J.B. Hunt (NASDAQ: JBHT) reported third-quarter revenue of $3.68 billion Thursday after the market closed. The result was ahead of a $3.59 billion consensus estimate. Earnings per share of $1.82 were 1 cent higher than analysts’ revised expectations. (A higher tax rate was a 4-cent EPS headwind in the quarter, partially offset by a 2-cent decline in net interest expense.)

The result was slightly better than its September update, calling for a 5% to 10% sequential decline in EPS, implying $1.77 at the midpoint of the range. At the time, the company flagged near-term cost pressures—a sharp runup in diesel prices ($10 million), driver-related costs ($25 million) and elevated cargo claims ($10 million)—as headwinds. The actual impact in the quarter was over $50 million.

The third quarter marked a fifth straight quarter of year-over-year improvement in operating income and EPS. The company’s earnings turnaround started in the 2025 third quarter, well ahead of peers.

Intermodal revenue increased 20% y/y to $1.83 billion as loads were up 8% and revenue per load increased 11%. Higher fuel prices pushed revenue higher in the period. Excluding fuel, revenue per load was up 2% y/y. Volumes increased 18% y/y in the East and 1% on transcontinental lanes. A 3% decline in length of haul, due to a mix shift to the East, was a modest headwind to revenue per load.

The unit booked a 91.9% operating ratio (inverse of operating margin), which was 15 basis points worse y/y. Higher costs (driver personnel, equipment and employee benefits) were a drag in the quarter.

The dedicated OR deteriorated 360 bps y/y to 91.5%. Revenue was up 11% y/y, almost entirely due to higher revenue per truck per week (inclusive of fuel). Revenue per truck was up just 3% excluding fuel. Average trailers in service increased 11% even though load counts grew just 3%. Higher driver costs, group medical claims, insurance premiums and new account startup costs were among the culprits.

The brokerage unit booked a second straight operating profit after 13 quarters in the red.

The company’s asset-light truckload unit swung to a $7-million operating profit after a modest second-quarter loss.

Shares of JBHT were down 2.4% in after-hours trading on Thursday. The stock fell 14% from its mid-September earnings update to the Thursday close. 

J.B. Hunt will host a call at 5 p.m. EDT on Thursday to discuss third-quarter results.

Why it matters? J.B. Hunt’s quarterly results serve as a bellwether for the intermodal, trucking and logistics industries. The company’s third quarter was a modest slowdown after four quarters of strong recovery. However, some of the incremental costs that plagued the period were likely transitory in nature.

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There will be a little more than 2,400 new truck parking spaces built over the next few years as a result of funding provided to various projects under the Nationally Significant Multimodal Freight & Highway Projects (INFRA) program.

“A targeted objective of this funding opportunity is to directly address the national shortage of commercial motor vehicle parking,” the Department of Transportation said in announcing the grants Wednesday. “By funding projects that expand safe, accessible public parking for commercial drivers, the Department aims to reduce fatigue-related accidents, improve supply chain fluidity, and provide essential infrastructure along the nation’s most critical freight corridors. To support these national freight and mobility goals, the Department intends to invest in projects that enhance or maintain the operational efficiency of the national transportation network.”

According to an FAQ document on INFRA, the funds for parking can only be provided to some sort of public entity or a public-private partnership. The list of acceptable entities to apply included potential applicants as big as a state or a group of them, down to an individual local government or a group of them.

But it also provides that any of the public applicants could have applied with a “private entity to fund development, capacity expansion, or operations and maintenance.”

There were 14 new parking projects approved by INFRA and announced by the Department of Transportation Wednesday. The precise total of new spots is 2,403. 

Biggest project in the Volunteer State

The largest is a 500 spot project in Tennessee. That project is actually two separate projects, one near Nashville and the other near Knoxville. 

The recipients of the grant of just under $24 million are three counties, joined together under the banner of the Greater Nashville Regional Council. The new parking spots will be built at five separate Pilot Travel Center locations, according to the fact sheet released by the DOT. They will be built along interstate 40 and interstate 24.

Border crossing parking

The dropoff to the next largest project is significant: 305 spots to be built in Los Indios, Texas, near the Brownsville border crossing with Mexico.

In that project, according to the DOT, work will need to be done to reconstruct about 0.35 miles of a local road that will provide access to a new parking area near the Los Indios Port of Entry. Cameron County was the entity granted the $9.2 million award.

The other projects from largest to smallest, along with their sponsors, are as follows:

• Port of Savannah, 275 spots, sponsored by the Georgia Ports Authority, near the port of Savannah, less than two miles from gate 4 of the port, $24.5 million.   

• Enfield, Connecticut, 260 spots at a new parking facility, sponsored by the state’s Department of Transportation, on interstate 91 north of Hartford, $13.5 million. 

• Rest Iowa sponsored by the state’s Department of Transportation, described as “rural,” 150 spots spread out over six existing rest areas on interstate 80, $24.5 million, sponsored by the state’s Department of Transportation. 

• Port of Wilmington, North Carolina, 140 spots, $6 million, at the port, serving interstate 40, sponsored by the North Carolina State Ports Authority. 

• Interstate 49 rest area, new project on the future interstate 49 in Crawford County, Arkansas, 137 spots, $23 million, Arkansas Department of Transportation is the sponsor.

• Nebraska interstate 80 rest stop, sponsored by the state’s Department of Transportation, 120 spots for $7.5 million, building a new facility between mile markers 247 and 254 in Dawson County. 

• Monroe County, Georgia, 109 spots, $13.5 million, adding spots at existing sites at two Georgia-owned parking facilities, one a weigh station and one a rest area, sponsored by the state’s Department of Transportation.

• Wisconsin project on interstate 41 near Dodge County, sponsored by the state’s Department of Transportation, 106 spots for $15 million, adding to two existing areas.

• Fort Worth Alliance project at a Pilot Travel Center, 100 spots, $5 million, state highway 170 & interstate 35 west, sponsored by the city of Fort Worth. 

• Needles truck parking area, 100 spots at a new 15-acre site, near the interstate 40 and California 95 interchange, $6.4 million, sponsored by the city of Needles. 

• Fergus Falls rest area in Minnesota, 63 spots, $27.7 million, sponsored by the state’s Department of Transportation, located on interstate 94. 

• Southern Illinois project, sponsored by the state’s Department of Transportation, 38 parking spots, reconstructing the southbound Green Creek and Post Oak rest areas on interstate 57.

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When a truck is selected for inspection, the program sends fleet and vehicle data and the driver’s electronic Record of Duty Status (eRODS) directly to the officer. Eligibility rests on two conditions: a fleet must use Fleetworthy’s Weigh Station Bypass service, which operated as Drivewyze before Bestpass-Fleetworthy Solutions bought it in 2024, and, for now, it must run ELDs from Geotab or Platform Science.

Fleetworthy called the Nevada launch the industry’s first automated roadside inspection solution and said enforcement officers there are already reporting time savings.

“With Expedited Inspection, we’re easily saving about 15 minutes per inspection. That’s time our officers get back to focus on enforcement, and time drivers get back on the road,” Sgt. Scott Keane of the Nevada Highway Patrol said in the release.

How it differs from standard ELD transfers

Drivers already send their logs to officers electronically. Under federal hours-of-service rules, a driver must produce and transfer hours-of-service records from an ELD when an authorized safety official asks. In a standard telematics transfer, the officer gives the driver a routing code and the driver starts the upload to an FMCSA server, according to FMCSA guidance. Officers review the file in eRODS, FMCSA’s software for opening ELD records.

Fleetworthy says its version automates that handoff and adds to it. The eRODS file reaches the officer once a truck is selected for inspection, and the program also sends fleet and vehicle registration data that pre-fills inspection forms, according to the company’s June 2025 Nevada launch release. Fleets activate the feature once through their ELD.

The idea has a predecessor: before the acquisition, Drivewyze’s e-Inspection program let drivers send inspection data from their ELDs to officers for Level III inspections, FreightWaves reported in 2021.

Expedited Inspection’s Virtual Vehicle Enabled label refers to Platform Science’s platform that pulls live data from trucks’ built-in telematics. Emilie Campbell, vice president of marketplace for Virtual Vehicle at Platform Science, said the expansion “helps get accurate information into officers’ hands the moment it’s needed, without adding steps for drivers.”

The expansion also adds Inspect Queue, a view of every truck flagged for inspection that lets officers pick up an inspection on a separate device. It is live in all five states.

Fleetworthy’s cost estimate

Each inspection saves a fleet about $22.82, Fleetworthy estimates, and the company said the savings can compound for fleets running frequent lanes through participating states. That equals the 15 minutes Keane cited at $91.27 an hour, the marginal cost of operating a truck in the American Transportation Research Institute’s 2024 Analysis of the Operational Costs of Trucking. That edition reflects 2023 costs, when ATRI put the per-mile cost at $2.270.

ATRI has published two editions since, and Fleetworthy used the older figure. The 2026 update, released in July, put 2025 costs at a record $2.336 per mile, up from $2.260 in 2024, FreightWaves reported. ATRI’s public summaries of the newer editions do not list an hourly cost.

Availability

The program is free to state transportation departments and state police. For fleets, it is available at no additional cost in Nevada, California, Michigan, Vermont and Maine with Weigh Station Bypass and a participating ELD provider. More states and ELD integrations are planned, Fleetworthy said.

“Expanding Expedited Inspection from one state to five shows how this technology can scale to reduce roadside friction for fleets and law enforcement,” said Miranda Leadbeater, a product manager at Fleetworthy. “Every minute saved means less downtime for drivers and more predictable operations for fleets.”

Why it matters: Drivers already must transfer ELD logs when officers ask. Fleetworthy’s program sends them, along with fleet and vehicle data, once a truck is selected. A Nevada officer says that saves about 15 minutes per inspection, though only two ELD providers support it so far.

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Penske Automotive Group (NYSE: PAG), a publicly-traded company that includes the current Penske-related companies involved in a closely-watched liability case, will become a private company with a buyout from two of its current corporate owners.

After a review of the July offer from Penske Corp and Mitsui & Co. Ltd., PAG said Thursday it had accepted the offer to sell itself to those two companies. What is being sold is the approximately 27.8% of Penske Automotive those two companies do not currently own.

After the deal is completed, Penske Corp., which is a private company, will own 64% of Penske Automotive. Mitsui will own the balance.

The purchase price is $212 per share. When the offer to take PAG private was first announced in July, the share price in the deal was $210 per share.

That price, according to the prepared statement released by Penske Automotive, is a premium of approximately 20.09% to the 60-day average and 26.17% to the 90-day volume average weighted prices of PAG stock for the period ended July 21, when the offer was made.

According to the company’s 10-K report to the Securities & Exchange Commission, Penske Automotive, whose key activity is automotive retail, had revenue in 2025 of approximately $27.5 billion from retail automotive dealerships, $3.4 billion from retail commercial truck dealers, and $922.6 million from commercial vehicle distribution and other operations. 

Its truck dealership operates as Premier Truck Group, which primarily sells Freightliner and Western Star trucks, both manufactured by Daimler Truck (DTG.DE).

Penske Automotive holds a 28.9% share in Penske Truck Leasing. In the 10-K, the company said Penske Transportation Solutions (PTS) is the “universal brand name for Penske Truck Leasing’s various businesses, which articulates the breadth of their services.”

“PTS is capable of meeting customers’ needs across the supply chain with a broad product offering that includes full-service truck leasing, truck rental, and contract maintenance along with logistics services, such as dedicated contract carriage, distribution center management, supply chain management, and dry van truckload carrier services,” the 10-K said.

It is carrier Penske Logistics and its brokerage affiliate, Penske Transportation Management (PTM), which are part of PTS, that find themselves in a case involving carrier liability that has drawn strong interest across the industry.

The chain of events in the case is that Penske Logistics secured a load of automotive seats, which it then brokered out to its affiliate PTM.

PTM then brokered the load to another carrier who in turn brokered the freight to yet another carrier. That carrier was involved in the fatal 2018 crash.

After a lower court victory that found Penske was not liable, the Penske companies were defeated on appeal by the Fifth Circuit, which ruled Penske Logistics, several steps away from the carrier that killed Lyndon Dean Meyer on the day after Christmas, could be held liable for that fatal crash.

Penske Logistics  is asking the full circuit for an en banc hearing to reconsider the appellate court decision in the Fifth Circuit.

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The American Trucking Associations has turned to one of its affiliates and plucked the head of the Alabama Trucking Association to be the national group’s next president and CEO, effective December 1.

Mark Colson has been named to head the ATA, which was jolted by the sudden departure of Chris Spear in late August.

According to a statement released by ATA, Colson has been president and CEO of the Alabama Trucking Association since 2019. Prior to that, he worked for several Alabama-based business organizations, including the Business Council of Alabama.

Colson, according to ATA, has been active in the group’s activities. He has been a member of the association’s Strategic Priorities Committee and the Truck PAC Board of Directors. Colson also is on the Advisory Committee of the American Transportation Research Institute, the ATA’s research arm. 

According to ATA, Colson was elected by his peers at other ATA state associations as vice chairman of the Trucking Association Executives Council.

He is the 10th ATA president and CEO in the group’s history, which dates back to 1933. He is a graduate of Huntingdon College, and receive an MBA from Troy University. 

