponsored by FedEx, identifies AI and high-performance computing as the fastest-growing drivers of semiconductor demand. More than 2,000 new data centers are expected to be built globally between 2026 and 2035, according to IEEE Spectrum. 

FedEx (NYSE: FDX) conservatively estimates the addressable transportation market focused on data centers and IT service equipment is $7 billion, Chief Commercial Officer Brie Carere said at the company’s Investor Day event in February. 

DHL Global Forwarding put the market size for data center logistics market in 2025 at about $23 billion and estimates that figure to rise to at least $35 billion by 2030, said Amanda Rasmussen, chief commercial officer and data center executive lead, in a company article.

Last month, global logistics powerhouse Kuehne+Nagel was named the primary logistics provider for Amazon Web Services, supporting data center installation and operations around the world. 

Cloud computing giants could spend up to $525 billion on data center construction in 2026 alone, by some estimates. The infrastructure investment supercycle is expected to reach $3 trillion by 2030, says commercial real estate services firm JLL. In an article last month, consulting firm PwC projected global data center capital expenditure could reach $31.6 trillion through 2050, with a plausible upside of nearly $50 trillion if AI adoption accelerates. 

The Worldwide Semiconductor Trade Statistics forecasts the global semiconductor market to reach about $975 billion by the end of the year.

Data center investment is expected to keep rising because servers, GPUs, and other information and communication technology equipment require refreshes every four to six years.

Server values have surged. Several years ago, servers cost around $100,000 to $250,000. Today, it is common for servers to cost $1 million and $3 million — and the value is expected to continue rising as AI workloads demand increased power. Modern AI servers pack exponentially more processing power, custom silicon, and advanced cooling requirements into every unit — making them both more valuable and more complex to handle safely, logistics experts say.

Beyond semiconductors, AI is generating huge demand for high-density server racks, networking equipment, liquid cooling systems, fiber optics, and large-scale power-generation hardware. The technologies often are transported between multiple manufacturing, assembly and testing facilities before being delivered to data centers. 

“These shipments are bulky, they are very high value and they require the specialized expertise that we have had for decades. A large amount of these components are produced in Asia and shipped into North America. We are the market leader on the trans-Pacific lane, so we are poised to outpace market growth,” Carere said, adding that FedEx has established a new specialized data center sales team.

The freight transportation giant is seeing double digit revenue growth in the AI sector as it captures business from across the value chain, including power generation manufacturers, the marketing chief said on FedEx’s June 23 earnings call. She described how FedEx responded to an urgent request from a global technology company to move multiple pallets of equipment to the United States, adding that successful execution on ad hoc engagements is leading to repeatable revenue streams. 

Kuehne+Nagel experienced strong demand from hyperscalers during the second quarter, especially on the trans-Pacific lane from China to the United States, CEO Stefan Paul said on the company’s July 23 earnings call. 

Why It Matters: The massive sums spent on AI projects and the huge demand for digital services means hyperscalers need to quickly deploy server farms so they can start generating revenue. Tech companies are willing to pay for premium transportation  — namely air freight — because speed is a priority, which makes the sector attractive for logistics providers. 

Companies operating major infrastructure projects often expect pricing responses within two to four hours for air freight and within 24 hours for ocean freight. In standard freight markets, equivalent quotes typically take 24 to 72 hours — making responsiveness an operational differentiator for logistics companies, DHL’s Rasmussen said. “That gives you a sense of how fast-paced and competitive this market is. The industry increasingly demands both speed and agility, which means decisions have to move quickly alongside the freight itself,” she explained.

In the past year, C.H. Robinson saw semiconductor and AI-related air freight volumes from Asia to the United States grow nearly 60%, and expects them to remain the engine of trans-Pacific air demand over the next 12 months, said Vincent Wong, director of product development, in an article posted to the freight forwarder’s website.

Ocean shipping and hybrid sea-air solutions are options for construction materials, server racks and replacement parts, he added.

“The ongoing heavy demand from AI hyperscalers shows no sign of slowing down, and we have seen increased demand for freighter space, as some hyperscalers are requiring upper-deck access for their servers,” said David Wall, the CEO of Expeditors, said in the Seattle-based company’s earnings report. 

AI-related shipments continue to underpin trans-Pacific air cargo growth, making up for the fall in e-commerce traffic — the main source of growth over the past two to three years. 

“The scale of AI’s impact is easy to underestimate because it sits inside a small slice of total air cargo volume — below 10% of what flies,” said Niall van de Wouw, chief airfreight officer for Xeneta in a recent research note. The growth in semiconductor sales this year “has made the trans-Pacific this year’s strongest air freight corridor, even as China-U.S. volumes weakened under tariffs.”