The chairman of the Alabama Trucking Association, Scott Smith who is CEO of PS Logistics, praised Colson’s tenure with that group. Colson, Smith said, “grew our membership and broke revenue records year over year for all our entities, and established our political action committee as one of the best and most effective in the state.”

In the ATA prepared statement, Colson said his role as head of Alabama Trucking “has been the honor of my career.”

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Francis’ assets include an $8.5 million Florida waterfront residence, while reporting approximately $7.5 million in liabilities in newly filed federal bankruptcy documents.

The bankruptcy documents also disclose that Francis is employed by Giant Logistics LLC in a commissioned sales position making over $37,000 a month in gross wages.

The disclosures offer the most detailed accounting yet of Francis’ personal finances following the January shutdown of the Pittsburgh-based trucking and logistics group, which left hundreds of employees without jobs and prompted lawsuits from lenders, carriers and other creditors.

Francis filed his schedules and Statement of Financial Affairs in U.S. Bankruptcy Court for the Middle District of Florida, nearly three weeks after seeking personal Chapter 11 protection on Sept. 22.

The 47-page filing lists $12,670,208.96 in assets and $7,461,606.75 in liabilities. However, the schedules also identify several disputed, contingent or unliquidated claims without assigned dollar amounts, meaning the reported liabilities do not necessarily reflect Francis’ total potential financial exposure.

The documents provide new details about his real estate, personal property, financial transactions and employment following R&R’s collapse. They do not, however, provide a complete accounting of the former company’s assets, debts or remaining obligations to workers and creditors.

Florida mansion at center of lender dispute

The largest asset disclosed is Francis’ residence at 550 S. Barfield Drive in Marco Island, Florida, which he values at $8.5 million.

He also lists two Pennsylvania properties: a residence in Presto valued at $1.4 million and a Pittsburgh property valued at $200,000.

Together, the three properties account for $10.1 million of his reported assets.

The Marco Island residence is central to litigation brought by Huntington National Bank, one of R&R’s principal lenders.

In a lawsuit filed in Collier County, Florida, Huntington alleged that R&R Express Properties LLC transferred the residence to Francis and his wife, Kathleen, in December 2025, as the company’s financial condition deteriorated.

The bank has challenged the transfer, alleging that it was intended to place the property beyond the reach of creditors. Those allegations have not been established by a court.

Francis’ bankruptcy schedules list a $5.3 million secured claim associated with Huntington, but an accompanying filing disputes his personal liability for the mortgage.

According to the notes, the mortgage is in the name of R&R Express Properties rather than Francis individually. The notes also describe a potential claim against Huntington involving an attempted mortgage payoff, the return of funds and a transaction involving Centennial Bank.

Francis additionally claims a Florida homestead exemption of $3.2 million for the Marco Island residence and identifies another exemption basis involving the same property. The claims have not been established as valid by a bankruptcy court, and the listed amounts should not be treated as separate exemptions that can automatically be added together.

The notes caution that none of the scheduled property values is based on a formal appraisal and that Francis reserves the right to amend the figures.

A 99-year lease raises additional questions

Another unusual disclosure involves a long-term lease for the Marco Island residence.

The court filing identifies a 99-year lease between Francis and R&R Express Properties LLC, with monthly rent of $16,667.67 plus expenses.

In the accompanying notes, Francis states that the lease was entered into at or near the time R&R Express Properties originally acquired the residence.

The filings do not establish whether the lease payments were made consistently, whether the agreement remains in effect or how the lease relates to the December 2025 transfer challenged by Huntington.

Francis reports new $37K monthly income from Giant Logistics

The bankruptcy documents also disclose that Francis is employed by Giant Logistics LLC in a commissioned sales position.

Court filings report approximately $37,078 in monthly gross wages and commissions from the company. Francis indicates that he began the position roughly two months before filing his bankruptcy petition.

His reported combined household monthly income, including other sources, is $42,751.54.

However, his monthly expenses total $65,283.45, producing a reported monthly deficit of $22,531.91.

Francis anticipates that his commissions from Giant Logistics could increase substantially as the business grows, projecting an additional approximately $22,000 per month within six months and $40,000 per month within a year. He does not explain how the business could grow in the court filing.

The schedules do not establish whether Giant Logistics has ownership, management or financial ties to R&R Family of Companies or whether it acquired any of the former company’s customers, employees or assets.

Boats, vehicles and other assets disclosed

Beyond real estate, Francis lists several personal assets, including a 2023 Boston Whaler 420R Outrage boat valued at $900,000 and two Sea-Doo personal watercraft valued at $3,500 each.

His schedules also identify luxury watches, household furnishings, bank accounts and interests in trusts.

Court documents disclose several transactions during 2026, including a wine collection transferred to Benchmark Wine Group in March for a reported $163,000, a 1961 Corvette transferred that month in a transaction valued at $160,000, and six timeshare interests transferred in May for a reported $60,000.

The Corvette disclosure also references approximately $148,000 in associated debt.

Francis also identifies interests in the Richard S. and Kathleen L. Francis Revocable Trust and the Kathleen L. Francis Spousal Lifetime Access Trust, with certain values listed as unknown.

What the disclosures reveal about R&R’s collapse

R&R Family of Companies operated a network of trucking, freight brokerage and logistics businesses, including R&R Express, RFX and Taylor Express.

Its operations began shutting down in January amid mounting financial pressures and disputes over unpaid freight bills.

Huntington has alleged in separate litigation that the R&R businesses suffered substantial losses and accumulated tens of millions of dollars in unpaid trade obligations before operations ceased.

In a separate lawsuit filed Jan. 23 in Hidalgo County, Texas, Jimenez Logistics LLC accused R&R Express Inc. and RFX Inc. of failing to pay approximately $264,650 in freight invoices for transportation services arranged in 2025 and early 2026. The complaint alleges that the companies continued arranging shipments despite knowing, or having reason to know, they could not pay carriers.

Jimenez Logistics asserted claims including breach of contract, fraudulent inducement and negligent misrepresentation. The allegations have not been proven in court.

Those claims remain allegations, and Francis’ personal bankruptcy schedules do not independently establish the company’s final financial condition.

The newly filed documents do, however, show how the financial fallout has extended beyond R&R’s operating businesses to Francis’ personal assets, guarantees, real estate and relationships with lenders.

The schedules list multiple R&R-related entities among parties connected to Francis’ financial obligations, while identifying potential claims against Huntington.

The Statement of Financial Affairs document reports approximately $3.18 million in wages and commissions during 2024, providing additional context for Francis’ compensation before the company’s collapse.

Another unresolved question is whether R&R’s corporate entities will seek bankruptcy protection of their own. Francis’ Chapter 11 is an individual proceeding and does not automatically place R&R Express, RFX, Taylor Express or other affiliates into bankruptcy.

Without a corporate bankruptcy proceeding, employees and trade creditors may have to pursue separate wage claims, lawsuits or collection actions against the specific entities that owe them money.

The amount ultimately available to satisfy those claims remains unclear.

Creditors prepare for next stage

Francis’ bankruptcy case is drawing participation from parties involved in the wider R&R financial dispute.

Attorneys representing Michael P. Williams and several AGX Freight-related companies filed notices of appearance Oct. 14. AGX was another freight business affected by financial disputes involving R&R and Huntington.

The appearances indicate that those parties are participating in or monitoring the proceedings, but do not themselves establish the validity or amount of any claim.

The bankruptcy court has scheduled an initial status conference for Oct. 21 and a meeting of creditors for Oct. 27.

The creditors’ meeting could provide an opportunity for questions about Francis’ finances, the disputed Marco Island property, his current business activities and the relationship between his personal obligations and R&R’s collapse.

FreightWaves contacted Francis’ bankruptcy attorney, Michael Seese, by email and telephone but did not receive a response to requests for comment.

Why it matters: R&R Family of Companies CEO’s bankruptcy filings offer new insight into his assets, business activities and financial obligations, but leave unresolved whether creditors and former employees can recover money owed by the company.

Related

Former employees detail turmoil before R&R Family of Companies collapsed

Taylor Express closure leaves drivers sleeping in trucks, employees jobless

Lawsuit alleges R&R Family of Companies continued operating while insolvent

New lawsuit alleges R&R, RFX failed to pay $264K in freight invoices

Florida-based AGX Freight halts operations amid lender dispute

Huntington sues 24 R&R companies over more than $12M in debt

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Prologis (NYSE: PLD) reported consolidated revenue of $2.39 billion for the quarter, reflecting an 8% year-over-year increase and topping consensus estimates by 8%. Core funds from operations (FFO) of $1.60 per share were 11 cents higher y/y and 3 cents better than analysts’ expectations.

Lease signings in the period totaled 60 million square feet of space for the San Francisco-based real estate investment trust. Leases commenced totaled 55.9 million square feet, a 15% y/y decline.

Average occupancy improved 30 basis points y/y to 95.1%, 10 bps higher than in the second quarter. It ended the quarter at 95.6% occupancy.

Net effective rent change on Prologis’ portfolio of multiyear leases was 38%, near the company’s full-year goal of 40%.

“Customers are running lean on inventory, and excess capacity within their networks has largely cleared,” said CEO Dan Letter. “We see healthy demand supported by e-commerce, advanced manufacturing and the build-out of the data center supply chain.”

Lease mark-to-market (resetting in-place rents to current market rents) was estimated at 16%, or $780 million in future net operating income, the company said on a Thursday call with analysts. The number doesn’t include future increases in inflation or rents.

Management said net absorption—leased space less the amount of space vacated—was 63 million square feet in the U.S. during the third quarter. That was in line with its annual expectation for net absorption of 230 million to 240 million square feet. It said new facility starts have moderated given elevated construction costs, general cost inflation and higher interest rates.

Prologis’ portfolio outperformed the U.S. market, which carried a 7.1% vacancy rate in the period, down from a 7.5% peak. Market rents improved 50 bps in the period, a third consecutive quarter of rent growth. Prologis expects rents on logistics properties to outpace inflation.

The outlook for full-year 2026 core FFO was narrowed to a range of $6.25 to $6.29 per share, a 1-cent increase at the midpoint. The guide assumes average occupancy of 95.25% to 95.5% (25 bps lower at the high end of the range) and development starts between $5 billion and $5.75 billion (an 8% increase at the midpoint). The company previously raised its outlook for development starts by $1 billion in conjunction with its second-quarter report.  

“Our financial results reflect another quarter of strong operating performance and disciplined capital allocation,” said Chief Financial Officer Tim Arndt. “That performance, together with the strength of our balance sheet, gives us the capacity and flexibility to continue investing in growth even in a higher interest rate environment.”

That growth plan includes the addition of London-based logistics warehouse operator Segro (LSE.SGRO).

Segro’s board agreed to Prologis’ $18.8-billion, best-and-final takeover offer in July. The combination will expand Prologis’ European footprint by nearly 50% to 363 million square feet. The combined entity will have $269 billion of assets under management.

“On SEGRO, shareholder approval was an important milestone in bringing our two companies together,” Letter said. “We look forward to completing the transaction and expanding our platform in Europe, increasing the scale at which we can serve customers.”

Shares of PLD were down 2.4% at 2:50 p.m. EDT on Thursday compared to the S&P 500, which was up 0.1%

Why it matters? Prologis’ third-quarter performance and development starts forecast reflect normalized inventory levels and robust demand from the e-commerce, advanced manufacturing and data center sectors. The company’s Segro acquisition will significantly expand its global footprint and infrastructure capacity to better serve international supply chains.

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The post Prologis tops Q3 estimates, raises development starts forecast again appeared first on FreightWaves.

Labor dynamics, global instability, and supply chain resilience and security may ultimately determine which carrier is the winning “tortoise” or the losing “hare” more than commercial and operational considerations.

New labor dynamics are putting pressure on several models. Teamster negotiations are hitting unionized carriers, while fast-growing “alternative carriers” using gig-based delivery models are facing increased scrutiny over compliance with labor protections. That scrutiny is increasingly playing out in court, through lawsuits alleging violations of state labor codes and the Fair Labor Standards Act. 

Last month, DoorDash and Uber reached a $131.5 million settlement with New York City’s Department of Consumer and Worker Protection. Some alternative carriers and large shipping platforms, including Amazon, have sought to shield themselves from the true cost of carrying fulltime employees by using delivery service providers, but that may not be an option in the future.

New York City’s Delivery Protection Act, supported by Mayor Zohran Mamdani, would require companies to hire core warehouse and delivery workers directly rather than rely on DSPs. Chicago’s version would add licensing, training, and safety requirements. 

The result is that no parcel labor model looks politically uncomplicated anymore. Whether you rely on unionized networks, gig platforms, or DSP-based operations, there are new questions about who bears the cost, risk, and responsibility of last-mile delivery and associated operations.

Geopolitics complicate parcel delivery

Links between global politics and domestic parcel delivery are not always obvious at first, but in 2026 the impact of conflict and trade policy is becoming harder to miss.

The Iran war has pushed fuel prices higher, and those elevated costs are expected to persist. FarEye recently reported that 88% of operators say delivery costs are growing as fast as revenue, or faster, with fuel among the top three cost pressures. For shippers, the war has translated into higher fuel surcharges. According to analysis by AFS Logistics, fuel surcharges that were about 9% for UPS and FedEx in 2021 are now above 23% for both carriers. 

If cost remains a primary driver of carrier selection then geopolitics is no longer an abstraction. It is becoming a material input into shipper decisions.

Trade policy is creating a similar shift. The permissive de minimis environment helped discount cross-border marketplaces and sellers thrive and supported alternative carriers positioned to serve them. With de minimis now removed, those foreign e-commerce giants face a tougher U.S. outlook even as they make costly investments in local fulfillment to adapt. The political risk may not end there, as suggested by the ongoing FTC investigation into cross-border retailer Shein. For the emerging carriers that grew alongside these platforms and sellers, geopolitics is now taking back some of what it initially gave, pushing them into a more crowded and difficult search for domestic customers.

Political anxiety over dependence on foreign trade is also turning inward, with parcel-market integrity increasingly framed as a U.S. economic security issue. That policy focus is still in an early stage, but the clearest example is Sen. Tom Cotton’s call for the Department of Justice to investigate alternative carriers he argues unfairly threaten U.S. firms, jobs, and data.

Importance of risk management infrastructure

Scrutiny is likely to intensify on the data and compliance front. Less than a week after Cotton’s letter was published, news broke that SpeedX, one of the companies mentioned in it, exposed 840 million customer records in one of the largest delivery-industry data incidents to date. Since then, other incidents have underscored the fragility of delivery networks, including a cyberattack on Boston Scientific, which disrupted its ability to process and ship customer orders and will likely affect its ability to meet some of its targets for the year.

A future reckoning with automation and AI in parcel delivery could push technology regulation and data security compliance even further up the agenda. Several forms of AI — particularly AI analytics and agentic AI — are expected to have high impact on the logistics industry, and many carriers are already investing in AI-enabled technologies, including autonomous applications. 

There have not yet been major, well-publicized logistics failures tied directly to AI systems. But as general-purpose models have shown a tendency to fabricate information or behave unpredictably, it is not difficult to imagine similar concerns emerging in parcel operations, where algorithmic decisions increasingly affect routing, fraud detection, customer service, warehouse activity, and delivery orchestration. In that environment, AI will not be treated merely as an efficiency tool; it may become another test of whether parcel networks can be trusted.

Political and policy dynamics do not negate the importance of strategy, cost, reliability, and speed in determining carrier success, but they imply that the next phase of parcel competition may reward a broader set of strengths. As shippers diversify their carrier portfolios, the most durable partnerships will likely depend not only on price or service levels, but also on continuity, regulatory discipline, labor stability, data security, and predictable performance in a less predictable environment.

For carriers, the tech-sector philosophy of “move fast and break things” may no longer be enough. In a market where politics increasingly shapes the rules of the race, the most valuable networks may not always be the fastest movers or the loudest disruptors. They may be the ones built to keep moving when the track changes.

(Daniil Davydoff is senior manager, market intelligence and strategy at DHL eCommerce Americas. His views do not reflect those of his company or FreightWaves. He can be contacted on LinkedIn or at daniil.davydoff@dhl.com.)

The post Opinion: How politics and policy are rewriting the rules of parcel delivery appeared first on FreightWaves.

This is not a marketing refresh or a new label on the same jug. It is a genuine category change, the kind the industry only goes through about once a decade. The last one landed in 2016. Before that, 2006. So if it feels like you have been buying the same oil forever, that is because, in category terms, you nearly have. What is coming in January is a real shift in how these oils are formulated, what they are certified to do, and in one important case, which engines they are even allowed to go into.

If you sit on the leadership side of a carrier, this belongs on your radar now as a procurement, budgeting, and equipment-planning item rather than a shop-floor detail to delegate and forget. The oil your fleet buys in bulk, the specs your maintenance team writes, the warranty language on the trucks you are ordering for 2027, and the fuel-economy case behind your next tractor purchase all run through this change. For the owner-operator, it is the same set of decisions at a smaller scale, made at the parts counter instead of in a supply contract. Either way the move is the same, which is to understand it before January rather than scramble after it.

We spent time digging into this one, including sitting through a technical briefing from the people who formulate these products, and we want to be upfront about something. We are not oil chemists. What follows is our best effort to translate a very technical subject into plain language a working carrier can actually use. Where the data comes from a manufacturer, we will say so, because a company presenting its own test results is not the same thing as an independent verdict, and you deserve to know the difference.

What Is Actually Changing

Right now, the two heavy-duty diesel oil categories you deal with are CK-4 and FA-4. CK-4 is the workhorse. It is the backward-compatible oil that goes into just about everything, old trucks and new. FA-4 was the lower-viscosity, fuel-economy option built for newer engines that could handle it.

PC-12 replaces both of them, and here is the part that trips people up. PC-12 is not a single oil. It splits into two separate categories, and the difference between them matters a great deal depending on what you run.

The first is API CL-4. Think of this as the direct successor to CK-4. It is backward compatible, which means it is designed to go into the engines you already own, old and new alike. If you have a 2015 truck or a 2024 truck, CL-4 is built to cover it. It carries on in the same familiar grades you buy today, the 15W-40, 10W-30, and 5W-30 that fill most fleet shelves. For the vast majority of the trucks on the road today, this is the category you will be buying.

The second is API FB-4. This is the low-viscosity, fuel-economy category, and this is the one to pay attention to, because FB-4 is not backward compatible. It is engineered for the model-year 2027 and newer engines that are being designed around it. You cannot simply pour FB-4 into your current truck to chase better fuel mileage. The engine has to be built for it. Putting it in the wrong engine is not a shortcut to savings, it is a mistake that can cost you a lot more than the few cents per mile you were hoping to pick up.

Part of what makes FB-4 different is viscosity. The new category introduces a thinner grade, the XW-20 family, meaning 0W-20 and 5W-20 oils. Those are noticeably thinner than the 10W-30 and 15W-40 oils most fleets run now, and that thinness is where the fuel economy comes from.

Why This Is Happening Now

None of this is happening because the oil companies got bored. It is being driven by emissions rules and by the engine makers themselves.

The model-year 2027 emissions and greenhouse-gas standards are pushing engine manufacturers to build cleaner, more efficient diesel engines, and those engines place new demands on the oil. These are not small targets. The new engines are being designed to cut nitrogen-oxide emissions by roughly 80 percent and particulate emissions by about half compared to what came before, and hitting numbers like that means tighter-running, hotter, more tightly sealed engines that are far less forgiving of an oil that cannot keep up. The engine builders, working through their trade group, formally asked the industry to develop a new oil category that could match. In other words, the engines are changing first, and the oil is being built to keep pace.

A thinner oil cuts the energy an engine spends just moving its own lubricant around. One of the formulators put it in terms anybody can picture. Moving honey around takes effort. Moving water takes almost none. Thinner oil behaves more like the water in that comparison, so the engine burns less fuel fighting its own oil. That is the fuel-economy logic behind the XW-20 grades and the FB-4 category.

But thinner oil and cleaner-burning engines come with a catch, and this is where the real engineering happens. A thinner film has less physical cushion between moving metal parts, so the oil has to work harder chemically to protect against wear. On top of that, the new category tightens the limits on sulfated ash, phosphorus, and sulfur, the group the industry calls SAPS, the chemistry that can clog up the aftertreatment systems, the DPF and SCR hardware, that keep these trucks legal. Lower levels of that chemistry mean longer aftertreatment life and better emissions performance, but some of those same ingredients were also doing double duty protecting your engine from wear.

To make sure the new oils actually hold up, the category adds a new engine test built specifically to torture the parts that thinner oil puts at risk. It is a cylinder liner scuffing test, and its whole purpose is to force an engine toward the kind of catastrophic liner-and-ring wear that a weak oil would allow. To pass, an oil has to survive a set number of hours under that abuse. It is a meaningful addition, because it targets exactly the failure mode operators worry about when they hear the word thinner.

The Wear Question, And Why It Matters To You

Here is the concern that comes up in every shop and every drivers’ lounge the moment this subject gets raised. If they are pulling out the chemistry that protects my engine, is my engine going to wear out faster?

It is a fair question, and the honest answer is that it deserves scrutiny rather than a reflexive yes or no.

The chemistry in question is mostly a compound built around zinc and phosphorus, the additives long associated with anti-wear protection. Under the old CK-4 oils, phosphorus levels commonly ran around 1,200 parts per million. Under the new CL-4 category, the ceiling drops to 800 parts per million, with zinc coming down alongside it. That is a real reduction, not a rounding error, and it is the reason some engine makers have been openly cautious about whether wear protection will hold.

The formulators argue that it will, and they have put data behind that argument. According to the manufacturer we heard from, the lower phosphorus levels are being offset by supplemental anti-wear additives, and their field testing has not shown a wear penalty. That company reported roughly 15 million miles of documented field-trial running across a wide mix of operations, from long-haul over-the-road fleets to coal-hauling heavy haul, mining equipment, farm equipment, diesel pickups, local delivery, and even city taxis.

The most striking piece of evidence they shared came from teardowns on two high-mileage Detroit Diesel DD15 engines running out of a North Carolina fleet. Both trucks were past 700,000 miles. Both had spent their first stretch on the older CK-4 oil and then switched over to the new PC-12 chemistry, accumulating well over half their total miles on the new formulation. When the engines were pulled apart and inspected, the manufacturer described the parts as extremely clean and showed a main bearing with essentially no measurable wear after 700,000 miles.

That is a genuinely impressive result, and it is worth taking seriously. It is also, and we want to be clear about this, the oil company’s own data presented to make the case for its own product. Independent, long-term field verification across many brands and many engines is what ultimately settles a question like this, and that evidence accumulates over years, not months. The early picture the manufacturer paints is reassuring. It is not the same as a neutral referee blowing the whistle. Both of those things can be true at once, and a smart operator holds both in mind.

What This Means For Your Operation

Strip away the chemistry and here is what actually lands on your desk, whether that desk belongs to a fleet maintenance manager spec’ing oil for dozens of trucks or an owner-operator standing at a parts counter.

Know your category. For the trucks you own today, CL-4 is your oil. It is the backward-compatible successor to CK-4, and it is built to protect the engines already in your fleet. When CK-4 starts disappearing from shelves, CL-4 is what replaces it for your existing equipment, and the transition for those trucks is designed to be seamless.

Do not put FB-4 in an engine that was not built for it. This is the single most important thing to take away. FB-4 is the thin, fuel-saving oil, and it only belongs in the model-year 2027 and newer engines engineered around it. The fuel savings are real on those new engines. Chasing them in your current truck by buying the thinner oil is not a clever hack, it is a path to accelerated wear and potential engine damage. If a price difference or a fuel-economy pitch ever tempts you toward FB-4 for an older truck, that is the moment to stop and check your engine maker’s specification.

Expect the switch itself to be smooth for most trucks. Based on the field data, the vast majority of trucks on the road can move from CK-4 to CL-4 without drama. The oils are built to be compatible with your existing drain intervals and operating conditions. You are not looking at a forced engine change or a new maintenance regimen, you are looking at a different jug on the shelf that does the same job for your current equipment.

Keep buying to your OEM spec and keep your documentation. This matters more than ever during a category change. Your engine manufacturer will tell you exactly which category and viscosity your warranty requires. Buy to that spec, keep your receipts and your oil-analysis records, and you protect both your engine and your warranty position if a dispute ever comes up. For a fleet running oil analysis programs, this is also the window to watch your wear-metal trends closely through the transition, because your own used-oil data is the most honest feedback you will ever get on how a new oil is treating your specific engines in your specific duty cycle.

Think about the fuel-economy math honestly. For fleets taking delivery of model-year 2027 and newer trucks, FB-4 and the XW-20 grades are where the fuel savings live, and across a large fleet those cents per mile add up to real money over a year. That is a legitimate reason to pay attention to the new category as you cycle in new equipment. Just remember that the savings are tied to the new engines, not to the oil by itself, and that fuel surcharge recovery and your cost-per-mile picture should factor into how you value that gain. A half-cent-per-mile fuel improvement means one thing to a fleet turning over tractors every three years and something very different to an operator keeping a paid-off truck for the long haul.

Why It Matters

PC-12 is the biggest change to heavy-duty diesel oil in about ten years, and the core of it is simple. Your current trucks move to CL-4, built to protect them just like the CK-4 you run now, while your new 2027-and-later trucks open the door to FB-4, the thinner fuel-saving oil that does not belong in anything older. You do not need to panic or stockpile old oil, you need to know which category each truck takes and keep buying to the spec your engine maker publishes.

That is what makes this worth your attention now rather than in January. The one mistake that will actually hurt, pouring the thin FB-4 into an engine built for CL-4, can turn a routine oil purchase into a major repair bill, and the carriers and owner-operators who learn the two-category split today will treat the switch as a non-event while the ones who wait will be making the call under pressure at the counter with the wrong information.

This article draws on a technical briefing from Shell Rotella’s formulation team at the Shell Technology Center Houston, along with published American Petroleum Institute category information and emissions-standard guidance from the Environmental Protection Agency and the Truck and Engine Manufacturers Association. Field-performance and teardown figures are as presented by the manufacturer and reflect its own testing rather than independent verification.

The post The Heavy-Duty Oil Standard Is Changing In January, What It Means For Your Fleet, Your Costs, And Your Equipment appeared first on FreightWaves.