Airlines are also cashing in on the AI boom. 

The International Air Transport Association estimates that AI-related goods accounted for 53.5% of the total value of goods transported by air in the first half, while representing just 7% of its volume—highlighting the segment’s high value density and strategic importance for the industry. Moreover, the value of air cargo trade in AI-type goods grew by 20% compared with 2024.

In Asia, Korean Air saw cargo revenue increase 46% in the second quarter, primarily due to AI demand. All Nippon Airways said second-quarter cargo revenue increased 38% year over year behind strong semiconductor traffic. And Taiwan-based EVA Air said AI-related items now contribute up to half its cargo revenue. 

On Saturday, Japan Airlines and Nippon Express launched a weekly freight service between the United States and Asia utilizing a Boeing 747 freighter aircraft chartered by JAL to meet growing demand for AI and semiconductor-related shipping. The round-trip service originates in Los Angeles with stops at Tokyo Narita Airport; Taipei, Taiwan; Singapore; and Narita, according to a JAL news release.

An area of concern for the AI industry — and shippers writ large — is that solid demand globally, and from Asia to North America, has outpaced capacity growth all year.  

Regional ecosystem

EVs, which require significantly more chips than traditional vehicles, together with the continued rollout of 5G cellular network technology, connected devices, consumer electronics, medical devices and industrial automation are further expanding semiconductor demand across industries, experts say.

APAC is home to four of the world’s top 15 semiconductor companies and is a major auto manufacturing region and local chip supply is critical. Tier 2 and Tier 3 suppliers provide essential support to the larger semiconductor industry, supplying specialized chemicals, precision components, and testing services. 

The markets widely expected to see the greatest increase in semiconductor demand over the next three years are Taiwan, Southeast Asia, Greater China, and Japan, according to a survey conducted by FedEx at a major trade show in Taiwan. Rather than being concentrated in a single market, semiconductor manufacturing and related activities are distributed across highly specialized hubs throughout the region.

Taiwan dominates advanced semiconductor manufacturing, accounting for about 60% of worldwide foundry output. China is a major material supplier, consumer market and growing fabrication hub. South Korea is a leader in memory chip production. Japan plays a critical role in semiconductor equipment, materials and specialty manufacturing inputs, while Southeast Asia has emerged as a key center for semiconductor assembly, packaging and testing operations.

Industry sentiment reflects the regionalization trend and a focus on geographic diversification. In the survey, 35% of respondents said they expect their companies to expand manufacturing into additional APAC markets over the next three years. A further 25% plan to increase or diversify sourcing either within APAC or globally. 

Asia-Pacific’s focus on production has shifted the industry to fragmented interdependence, with more small, customized shipments replacing bulk deliveries. Since a single semiconductor often requires design, fabrication, and packaging in different hubs, there is increased cross-border movement of prototypes, test wafers, and high-value spares, Frost & Sullivan said.

Just-in-case supply chain model

Supply chain resilience is becoming a strategic priority for hyperscalers, as well as smaller suppliers as geopolitical uncertainty, regulatory complexity, tariff changes and other external disruptions make them vulnerable to disruptions. Traditionally, companies pursued lean efficiency to minimize costs, but in an era when components travel over 25,000 miles and cross more than 70 borders before completion, even minor shipment delays can halt production.  As a result, technology companies are supplementing just-in-time operating models with inventory buffers and larger supplier pools.

As semiconductor and data center supply chains become more complex and globally interconnected, the FedEx survey suggests that speed and visibility will be central to future logistics strategies, with 44% of respondents identifying faster international shipping as the most important capability when selecting logistics and supply chain partners over the next three years. 

To support growing high-tech demand in Asia, FedEx last year introduced daily direct flights between Taiwan and South Korea, extending cutoff times by more than three hours and providing greater flexibility for high-tech customers. South Korea has become one of Taiwan’s major trading partners, with semiconductors and electronic components leading the way on export flows. 

FedEx and UPS this year upgraded their logistics facilities located near Taiwan’s main airport. The expanded FedEx transshipment center doubled the footprint of the previous site and features an advanced automated system that can process up to 9,000 packages per hour, significantly increasing productivity. UPS opened an 872,000-square foot automated distribution center, more than doubling its warehouse footprint in Taiwan. The facility features a fleet of autonomous mobile robots for freight handling. 

DHL Supply Chain in March announced a significant expansion of its North America data center logistics footprint with 10 dedicated warehouse sites totaling more than seven million square feet of capacity set to go live this year. Designed for hyperscale and colocation data center operators rushing to deploy new capacity, the facilities offer white‑glove handling, rack configuration services, and specialized warehouse‑to‑site transportation. 

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

Write to Eric Kulisch at ekulisch@freightwaves.com.

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