Medicines, vaccines, biologics and other critical healthcare products typically follow a separate booking process because they require specialized, value-added services beyond a standard parcel. That process includes providing a validated temperature-controlled package as part of the FedEx Temp-Assure Advantage (FTAA) service, with packaging supplied and managed through specialized fulfillment centers.

Before the new FTAA portal, arranging these services often involved multiple steps and coordination between the customer, fulfillment center, and transportation network. The new portal digitizes and streamlines the process by enabling customers to manage onboarding, ordering of pre-conditioned packaging, shipment scheduling and returns through a single online platform. 

Temperature-controlled healthcare logistics has traditionally involved a significant degree of manual coordination across the industry. By bringing key steps into a single digital workflow, the FTAA portal helps simplify the process, improve visibility  and reduce administrative effort for customers, FedEx (NYSE: FDX) said in a news release on Tuesday.

The platform is available for pharmaceutical manufacturers, biotech companies and clinical trial operators for non-freight, intra-European and domestic service in 26 markets in time for the peak shipping season. It applies to air and road shipments, and is expected to help to improve efficiency and control over temperature-sensitive goods during a period of increased demand. 

Why It Matters: As demand grows for biologics, specialty medicines and vaccines, maintaining strict temperature control is critical to ensuring product efficacy and patient safety. FedEx earlier this year created a new interdisciplinary life sciences unit, part of the company’s increased strategic focus on healthcare logistics.

FedEx Temp-Assure Advantage is a service designed to support the exacting requirements of the pharmaceutical and life sciences industries. It combines qualified packaging, tested in the FedEx Packaging lab, with the company’s integrated European transportation network and pharma-certified distribution facilities to help maintain temperature integrity for products requiring frozen, refrigerated or cool temperatures during transit of up to 96 hours, or more. It also utilizes reusable containers to help reduce waste.

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

Write to Eric Kulisch at ekulisch@freightwaves.com.

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Voorhoeve runs the North American arm of a brand with a large construction-truck business abroad. Volvo’s cab-over FMX holds about 30% of the vocational market in both Europe and Brazil, he said in a keynote at Volvo Construction Equipment’s Customer Center. The X marks Volvo’s vocational trucks worldwide: the FMX sits beside the long-haul FH and regional FM in cab-over markets, as the VNX now sits beside the VNL and VNR in North America.

The VNX, unveiled Wednesday, is the third truck on a shared North American platform after the long-haul VNL and regional-haul VNR. Volvo’s largest North American investment program includes more than $2 billion in new products, reported earlier in March. Volvo puts the total, including manufacturing, at $3 billion.

The three trucks share a chassis and electrical architecture, Voorhoeve said in an interview with FreightWaves, while each gets its own cab.

“When we then decided to put in a two-billion-dollar investment program platform, of course we need the whole market,” he said. “So let’s make now a platform where we can do the long haul, the regional haul, and the vocational.”

Voorhoeve put Volvo’s share of vocational at 2% to 3% in his keynote.

“Twenty-five percent, or anyway between twenty-five and thirty percent, is vocational—construction—which is a fairly stable segment,” he told FreightWaves. “So we developed products for the long haul, which is half of the market. We developed products for regional, which is a quarter of the market. And then we had a limited presence in vocational.”

Why Volvo built long haul first

Length rules explain the order. European rules cap the length of the whole tractor-trailer, Voorhoeve said, so builders put the driver on top of the engine to leave more room for payload. That produced the cab-over trucks Volvo sells across most of the world.

“Here in the US, the trailer length is regulated, but the combination length is not regulated,” he said. “So you can make a much longer tractor.”

Federal rules bar states from setting an overall length limit on tractor-semitrailer combinations on the National Network of truck routes. U.S. hauls also run longer, and Voorhoeve pointed to a mail hauler that runs Volvo trucks between Miami and Los Angeles every day.

“That’s two and a half, three days, and they do the desert,” he said. “So you need to be able to live in your truck.”

When Volvo came to the U.S., it bought the White factory and built White trucks under the Volvo logo for 10 years, Voorhoeve said. It launched the VNL in 1996 with what he called the first integrated sleeper in the North American market. The VHD followed in 2000 as Volvo’s construction truck, which Voorhoeve called a great truck with fairly limited applications.

Infrastructure and data centers

Vocational demand has run a little stronger than the rest of the market in recent years, Voorhoeve said, which he credited to the bipartisan infrastructure law and its spending on bridges, airports and highways.

Voorhoeve expects data center construction to carry that strength forward.

“Then we saw it coming back to normal a little bit, but of course now, with the whole data center boom, we will see a continuation of strength in that segment,” he said. “Will it explode? That I don’t really believe, but I think it will remain a very strong segment.”

Volvo is aiming the VNX at agriculture, municipalities, concrete, construction and roll-on/roll-off work, he said.

The overall market is less predictable. In his keynote, Voorhoeve described a North American truck market that can swing from 220,000 trucks a year to 300,000 and back, a range he said is hard to staff a factory around.

Trucks sold alongside construction equipment

Volvo’s other edge sits inside the same group. Volvo Construction Equipment sells machines into the job sites where VNX customers will haul to and from the pit.

“If you have a Volvo Construction Equipment loader, why wouldn’t you look at the Volvo trucks VNX?” Voorhoeve said.

The two businesses share a back office, which Voorhoeve said makes it easier to do business with customers. In-house financing can put a wheel loader and a truck in the same contract. The group’s U.S. parts warehouses stock both construction equipment and truck parts, and both businesses draw engine technology from the Volvo Group’s global powertrain division.

The VNX design drew on the same relationship. Voorhoeve said in his keynote that Volvo combined its global vocational experience with Volvo CE’s knowledge of how a job site runs, including how wheel loaders and trucks work together.

Vocational customers do not all buy the same way, he said. Some specialize in heavy haul, moving equipment or even houses, and only some own both machines and trucks.

“Some operators have both the yellow machines and the trucks, and some don’t,” Voorhoeve said. “But we have now the opportunity at least to combine there where necessary if the customer asks for that.”

The 15% target

Volvo set the goal at the Volvo Group’s November 2024 Capital Markets Day, held at the Volvo Trucks Customer Center in Dublin, Va., Voorhoeve said. Volvo’s North American heavy-duty market share was 8.4% in 2025, down from 9% in 2024, according to the Volvo Group’s fourth-quarter 2025 report.

He declined to put a number on where Volvo’s vocational share will be in a year.

“Let’s see where we end up,” he said. Volvo, he said, was “fairly firm that we believe that with Volvo Trucks we should be able to get to fifteen percent market share, and that combines long haul, regional haul, and vocational.”

Asked whether autonomous trucks would follow onto job sites, Voorhoeve said Volvo does not speculate on that.

“First of all, our main focus is now to continue in the vocational segment and to strengthen our position with a range that has far more applications available,” he said.

The post Volvo’s 15% share goal runs through vocational trucks appeared first on FreightWaves.

The rename follows Westport’s July 2025 sale of its light-duty business to an investment vehicle of Netherlands-based Heliaca Investments for a base price of $79.5 million. A company brand sheet ties the new name to that divestiture and to the transfer of the Westport name.

Aetherion’s chief executive said the rename tells the market who the company is after a strategy reset that narrowed what it works on.

“The bread and butter is the original foundation of the company, the original technology, HPDI, high pressure direct injection,” said Dan Sceli, CEO of Aetherion, in an interview with FreightWaves. “That’s really how it all started and that’s the core that we want to get back to focusing on and not trying to do 20 things part way, but do a couple of things really well.”

The name draws on two Greek roots, according to the company: aithēr, the clean air of the upper sky, and ion, meaning motion or energy.

Shareholders approved a name change at the company’s June 30 annual and special meeting. The company expects its shares to trade under the new name on the Toronto Stock Exchange and Nasdaq, subject to final exchange approvals, on a date it has not announced.

HPDI anchors the renamed company

Philip Hill co-founded Westport in 1995 and invented HPDI, which keeps the diesel engine and changes the fuel it burns. HPDI is sold through Cespira, a joint venture with Volvo Group launched in 2024. Aetherion owns 55% and Volvo owns 45%.

HPDI runs in more than 12,000 trucks worldwide, according to the company. Cespira posted second-quarter revenue of $27.1 million, up 125% from $12 million a year earlier, according to Westport’s second-quarter management’s discussion and analysis, dated Aug. 11.

The open question now, he said, is how quickly fleets switch to natural gas for its stable pricing.

“There’s lots of places for battery electric and fuel cells, but not on these long-haul truck fleets,” he said.

HPDI can also run hydrogen and natural gas blends on the same core technology, Sceli said. Most of hydrogen’s cost is tied up in liquefying and transporting it, he said, and it needs to get closer to $5 an equivalent gallon to compete. He sees blending hydrogen into existing U.S. natural gas pipelines as one way around that cost.

“They’ve been doing it in Hawaii for 50 years,” he said.

Hawaiʻi Gas blends up to 15% hydrogen into the synthetic natural gas it makes at a plant built in 1974 and distributes by pipeline on Oʻahu.

Cespira and Volvo signed a development agreement in June to run Volvo’s 13-liter engine on hydrogen through HPDI, with a European commercial launch targeted before 2030, according to Westport’s second-quarter filing.

CNG storage for North America

Cespira’s growth so far has come on liquefied natural gas, Sceli said. North America is the next market, he said, and its fuel is compressed natural gas, with pipelines and infrastructure already in place.

Westport showed a CNG demonstration truck at ACT Expo in May, a Volvo VNL 300 on a high-pressure storage system. The company reported more than 600 miles of range and up to 10 miles per gallon equivalent on that truck. Sceli said a number of large fleets have shown interest, and Volvo is working through its business case for the system in North America. He told FreightWaves in April that Environmental Protection Agency certification is the primary step toward commercialization.

Fleets want price stability on top of savings, Sceli said.

“They want to know that six months or 12 months down the road, what their fuel pricing is going to be,” he said. “This volatility in diesel causes headaches for all of these fleets and pricing and dealing with short- and long-term contracts.”

Over the next six to 12 months, Sceli said, the two things to watch are Cespira’s growth and the CNG system.

“Westport is bringing a new CNG storage system to combine it with HPDI for the North American market, because the market is looking for an alternative and we have it,” he said.

The post Westport becomes Aetherion, bets on CNG for US long-haul appeared first on FreightWaves.

With the more than 2,200 comments filed to the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration are overwhelmingly in favor of codifying current regulations on English Language Proficiency (ELP), the few urging caution tend to stick out.

That is particularly true in the case of the Sikh Coalition, which is not a trucking-specific organization but one that given the large number of Sikh drivers on U.S. highways has taken particular interest in the ELP regulation. 

The Sikh Coalition, in its comments filed to FMCSA, described itself as a “nonprofit and nonpartisan organization dedicated to ensuring that members of the Sikh community in America are able to practice their faith without fear of discrimination or backlash.”

Its description of the organization goes on to say that the group “(defends) the civil rights and civil liberties of Sikhs, including Sikh truck drivers, by providing direct legal services, advocating for legislative change, educating the public about Sikhs and Sikhi, and fostering civic engagement amongst Sikh Americans.”

The Notice of Proposed Rulemaking (NPRM) on ELP took comments through last Friday. The proposed rule “would make updates,” according to the NPRM, to various existing regulations to “reflect that noncompliance with ELP requirements will result in a driver being placed out of service.”

The one exception would be truck traffic localized to the U.S.-Mexico border that wasn’t heading further inland.

Supporters mount email campaign

The largest source of comments submitted to FMCSA was through a campaign from an unknown organizer in support of the proposed rule. It manifested itself in the form of verbatim submissions by dozens of individuals that raised the story of Dalilah Coleman. 

Dalilah Coleman was five when she was injured in a 2024 crash in California involving a driver in the U.S. illegally.

The email comments from that lobbying drive all opened with the same wording.

“Dalilah’s story should not be the next in a saga of many others like it,” the emails said. “It should be the last one ever told. The illegal alien driving that truck should never have been allowed behind the wheel.”

That crash led to the introduction of Dalilah’s Law in the House of Representatives and the Senate. Its provisions include ELP requirements.

While the House of Representatives” Committee on Transportation & Infrastructure voted to advance the bill, it has not been taken up by the full House. Its Senate companion did not get a vote in the corresponding committee.

Given the calendar, passage of Dalilah’s Law is unlikely to occur this year. It would need to be considered by the next Congress to become law.

Concerns about discrimination

In its comment to FMCSA, the Sikh Coalition said it “(agrees) there is a common-sense safety need for all drivers to understand a level of English as is already required by federal law.” But it added that “certain steps needed to be taken to mitigate the risk of discrimination during the course of or under the guise of ELP enforcement.”

The Coalition said in earlier communications with the Department of Transportation, it had “raised concerns” about several issues, including what it said was “the lack of clear criteria for roadside inspectors to use to determine whether to subject drivers to ELP assessments, and the lack of any information as to what recourse is available to drivers rendered out of service (OOS) due to alleged ELP violations.”

It cited a FMCSA decision from 2016 that the agency “had previously removed the requirement to place drivers out-of-service because the Commercial Vehicle Safety Alliance could not substantiate the safety impact of the requirement.”

The Coalition also said it had communicated to FMCSA that the Sikhs’ analysis of FMCSA data on roadside inspections between 2021 and 2025 showed that just 0.19% “involved a driver’s inability to communicate in or understand English.”

ELP was a Road Check focus

However, this year’s Road Check Week resulted in EPL violations becoming a top 5 reason for inspectors to hand down an OOS order. ELP violations consisted of 9.1% of all OOS orders.

“Our goal is to reduce the risk of any discrimination against truck drivers who could

be profiled for their appearance and subject to disproportionate or discriminatory

additional scrutiny during roadside inspections in the name of ELP enforcement,” the Sikh Coalition comments said. “It is critical that FMCSA establish clear, objective standards for roadside inspectors tasked with carrying out ELP enforcement to mitigate the risk of wrongful discrimination against Sikh or other commercial drivers.”

The Coalition’s comments also raise the social media post posted last month by the Department of Homeland Security–later taken down–that made reference to Sikh drivers and declared “Get off our roads, you don’t know how to drive, Mr. Singh.”

“FMCSA has consistently provided reason to believe that it is less interested in improving safety outcomes and more interested in removing certain drivers from the road because of where they come from,” the Coalition’s comments said.

It wrapped up its comments by asking FMCSA to withdraw the NPRM, and “instead invest in tailored, evidence-based safety measures.”

The key U.S. trucking organizations, in their comments, broadly backed the goals of the ELP rule. But there were recommendations for some changes. 

ATA’s concerns

The American Trucking Associations, in a comment that seemed to indirectly echo the Sikh Coalition’s criticism that the ELP/OOS criteria could be vague, said the ATA “remains concerned that the current assessment process leaves room for subjective interpretation by individual enforcement officials.”

“Without standardized scoring metrics or clearly defined evaluation criteria, ELP determinations may vary considerably from one roadside inspection to another,” the ATA said. “For example, a driver’s level of English proficiency may be deemed sufficient by one officer yet insufficient by another based on differing interpretations of the same interaction.”

ATA called on FMCSA to work with the states issuing CDLs “to establish and build in a standardized ELP assessment as part of the CDL issuance and renewal process.”

“Doing so would help evaluate and catch drivers with ELP deficiencies at ‘the front door’ – ensuring drivers are tested for ELP based on a consistent national standard before receiving a credential to operate, rather than relying primarily on roadside inspections to identify deficiencies after a driver has entered the workforce.”

The Owner Operator Independent Drivers Association’s (OOIDA) comments had few recommendations and was more effusive in its praise than ATA. 

But it did add a history of earlier enforcement action.

It said that CVSA removed an ELP requirement in 2015. After that, OOIDA wrote, “ELP violations went largely unenforced and unreported for a decade.”

“In 2014, there were over 100,000 ELP violations at roadside; yet in 2024, there were just 9,700 ELP violations reported,” OOIDA said. “The lack of ELP enforcement, in conjunction with the growth of States issuing Non-Domiciled Commercial Driver s Licenses to foreign drivers during the same period, permitted hundreds of thousands of unqualified drivers to work on our nation’s roads. This needlessly resulted in numerous fatal crashes.”

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The companies began commercial operations earlier this year. Routes completed by the autonomous trucks since then have produced 100% on-time pickup and delivery and zero safety incidents, according to Waabi. Neither company disclosed how many Waabi trucks Warrior runs or how many loads they have hauled.

The carrier, founded in 2015, runs more than 200 trucks of its own, according to the companies’ release. It is using the Waabi trucks to add capacity and raise utilization across that broader fleet as customer demand grows.

“Our customers want more capacity on our core lanes, and they want it to be consistent,” said Scott McFarlane, CEO of Warrior Logistics. “Our partnership with Waabi gives us the flexibility to deliver that. Waabi Driver-powered trucks complement our professional drivers, build density on our power lanes, and add capacity on the routes that are less desirable for our drivers.”

McFarlane described a network where autonomous trucks and professional drivers run side by side. That mix lets Warrior take on more freight and keep its drivers on the lanes they want to run, he said.

Why Warrior signed on

Warrior began the partnership for three reasons, McFarlane said: a leadership team it trusts, technology he called truly innovative and a co-development approach that let the carrier see firsthand how safely the Waabi Driver performs.

“The results on our own freight speak for themselves,” he said.

“Warrior has helped shape our technology over the course of our partnership and the impact we’re seeing across their operations shows how we can help carriers take on more freight, serve more customers and grow their business,” said Lior Ron, COO of Waabi.

Over the coming year, the two companies will jointly pick and develop the next lanes for the autonomous trucks across Warrior’s network.

Waabi’s Dallas-Houston business

The Warrior deal comes nine days after Waabi and Volvo Autonomous Solutions began hauling freight for Warp, their first customer operation together. Volvo VNL Autonomous trucks running the Waabi Driver move Warp freight directly to third-party facilities on the same corridor, with an observer in the driver’s seat.

Commercial load volume on Waabi’s Dallas-Houston route has grown more than 80% this year, the company said. It did not give a baseline.

Its first revenue loads on Interstate 45 between Dallas and Houston moved in September 2023, the week it announced a 10-year deal with Uber Freight.

In July, Waabi said its software, trained only on a Peterbilt 579, drove a Volvo VNL Autonomous truck with no new data or fine-tuning.

Waabi’s trucks are not yet driverless. Ron told FreightWaves in January the company will remove the driver only once the truck and its fully redundant platform are ready from the manufacturer.

This month, he said Waabi is “fully on track for driverless next year, with Volvo as the first OEM platform.”

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Repeated Houthi missile and drone attacks on Saudi Arabia’s airports and energy infrastructure have sharply escalated the Saudi-Houthi conflict, raising the prospect of renewed disruption to Red Sea shipping as the 2027 contract-tendering season gets underway.

Saudi Arabia has vowed a “serious response” after strikes on Riyadh’s King Khalid International Airport killed at least 14 people and injured more than 300. The airport remains closed until at least October 17, airlines have canceled flights, and the Houthis have threatened further attacks on Saudi airports, and military targets. The Yemen-based militia overnight hit the headquarters of Aramco, the Saudi oil producer, with missiles.

The attacks follow Houthi attempts beginning in July to close the Bab el-Mandeb Strait to Saudi-linked traffic, including vessel attacks into August after nearly nine months of relative quiet. The ‘other’ Mideast strait guards the Red Sea’s southern entrance to the Gulf of Aden. The latest escalation increases the likelihood that Red Sea transits could again become more dangerous, although no broad closure of the waterway has been confirmed.

For container lines, the immediate effect is uncertainty rather than a confirmed capacity shock, said analyst and SONAR data contributor Freightos (NASDAQ: CRGO). Carriers had gradually increased Asia-Europe transits through the Red Sea since June, helping expand effective vessel supply; a renewed wave of attacks could reverse that trend and support rates.

Asia-Europe Rates Still Elevated

Spot rates on Asia-Europe lanes have fallen steadily since July, driven primarily by the post-peak demand slowdown and by carriers’ gradual return to Red Sea routings. Yet prices remain well above year-ago levels: both major Asia-Europe trades were above $3,000 per FEU last week, roughly 70% higher than in October 2025.

Some carriers have already announced October general rate increases. Asia-Mediterranean spot prices rose 7% to $3,800 per FEU last week, a move that could help establish a higher benchmark ahead of annual contract negotiations.

The market’s underlying support is fragile. Lingering congestion in Northern Europe and the Far East has absorbed capacity, while a threatened German port strike that could have worsened European delays was recently averted.

Contract negotiations face uncertainty

Shippers and carriers are entering tendering season for 2027 annual contracts with conflicting signals. Carriers enter talks with rates still historically elevated, but there are reasons shippers may resist locking in current levels.

Newbuild deliveries expected next year would expand fleet capacity, while continued growth in Red Sea transits would further increase effective capacity by shortening Asia-Europe voyages. Those factors have led some shippers to expect rates to ease in 2027 and to hesitate over long-term commitments at present levels.

Trans-Pacific peak may be ending

The trans-Pacific trade has held near peak-season levels since July, supported by sustained demand and Asia congestion. But the first signs of easing are emerging: Far East-U.S West Coast rates dipped 2% to $8,150 per FEU, potentially signaling the start of a post-Golden Week decline.

The National Retail Federation’s latest U.S. import forecast points to a sharp seasonal slowdown, projecting November ocean arrivals to fall 11% month over month. Even so, full-year 2026 imports are projected to be just 1.4% above 2025 and 1.2% above 2024, approaching the record volume set in 2021.

Outlook

Rates may continue to soften through the remainder of the quarter as peak-season cargo tapers. The principal upside risk is geopolitical: A sustained Houthi campaign against Saudi targets, or renewed attacks on commercial shipping in the Red Sea, could tighten effective capacity and complicate carriers’ efforts to defend rate levels heading into 2027 contract talks.

Read more articles by Stuart Chirls here.

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The VNX shares an electrical architecture with the long-haul VNL and regional-haul VNR, the result of what Volvo said was a $3 billion investment in product development and manufacturing.

Vocational work makes up about a quarter of the North American truck market, Voorhoeve said at a preview event at Volvo Construction Equipment’s Customer Center. Long haul accounts for half and regional haul for the remaining quarter.

“We don’t really play in that vocational segment. We have like a two or three percent market share,” Voorhoeve said. “In the largest market of the world, apart from China, why would we not play in a segment that we are so rooted in the rest of the world?”

Volvo’s FMX holds about 30% of the vocational market in both Europe and Brazil, he said. In North America, Volvo has sold the VHD since 2000. Voorhoeve said its customers are loyal, but the truck has covered a limited range of applications.

Volvo built the VNX around feedback from VHD owners, its vocational business abroad and the job-site experience of Volvo Construction Equipment, which has built and sold machines in the U.S. for more than 50 years.

“Growth in vocational is a natural next step for Volvo Trucks, right as we’re seeing stable demand for trucks on construction sites, infrastructure projects and industrial builds across the country,” Voorhoeve said in a statement.

Remote steer and a terrain brake

Remote Steer gives an operator control of the VNX from outside the cab at speeds up to 5 mph, Volvo said, aimed at mixers, cranes, vac units and other work that needs precise movement.

“Basically what we’ve done is we’ve made a giant RC truck,” said John Moore, product marketing manager at Volvo Trucks North America. “If you ever try to drive a mixer and back it in real close to a building or where they’re pouring concrete, you pretty much have to have a person to guide you. Remote steer lets a mixer be backed in with one person.”

Terrain Brake holds the truck in place on steep, rocky ground the moment the driver lifts off the accelerator, stopping forward or backward lurches faster than the driver could reach the service brakes. 

A direction-change feature lets drivers switch between forward and reverse without touching the brake. Moore said it targets dump truck drivers who shuttle back and forth all day.

Configurations and powertrain

The VNX comes as a 300 day cab and a 440 with a 42-inch sleeper, each available as a tractor or straight truck, plus a 640 tractor with a 62-inch midroof sleeper. Every model is offered in axle-forward and axle-back configurations, and the heat-treated steel frame rails are rated for 160,000 pounds gross vehicle weight.

The truck runs on Volvo’s D13, rated up to 540 horsepower and 1,950 pound-feet of torque and certified to EPA 2027 emissions standards in all 50 states. Moore said that rating puts the VNX within 60 horsepower of the 600-horsepower big-block engines at the top of the class.

The 2027 D13’s engine brake climbs to 630 braking horsepower, up from 500 and above the engine’s 540-horsepower output.

“Typically engines rate their engine brake the same as their horsepower. This one is different—we have extra braking,” Moore said. That matters on steep downgrades, where service brakes can overheat.

The new I-Shift transmission shifts 30% faster, he said, and comes in 13- and 14-speed versions with crawler gears.

Safety and connectivity

Standard forward pedestrian detection scans from 23 to 230 feet, joined by blind spot detection on both sides and a 360-degree camera. The cab uses one-third more ultra-high-strength steel than Volvo’s legacy vocational trucks. Volvo said standard driver-side curtain airbags make it the only OEM in North America to offer them on a vocational truck.

Every VNX ships with a factory-installed 4G telematics gateway for remote diagnostics and over-the-air programming. Volvo said it will announce the start of sales later this year.

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The 51-page federal complaint, filed Sept. 30 in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Illinois, alleges that the employees secretly established competing businesses while still working for Edge Logistics and arranged to transfer customer accounts to Utah-based Freight Tec before resigning.

Edge alleges its expedited-freight division declined 66.4% within weeks of the employees’ departures in May 2026, while the rest of its business grew 8.5%. The lawsuit does not specify whether those figures measure revenue, shipment volume or another metric, nor does it identify the precise comparison period.

The lawsuit names Freight Tec Management Group Inc., former Edge employees Nicholas Daglas, John Harlan, Andre Apiquian and Alexis Hersh, and three companies allegedly established to operate as Freight Tec brokerage agents: Parlay Expedited LLC, Thorndale Logistics LLC and Freight Redefined LLC.

Todd Rowden, a partner at Taft Stettinius & Hollister LLP representing the four former employees and three related LLCs, disputed the allegations.

“My clients dispute plaintiff’s allegations, and the legal sufficiency of its claims, and have no further comment regarding the complaint,” Rowden said in an emailed statement to FreightWaves.

Freight Tec did not provide a substantive response to FreightWaves’ requests for comment before publication. 

Lawsuit alleges employees planned departures while still on payroll

According to the complaint, the four employees worked in Edge’s expedited-freight division, arranging urgent and time-sensitive shipments using straight trucks, box trucks, cargo vans and other equipment.

Edge Logistics, headquartered in Chicago, was founded in 2014. The logistics provider has around 120 employees, according to Built In Chicago.

Bountiful, Utah-based Freight Tec Management Group is a privately held freight brokerage founded in 1997. The company provides truckload, less-than-truckload and expedited freight services through a network of independent freight agents. Freight Tec has between 51 and 200 employees, according to LinkedIn.

Edge alleges the employees had access to confidential customer information, including shipping rates, pricing strategies, freight lanes, customer preferences and business relationships.

Rather than leave Edge and independently establish competing businesses, the employees allegedly worked with Freight Tec to develop a plan to transfer existing Edge accounts to the rival brokerage.

The lawsuit alleges that Freight Tec’s leadership knew the employees were subject to restrictive employment agreements and reviewed those agreements before engaging them.

Edge claims in court filings that Freight Tec’s CEO met with Daglas approximately three to five times before the employees departed to discuss their agreements, paperwork and the legality of their planned business arrangements.

The employees allegedly agreed to operate through independent agency businesses under Freight Tec’s brokerage authority, receiving a share of gross profits generated by the customers they brought to the company.

Three of the defendants established limited liability companies in April, according to the complaint:

• Apiquian registered Freight Redefined LLC in Florida on April 20.
• Harlan registered Thorndale Logistics LLC in Illinois on April 22.
• Daglas registered Parlay Expedited LLC in Illinois on April 23.

Edge alleges all three companies were established while their owners were still employed by the brokerage.

The complaint further alleges the employees staggered their resignations to conceal the coordinated nature of their departure.

Daglas submitted his resignation May 8, telling Edge he was stepping away from the freight industry to focus on family, according to the lawsuit.

Harlan allegedly told colleagues he was leaving to work for a friend in Las Vegas, while Apiquian said he wanted a local, office-based position.

Edge claims those explanations concealed plans to continue working in freight brokerage through Freight Tec.

Customer emails allegedly established before departures

Among the lawsuit’s most detailed allegations are descriptions of customer-specific Freight Tec email accounts appearing in Edge shipment communications before the employees left the company.

On May 9, while Daglas and Hersh were still employed by Edge, an email account associated with Freight Tec and dedicated to an Edge customer identified as Customer A appeared in a shipment-related email thread, according to the complaint.

Five days later, on May 14, a second Freight Tec email account dedicated to Customer B appeared in a rate-request thread involving Daglas and Harlan’s Edge email addresses.

Edge contends those communications demonstrate that the defendants were preparing to service existing Edge customers through Freight Tec before their employment ended.

The complaint also describes subsequent transactions allegedly involving the same customers.

On June 28-29, Apiquian allegedly arranged an expedited shipment for Customer B through Freight Tec and Freight Redefined LLC, identifying himself as Freight Tec’s key accounts manager.

Hersh, identified in the complaint as a Freight Tec strategic account manager, allegedly coordinated delivery and confirmed the shipment’s final rate.

On Aug. 18, a representative of Customer A requested a transportation quote from Apiquian at his Freight Tec email address, with an Edge email address also included in the correspondence, according to the lawsuit.

Apiquian allegedly responded with a freight rate.

Edge also claims freight postings appeared on a load board for lanes previously handled by its brokerage, using Freight Tec addresses associated with Daglas and Harlan.

Alleged kickbacks funded by inflated freight rates

The complaint includes a separate allegation that former Edge employees arranged to pay kickbacks to a shipping customer’s decision-maker in exchange for directing freight to Freight Tec.

According to the lawsuit, the arrangement developed around April 2026, when representatives associated with a customer identified only as Customer C visited Chicago.

Edge alleges that the former employees informed an East Coast contact at Customer C about their plans to establish a competing operation through Freight Tec.

The customer contact allegedly agreed to direct shipments to the new operation but demanded kickbacks financed by adding money to freight charges.

The complaint alleges the defendants subsequently handled Customer C freight under that arrangement.

Edge contends the alleged payments gave Freight Tec an improper competitive advantage by influencing the customer’s freight-routing decisions rather than winning business through pricing or service.

The complaint does not identify Customer C, specify the amount of any alleged payments or include underlying invoices or payment records establishing the alleged kickbacks.

The allegations have not been proven in court.

Edge seeks injunction, damages and return of confidential information

Edge’s lawsuit contains 11 counts, including breach of contract, breach of duty of loyalty, tortious interference with contractual and prospective business relationships, aiding and abetting, civil conspiracy and unfair competition.

The company alleges the employees violated employment agreements containing confidentiality, noncompetition and nonsolicitation provisions.

Edge is asking the court to prohibit the defendants from using or disclosing its confidential business information and to restrict certain competitive activities and customer solicitation.

The company also seeks the return of confidential documents and electronic information, preservation and forensic imaging of electronic devices and accounts, monetary damages, disgorgement of allegedly improper profits and attorneys’ fees.

The complaint does not specify a dollar amount in damages.

Court documents indicate that attorneys for Daglas and Harlan previously challenged the enforceability of certain employment agreements, arguing that the agreements lacked sufficient consideration.

The complaint also acknowledges that Daglas’ employment agreement contains an arbitration provision. Edge says it is seeking injunctive relief against him in federal court at this stage and intends to pursue monetary claims through arbitration, subject to circumstances described in the complaint.

No court has ruled on the merits of Edge’s allegations or determined whether the disputed employment restrictions are enforceable.

Former employees have until Dec. 1 to respond

The four former employees and three related LLCs waived formal service of the complaint, according to court records filed Oct. 6.

Their responses to the lawsuit are due Dec. 1.

An initial status hearing is scheduled for Dec. 2 in Chicago.

As of the latest docket reviewed by FreightWaves, no defendant had filed a substantive response to the complaint, and the court had not issued a ruling on Edge’s allegations.

Why it matters: The Edge Logistics LLC v. Freight Tec Management Group Inc. case highlights the legal and financial risks freight brokers face when employees leave with valuable customer relationships and establish competing operations.

More FreightWaves articles by Noi Mahoney:

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• Texas trucking firm sued over age limits on drivers
• New Jersey CDL school lawsuit questions evidence behind FMCSA shutdown

The post Freight broker alleges customer theft, kickbacks in lawsuit against rival appeared first on FreightWaves.

Meanwhile, the shipping giant recently issued a news release in which it described a new global operating model centered on providing integrated logistics services as the company continues its “evolution” from a small package carrier.

Analysts question whether UPS (NYSE: UPS) can successfully morph into an integrated logistics provider if it shrinks parcel volume. And industry consultant Satish Jindel suspects there are other motives behind the messaging, arguing the company has no intention of exiting any part of the parcel business.

“I think it’s a very difficult needle to thread. They’re a parcel carrier. Plain and simple,” Richard Metzler, an industry veteran who has held high-level executive positions at companies like DHL Express, Greatwide Logistics, XPO and uShip, said in a phone interview. “Is Supply Chain Services a serious logistics business? For sure. But in my opinion, it will be tough to backfill what they exit in parcel with just logistics, small-and-medium businesses, heavyweight and healthcare.”

And since Amazon is rapidly moving to serve those market segments with its third-party freight, distribution, fulfillment and parcel shipping service, under the Amazon Supply Chain Services banner, profit margins won’t be safe in logistics either, he added

In early August, Jindel warned negotiations on the next contract for more than 300,000 van and truck drivers and package handlers will turn into a tectonic clash that reshapes the parcel shipping sector, with either UPS becoming the top dog or getting overlapped by rival couriers, depending on how the talks play out. 

UPS’s labor costs are so out of whack with the rest of the industry because of the lucrative 2023 contract the Teamsters secured that UPS is becoming unaffordable for retail shippers, according to many industry watchers.

Jindel is now going further, predicting that UPS will welcome a strike by the Teamsters union and its combative boss Sean O’Brien, who is already drawing red lines that could easily trigger a work stoppage in 2028, so it can reset its cost structure. 

The emphasis on revenue quality over sheer parcel volume is actually a smokescreen to keep parcel delivery competitors, like FedEx and Amazon, off guard so they don’t prepare for a driver exodus when Teamsters workers go on strike, enabling UPS to hire drivers from competitors and reset its cost structure. That would allow UPS to again dominate the parcel market like it did in the 1990s, he opined in an interview.  

Although UPS downsized its domestic parcel network — eliminating 150 sort centers, 30,000 positions and 50 million labor hours — to align with lower volumes from shedding Amazon business, it wouldn’t be investing more than $8 billion over four years to automate facilities, if it planned to stop delivering from fulfillment centers to consumers’ doorsteps, Jindel explained.

UPS is trying to make people believe they are pulling out of short-haul parcel delivery. “They are not. This is a Trojan horse to misguide competitors and the Teamsters,” the founder and president of ShipMatrix told FreightWaves. 

ShipMatrix supports hundreds of shippers with parcel visibility, analytics, invoice processing, auditing and carrier selection. Jindel has a strong track record of predicting industry events or making recommendations that eventually are adopted, including the spinoff of FedEx Freight and retailers’ overreaction to consumer interest in free, superfast delivery.

In the Aug. 31 news release downplaying the parcel operations, UPS also named Matt Guffey as chief U.S. domestic officer, with responsibility over all parcel and delivery business units: small package, non-union subsidiaries Roadie and Happy Returns, The UPS Stores and Mail Innovations (the company’s consolidation program with the U.S. Postal Service for lightweight parcels).

UPS purchased Roadie in 2021 for $548 million. The carrier handles same-day, urgent shipments that don’t go through the parent company’s parcel sortation network. Instead, the crowdsourced delivery platform instead picks up orders from brand-name stores and delivers them to homes and businesses, with independent drivers providing their own vehicles. 

Jindel said the reorganization under Guffey suggests that UPS intends all five units will eventually utilize non-union workers because, for the first time, management has brought all the parcel services under one executive. It will allow use of a fully integrated parcel network to meet customers’ needs at the lowest cost by placing the right parcel in the right network. 

The reorganization aligns with a scenario he floated last November, in which UPS proposes that Roadie carry out all B2C deliveries from UPS Stores, while Teamster drivers handle shuttle runs between package hubs and the UPS retail outlet — a nonstarter for the Teamsters that would likely tee up a strike. UPS will be able to manage a strike without huge damage if Roadie has plenty of freelance workers signed up on its app in advance to deliver packages and management bringing packages to the UPS Stores.

UPS officials privately caution not to read too much into the Aug. 31 statement: Small package is not going away. Core competency is now directed at transportation moves that require multiple services, but also feed into the small package network, where the driver still needs to deliver the product to a home or business, and customers view UPS as a partner in the end-to-end logistics process. 

“Our number one priority is to move the right packages and the right mix of volume through our network. The market has changed and we’re adapting to it,” CEO Carol Tomé said in the company’s second quarter earnings briefing.

“We’re overturning the old industry assumption that scale alone drives profitability. Instead, we’re focused on premium segments. … Our strategy is working. We’re seeing favorable mix improvements with small-and-medium business and B2B volume representing a larger share of total U.S. volume and … meaningful revenue per piece growth. … We’re winning through innovative and differentiated capabilities,” she said.

Being selective about which shipments to accept means lower revenue, but UPS — and FedEx, for that matter — is partly making up for that money by frequently introducing a broad range of surcharges throughout the contract year, a relatively new tactic for increasing revenue-per-package. 

Mixed opinions on strike chances

The fact that Teamsters chief Sean O’Brien has used inflammatory language to disparage UPS and insist it accept more union demands in the next contract, while suggesting a labor stoppage is almost inevitable, is striking two years before the current labor contract expires. 

Not everyone is convinced as Jindel that a strike will occur, while seeming to acknowledge it will be a close call. Their comments reflect a broader nervousness across the carrier and shipping community that a UPS shutdown is possible. 

James Cochrane, chief executive officer of the Package Shippers Association, said UPS has to do something to rebalance its costs with the market.

“The last [contract] didn’t end well for them. Their cost to serve went very high. The people that deliver are hardworking individuals, but there’s such a difference between people that are delivering packages making $50,000 a year and those making $150,000. I don’t know how sustainable that is,” he said during a keynote address at Parcel Forum 26 here last month. 

The Teamsters strike of UPS in 1997 was damaging to the company because it took time to regain business from FedEx, he recalled.

“I don’t think there’ll be a strike, but I don’t envy UPS having to negotiate that one because very rarely do things [contract terms] move backwards. They’re at a high number now, and so I worry about their long-term longevity with that kind of cost. I would love to see them maybe get a distributed environment where some of the new employees have a lower base for a period of time,” Cochrane said. 

Teamsters drivers cost about $65 per hour — total compensation when all healthcare and other benefits are included with the $49 hourly rate for senior drivers — compared to FedEx drivers who earn about $35 to $39 per hour on average for total compensation.

Regional carriers that heavily rely on contract fleets or gig workers spend about $15 per hour, or less, on last-mile delivery drivers, experts say. 

“The real battleground in 2028 might be a show down over Roadie. UPS spent $548 million to buy Roadie and the time may be approaching to pull it off the shelf. Decoupling middle-mile Teamster haulage from gig-based final-mile delivery isn’t just an option for UPS — it is probably the only mathematical reality that allows them to remain competitive,” wrote Metzler, who advises two parcel carriers, in the comment section of a FreightWaves article about UPS. 

Vincent D’Amato, chief sales officer at startup carrier Gofo, said his attitude toward a potential strike is colored by previous cries of wolf that never materialized when UPS contracts came up for renewal.  

“I’m not saying there’s zero chance. I”m saying I don’t really buy into the hype because I spent 17 years at FedEx and every cycle it would come up and we’d be told to go out to the customer base and tell them they need to lock in volume now because if it gets closer we’re not going to take volume. And it never really happened,” he said on the sidelines of the conference. “I just feel as though there’s always talk about the strike. I just don’t think it’s a significant likelihood that it would happen, enough where it would create a panic in the market.”

If UPS workers did walk off the job it would severely hurt businesses and create shipping delays, he added.

“It would be catastrophic for the parcel market. Most of these alternative providers can’t handle that volume. They would be inundated. FedEx would be very disciplined about what they would and wouldn’t take at what price,” said D’Amato. “Maybe Amazon or the USPS could absorb some of it.”

Can UPS ignore last-mile delivery?

Despite UPS’s public position about being very intentional in only accepting high-margin, multi-zone, specialized shipments that fit their profile, analysts say the company can’t afford to abandon a key segment of the market when its goal is to provide integrated logistics solutions.

Integrated logistics, by definition, means having one’s own assets and network, said Jindel.

“It can’t be either, or, especially because consumers and businesses require both” B2C and B2B shipping capabilities that, for example, can get pharmaceuticals to someone’s house or to a hospital, said Joanne Strong, senior manager and warehouse management system practice lead at Deloitte, during a panel discussion. “The market is very dynamic and there are all these operating models going after the same customer based on what that means for them at that moment.”

Metzler agreed that cherry picking a big piece of the market won’t work because shippers won’t give all of the quality packages to one carrier.

“Carriers are going to go after where the biggest margins are. But you have to be able to offer those [last-mile] services to really make it work. They have got to build their physical networks with freight. They need volume to make those operationally successful,” Chris Kina, senior director analyst for logistics, customer fulfillment and network design at Gartner, said at the event. New technology, added, is going to enable more carriers to expand their service offerings.

Focusing on premium market segments is risky when the line between commerce and package delivery is disappearing, as platforms like DoorDash and Uber expand from restaurant and grocery delivery to deliver orders from big and small stores, including brands like Costco and Ace Hardware, while retailers like Walmart deliver more packages on their own, said Nate Skiver, the founder of LPF Spend Management, on LinkedIn. 

The amount of available package volume for pure-play couriers will shrink, as a result. “Which begs the question: Is there enough ‘premium’ volume for both UPS and FedEx?” he said. 

D’Amato said that UPS would have to significantly scale down its network if it were going to push out B2C delivery. 

“They may have painted themselves into a corner with the last Teamsters contract. Plus, Sean O’Brien has made it abundantly clear the next contract will be no fun and will close the gaps on Roadie, UPS Stores and Supply Chain Services” Metzler said. “With the fixed cost of the UPS network, it is hard to see how they can get to the Promised Land with lower package density on any given route.”

Not too early for contingency planning

Some businesses are beginning to realize the need for contingency plans as awareness increases about the strong potential of a strike at UPS, and the chain reaction it could set off across the parcel industry, parcel shipping consultants say.

Jindel said customers are asking about how to prepare for any potential labor disruption, including how to incorporate alternative carriers in their automated manifesting and label-generation systems, after reading his Aug. 11 commentary warning about the UPS-Teamsters negotiating cliff. 

Analysts say the proliferation of surcharges for peak season, fuel, large packages, non-urban delivery areas and other conditions has irritated shippers, making them more open to using alternative carriers.

“Carrier diversification is already a focus for many shippers because of rising costs and service concerns, and the potential for another UPS strike adds to that conversation,” Robyn Meyer, senior vice president, parcel strategy and solutions at Transportation Insight, told FreightWaves. 

“It’s not a major concern just yet. I think the biggest lesson from 2023 is that shippers can’t wait until the last minute. Alternative carriers have limited capacity, and building those relationships takes time,” she said.

Shippers should be engaging with other carriers so that their warehouse management and transportation management systems are integrated and ready to exchange information if that becomes necessary, the ShipMatrix chief recommended. Carriers will be overwhelmed onboarding new accounts if shippers wait until 2028. 

“Your packages will be piling up. You won’t be able to ship,” Jindel said.

Parcel shippers also have to worry about the financial impact of shifting volume away from UPS and potentially affecting existing contract incentives.

“I expect we’ll see more conversations around this throughout 2027, especially among larger shippers with significant UPS volume,” said Meyer.

Some shippers, in an effort to maintain flexibility to divert packages if a labor disruption occurs, are asking UPS to include clauses in contract renewals that waive volume requirements for discounted rates, Jindel said.

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A Nebraska traffic stop uncovered more than $250,000 in stolen copper inside a semi-truck on October 7. Lancaster County’s Criminal Interdiction Unit stopped the vehicle around 2 p.m. on Interstate 80. Deputies saw the trailer leaning heavily after the load shifted toward the passenger side. The driver could not provide vehicle registration, a bill of lading or basic freight details.

Authorities identified the driver as 22-year-old Raman Pal of Tracy, California. Pal could not explain what he hauled, where pickup occurred or the destination. Deputies received consent to search the truck and trailer. Inside, they found 11 pallets of copper wire weighing 43,937 pounds and two bolt cutters.

Copper load had passed Iowa destination

Deputies found a bill of lading during the vehicle search. It listed Imperial Metal Group in Chicago as the pickup location. Court records identify Imperial Metal Group as the owner of the stolen copper. Lakeside Auto Recyclers, a Carter Lake, Iowa, recycling company, was the listed destination.

Investigators stopped Pal near Lincoln after the truck had already passed Carter Lake. Lakeside Auto Recyclers confirmed the vehicle was off route while traveling westbound. The affidavit does not explain why Pal continued beyond the listed destination.

The affidavit states Get There Real Quick LLC should have delivered the shipment. FMCSA records list the Illinois carrier under USDOT 4381300 and MC 1717529. Get There Real Quick operates interstate with six power units and 10 drivers. Lakeside Auto Recyclers told deputies Nawab Xpress Inc. should not possess the load.

Pal’s truck displayed Nawab Xpress and USDOT 4172559. FMCSA records list the California company as an interstate carrier. Nawab Xpress operates with one power unit and one driver. The affidavit does not explain how Nawab Xpress obtained the shipment.

Investigators contacted Imperial Metal Group President Zach Spellman during the stop. Spellman confirmed the copper belonged to his company. He told deputies the shipment was stolen because the correct carrier did not possess it. The trailer also lacked the load lock and seal Imperial required.

Spellman told investigators this was Imperial Metal Group’s fourth stolen metal load this year. He said all four disappeared “in the same fashion.” The combined value exceeded $1 million, according to the sheriff’s briefing. Records do not establish whether the same people handled those losses.

Investigation could extend nationwide

Court records show prosecutors charged Pal with criminal impersonation and theft by unlawful taking over $5,000. The complaint identifies the stolen property as belonging to The Imperial Group LLC. Deputies also found two identification cards carrying different names inside the cab. One matched Pal’s actual California identification, according to the affidavit.

The affidavit does not identify a freight broker or explain how Pal obtained the shipment in Chicago. It also does not describe a fictitious pickup or name any federal agency involved. Deputies placed the truck and trailer on a criminal hold after Pal’s arrest. Investigators continue working to determine how the load changed hands.

FreightWaves contacted the Lancaster County Sheriff’s Office, Imperial Group and Lakeside Auto Recyclers for additional information. None had responded before publication. Investigators have not established whether the same people were involved in Imperial Metal Group’s four thefts. “There’s a lot more people involved in this than just the 22-year-old,” the sheriff’s office told reporters.

Why it matters

The case shows how a high-value load can leave the proper carrier’s control and keep moving without immediate detection. That gap can turn a single pickup failure into a six-figure cargo loss before anyone realizes the shipment is off course.

CFCO

In my opinion, Certified Fraud Compliance Officer training can help teams catch carrier, driver and document mismatches before releasing a load. A repeatable verification process creates another checkpoint before high-value freight leaves the shipper’s control.

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

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The LTL rate-per-pound component of the TD Cowen-AFS Freight Index finished the third quarter 78.8% above its January 2018 baseline. That was 11.9 percentage points higher year over year and 1.1 points above the second quarter. The dataset is expected to end the fourth quarter 82.5% above the 2018 benchmark, which would be 14.7 points higher y/y.

High diesel fuel prices and extant “carrier pricing power” are driving the increases. The 80%-plus rate jump over an eight-year period also highlights the severity of cost inflation across carrier P&Ls (wages, health insurance, liability insurance, maintenance, etc.).

The dataset’s fuel surcharges were 79% higher y/y in September. Actual retail diesel prices were up y/y by 31% in July, 46% in August and 68% in September. (Less-than-truckload fuel surcharge mechanisms include a step function as diesel prices rise, resulting in margin accretion.)

Large public carriers have been able to capture mid-single-digit contractual rate increases through the downturn. Many are also pulling forward general rate increases given favorable sector fundamentals. Rate hikes on noncontractual LTL business used to occur annually. The cadence had been shortened to 11 months in recent years. Saia (NASDAQ: SAIA) installed a 7.1% GRI on July 6, which was 120 basis points higher and three months earlier than its 2025 increase.

The report showed LTL cost per shipment declined 2.8% sequentially (5.3% higher y/y) in the third quarter, as weight per shipment fell 3.4% (down 2.3% y/y), implying rate per pound was 0.6% higher (7.6% higher y/y).

Linehaul rates were 1.2% higher sequentially in the quarter even though length of haul declined 2.2%.

Public carrier data has diverged from the index somewhat in recent months.

Tonnage among publicly traded LTL companies inflected positively y/y in March, with growth rates continuing to accelerate since. Mid-quarter updates from the group also showed y/y increases in weight per shipment during July and August, with XPO (NYSE: XPO) being the lone outlier. XPO’s freight mix now includes more shipments from SMBs, which tend to be smaller but carry better margins.

The group has indicated that the improved shipment weights result from freight previously lost to the truckload market returning to LTL networks as TL rates rise. Also, manufacturing activity has remained in growth territory in every month this year. The Institute for Supply Management’s Manufacturing PMI registered a 54.5 reading in September, with the new orders dataset logging a 55.3 reading. (A reading above 50 signals expansion, while one below 50 indicates contraction.)

Supply-side correction fueling TL rate surge

The TL rate-per-mile component of the index was 19.7% above the January 2018 baseline in the third quarter, 13.7 points higher y/y and 3.3 points above the second quarter, “as continued regulatory action, carrier exits and fuel shocks squeeze available capacity.”

The index is expected to increase to 23.4% above the benchmark during the fourth quarter, which would be 15.8 points higher y/y and the highest level registered since the 2022 first quarter.

The third-quarter earnings season begins Thursday when J.B. Hunt Transport Services (NASDAQ: JBHT) reports results after the market closes.

AFS Logistics is a non-asset-based 3PL providing audit and cost management services, managed transportation, and freight brokerage. It manages over $11 billion in transportation spend.

Why it matters? The TD Cowen-AFS Freight Index provides a rare look at past and future LTL rates. The dataset confirms key industry trends, including LTL rates hitting new highs in the third quarter and expected increases in the fourth quarter, driven by high fuel prices and carrier pricing power.

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 LTL rates hit new high in Q3, moving higher in Q4 appeared first on FreightWaves.

Analysts say the onslaught of surcharges is spurring businesses to diversify their vendor pool and helping alternative carriers gain market share from the large legacy carriers. 

Why It Matters: Fuel surcharges are a major cost driver this year for businesses that purchase parcel transportation. Diesel fuel prices have soared since the start of the Iran war in February, which slowed crude oil and refined fuel traffic through the Strait of Hormuz, but repetitive carrier changes to the formula that sets fuel surcharges have more to do with elevated rates than the actual rise in fuel prices, the companies said in the benchmark report.

Carriers have frequently reindexed surcharge tables since 2021 to not only capture additional revenue as fuel prices rise, but keep fuel surcharges high even as actual fuel prices fall, according to the TD Cowen/AFS Freight Index released on Tuesday.

The fuel surcharge has increased from 7.75% of the transportation rate in the first quarter of 2021, when the average diesel fuel price was $2.91 per gallon, to 30% in September, when diesel peaked at $6.53 per gallon. Nearly three quarters of the increase is the result of carrier adjustments to fuel surcharge tables, not the price at the pump, the report said. 

Even if fuel prices returned to the 2021 level, the current fuel surcharge would be 23.75% — about three times higher than five years ago.

The TD Cowen/AFS Freight Index has pointed all year to tinkering with the fuel-surcharge mechanism as a major cause of shipping inflation.

“While diesel and jet fuel are major costs for ground and express parcel, the fuel surcharge has become a revenue lever for carriers in addition to a pass-through mechanism for covering the cost of doing business,” said Mingshu Bates, chief analytics officer and president of parcel at AFS Logistics, in a news release promoting the report. “Even if crude oil normalizes and fuel prices recede, the effective fuel surcharge will not show a material decrease.”

AFS Logistics uses transactional data to help companies manage their parcel, less-than-truckload and truckload freight costs.

New FedEx surcharges

Fuel isn’t the only area where large carriers make pricing changes that often go unnoticed by customers. Carriers have replaced predictable annual hikes with continuous, targeted pricing to protect margins even as overall demand growth slows, and are able to do so with limited pushback because most shippers still plan annually, industry practitioners say.

From the start of 2025 through mid-summer, FedEx implemented or announced more than 50 pricing changes, including general rate increases, delivery area surcharges, customs fees and demand surcharges, parcel spend management firm LJM previously reported. 

For the fourth consecutive year, FedEx (NYSE: FDX) last month announced a 5.9% average general rate increase, effective Jan. 4. Embedded in the new pricing policy is a change that reclassifies 2,533 ZIP codes from extended delivery area surcharge to remote DAS — the most expensive tier. The change was much more extensive than an earlier one in which 102 ZIP codes were added to the standard delivery area surcharge tier, 74 moved from standard to extended area and 63 moved from extended to remote area.

For packages destined for ZIP codes reclassified from extended to remote, the DAS fee will jump to $17.75 — roughly doubling the fee for residential deliveries and more than tripling it for commercial destinations, the TD Cowen/AFS report said.

Shippers with high residential volume, rural deliveries, lightweight packages, or heavy accessorial exposure, the effective increase can expect materially higher shipping increases than 5.9%, warned Charles Moore, vice president of parcel solutions at Transportation Insight, on LinkedIn.

Ground pricing has flattened across zones, with increases almost uniform across all regions instead of just for long-haul routes.  Lightweight e-commerce shipments take the biggest hit, with packages in the one-to-five pound range getting increases of nearly 6.5%, making small parcel shipping more expensive for many retailers. The FedEx Ground minimum charge is set to increase to $12.70, representing a compounded increase of more than 12% over the last two years. Additional handling fees are increasing between 7% and 7.6%, he pointed out. And FedEx is introducing a $25 Paper Document Fee and a $5 Paper Air Waybill Fee to reinforce the carrier’s push toward fully electronic shipping and trade documentation. 

DHL eCommerce recently posted its peak season surcharges UPS (NYSE: UPS) has similarly hiked a broad spectrum of surcharges, including new cubic-volume rules, in recent years. Amazon, the U.S. Postal Service and more independent carriers are beginning to follow suit. 

So far, DHL eCommerce, Amazon Shipping and OnTrac, besides FedEx, UPS and the USPS, have announced peak season surcharges. DHL eCommerce’s surcharge has three pricing windows, starting in late October. The highest charges are between Nov. 22 and Dec. 26, when package volume is at its most. Fees also change by distance.

Consultancy LJM recommends DHL customers model peak costs by shipping week, product, weight and zone. A single average per-package surcharge will no longer provide an accurate forecast, it said on its website.

Startup Gofo, under pressure from a combination of low pricing and rising costs, recently announced a 4% emergency fuel surcharge nationwide, effective Oct. 26.

“Introduced with unprecedented frequency and often with little warning, [accessorial] charges are now a preferred lever for increasing revenue-per-package. . . . A fundamental change is to blame. Carriers that for years pushed to gain market share now only want the shipments which are most profitable in their networks” and are implementing pricing strategies accordingly, wrote Josh Dunham, co-founder and CEO of shipping intelligence platform Reveel, in an online column. He recommended shippers expand their rotation of parcel carriers. 

Q3 parcel rates

With peak shipping season and demand surcharges around the corner, the index for ground parcel rate per package in the fourth quarter is projected to reach a record of 43.3% above the January 2018 baseline — up 5.8% year over year and up 3.2% from the previous quarter, TD Cowen and AFS Logistics said.

Similarly, the express parcel index is estimated to set a record for the fifth consecutive quarter, reaching 20.3% this quarter, a 13.8% increase year over year. 

Third-quarter express parcel cost per package increased 1.1% from the prior quarter on higher billed weight, more premium service mix and increased accessorial fees. 

The average billed weight continued to increase, reflecting an ongoing decline in the share of lightweight shipments and carrier rating rule changes that raise billable weight. 

The report’s authors said FedEx and UPS have more room to offer deeper customer discounts this year as their network streamlining and efficiency programs lower operating costs and boost margins. FedEx is moving further than UPS, with discounting skewed strongly toward large customers, while UPS increases were concentrated in the small and medium segments.

UPS has repeatedly stated that one of its strategic target markets is small-and-medium businesses, which often don’t have the wherewithal to manage all their logistics needs internally and can benefit from a carrier with value-added services. 

Meanwhile, ground parcel cost per package declined 2% quarter over quarter as lower fuel surcharges, reduced accessorials and deeper discounting offset continued rate pressure, according to TD Cowen/AFS Logistics. The average effective fuel surcharge paid by shippers fell 4.7%, as diesel moderated through the first two months of the quarter before reaching a record-high in September. 

With discounts, FedEx and UPS both favored large shippers over small and medium ones.  With diesel prices reaching a historic-high late last month, the Freight Index predicted carriers are likely to make further fuel-related adjustments to capture the revenue windfall. 

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

Write to Eric Kulisch at ekulisch@freightwaves.com.

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Twelve more heavy-duty sites are under construction, and three are nearly finished: a Flying J in Tulare, California, which opened Oct. 9; a Flying J in Fort Stockton, Texas; and a Pilot in North Las Vegas, Nevada.

Each site will have four to eight stalls running Tesla’s V4 cabinet technology. According to Tesla, each stall can deliver up to 1.2 megawatts, enough for a Tesla Semi to recover 60% of its charge in 30 minutes.

Pilot, a Berkshire Hathaway subsidiary based in Knoxville, Tennessee, operates more than 900 locations in 43 states and five Canadian provinces. The Megacharger network is planned for select locations along I-5, I-10, and other major freight corridors in California, Georgia, Indiana, Nevada, and Texas.

“Pilot is proud to bring heavy-duty charging directly to key trucking routes and pair it with the services and amenities drivers rely on,” said Shannon Sturgil, senior vice president of alternative fuels at Pilot.

Ellabell’s opening came later than Pilot projected. When the companies announced the partnership in January, Pilot said construction would begin in the first half of 2026 and the first sites would open in the summer.

The January announcement also named New Mexico among the initial states. The October release drops it and lists Indiana.

The chargers are arriving as Tesla moves the Semi into high-volume production, which began at its Sparks, Nevada, factory on Sept. 24. Tesla has said it expects more than 30 charging stations and over 200 megawatt-capable charging posts to be operating by year-end, including the Pilot sites, and that the factory is designed to build 50,000 trucks a year, FreightWaves previously reported.

Pilot said the heavy-duty sites build on its passenger EV charging network and its renewable diesel and biodiesel offerings.

“With these initial locations, we’re making fleet electrification a more accessible option for long-haul transportation,” Sturgil said.

The post Pilot, Tesla open first Megacharger site, 12 more underway appeared first on FreightWaves.

Johansen made the announcement in a LinkedIn post Oct. 13. He succeeds Brian Enright, who served in the dual positions since Oct. 22.

Johansen has more than 25 years of experience in integrated port and logistics businesses. He joined Dubai-based DP World in 2011 and previously served as CEO of DP World Dominicana.

He later became chief operating officer of DP World Americas, with responsibility for ports and terminals, logistics services, economic zones, and maritime operations throughout the Western Hemisphere. 

In that role, he has emphasized integrating physical infrastructure with ports, inland transport, customs processes, economic zones, and digital platforms.

The appointment comes as DP World continues to expand its Americas footprint. 

The company entered exclusive negotiations with the Port of Corpus Christi in June 2026 to design, build, and operate a container terminal under a long-term lease. If completed, it would be DP World’s first container-terminal development on the U.S. Gulf Coast and its first U.S. container-terminal development in roughly two decades.

The proposed facility could ultimately handle about 1 million TEUs annually. No construction start date, final capital commitment, or definitive lease terms have been announced.

Other Americas initiatives include a $760 million port and free-trade-zone development in the Dominican Republic, which the company says is intended to increase cargo capacity and support nearshoring-related investment.

Prior to DP World, Johansen’s background includes senior roles at APM Terminals, Maersk, and Sociedade Gestora de Terminais. A native of Denmark, he has been based in Charlotte, N.C., in his Americas leadership role.

Read more articles by Stuart Chirls here.

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The plan is expected to increase container capacity by 122% and automobile capacity by 18%, add more than 6,000 jobs, and generate $45 million in annual state and local tax revenue.

PhilaPort will use the state funding, together with two U.S. Department of Transportation grants, to build a new 2,000-foot berth at Southport Marine Terminal—the port’s first new berth in more than 50 years.

“PhilaPort has a long and storied history that spans back over 300 years to the very founding of our Commonwealth,” said Gov. Josh Shapiro, at a press conference Tuesday. “It was here where goods produced in Philadelphia embarked for destinations around the globe, and today, the port remains a major player in global trade and a critical piece of our economy. This is a game changer for PhilaPort and it builds on our work to grow the economy and create real opportunity for Pennsylvanians.”

As a specialized mid-Atlantic gateway, Philadelphia handled a record 889,268 TEUs in 2025, compared with 8.9 million TEUs at New York-New Jersey and 5.7 million TEUs at Savannah.

PhilaPort currently supports more than 8,000 jobs and contributed nearly $1.2 billion in economic output across Pennsylvania in 2025, according state data. The expansion is projected to lift port-related employment to about 14,000.

The program also includes dredging at Southport, land acquisition, infrastructure improvements, and new cranes and cargo-handling equipment. Project components include $31 million for Southport dredging, $145 million for reclamation work at Southport Berth II and the North Wharf, and $58.1 million for cranes and other equipment.

Private commitments include $100 million each from terminal operator Holt Logistics and vehicle-processing company Glovis America.

The expansion would transform the 152-acre Mustin Yard parcel adjacent to Southport for container and automobile cargo, while the new berth would add vessel capacity at Southport. Officials told local media that auto capacity gains would amount to more than 100,000 additional vehicles annually.

Construction is expected to begin once permitting and contracting are complete, with port officials projecting a ground-breaking in early 2027.

The announcement positions Philadelphia to compete for additional container and automobile business as East Coast ports seek to expand capacity. State officials said the investment is intended to strengthen PhilaPort’s role as a global trade hub and support future cargo growth.

Read more articles by Stuart Chirls here.

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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.

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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.

(Editor’s note: This is an updated article on diesel markets, including content from an article published Tuesday).

The benchmark diesel price used for most fuel surcharges fell for the third straight week, but the broader market numbers are suggesting it is going to be tough for that price to go down for a fourth consecutive time.

The Department of Energy/Energy Information Administration average retail diesel price was set at $6.179/gallon, effective Monday but published Wednesday, a day later than normal due to the Columbus Day holiday. That is a decline of 2 cts/g from the prior week.

But the price decline comes as the futures market for ultra low sulfur diesel (ULSD) has risen sharply since October began. Given the normal lag between changes in the futures market and the wholesale market and what consumers see at the pump, it has taken time for those increases to make their way to the retail level. But they are occurring now.

One thing that is not occurring: any negative reaction to the Trump administration deal for more supplies of diesel from Russia.

ULSD on CME settled at $4.642/g on October 1. The settlement Tuesday was $4.9344/g, a sign that both the Russia diesel deal and the move to allow on-road use of cheaper red dye diesel is having little to no impact on the broader diesel market.

At approximately 10:45 a.m. EDT Wednesday, ULSD was down about 1.2%, a decline of 6.05 cts/g, to $4.8739/g.

The futures market for ULSD has been marked by crazy volatilty in the last seven or eight trading days.

When the DOE/EIA price was published October 6, ULSD settled 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 its impact is largely being dismissed as well).

But the sharp rise Tuesday appeared to signal that the market had largely rejected the idea that any further Russian supplies having an impact on the price.

Will Russia deal bring relief?

The Russian diesel deal is a transaction that has largely been dismissed as irrelevant to supply/demand trends. 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.

However, it has risen the last two days, adding 3.3 cts/g from Monday’s price. The latest AAA price for Wednesday was $6.2997/g.

The DTS.USA average retail diesel price in SONAR Tuesday and Wednesday was $6.32/g.

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.

More FreightWaves articles by Todd Maiden:

• Yellow Corp., Teamsters settle on WARN Act claims
• LTL survey: Old Dominion, Daylight Transport take home top honors again
• Transportation prices surge as capacity tightens further in September

The post 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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• Texas trucking firm sued over age limits on drivers
• New Jersey CDL school lawsuit questions evidence behind FMCSA shutdown

The post Truck driver, 74, killed in Interstate 84 rollover in Idaho appeared first on FreightWaves.

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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.

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Read more articles by Stuart Chirls here.

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The post CSX operations chief to retire appeared first on FreightWaves.

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.

The post Bot Auto taps Lenovo, Nvidia, pegs autonomy hardware at $50,000 appeared first on FreightWaves.