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"I think we're really there, where we've finally got tailwinds instead of headwinds." --ATBS Vice President Mike Hosted, speaking in this edition of Overdrive Radio about market fundamentals owner-operators face in 2026, despite the ongoing fuel shock. In this week's podcast, we’re tracking back through the full audio from our Partners in Business coproducer ATBS’s twice-annual updates charting trends in costs, in revenues and bedrock income for owner-operators: https://overdriveonline.com/15820459 Regular Overdrive readers will know this year’s update reconfigured slightly how the owner-operator tax and business services firm calculates the numbers, and you’ll hear detailed explanation of the changes today from ATBS Vice President Mike Hosted. Note that the Youtube version of this week’s podcast includes a way to walk through the entire presentation with all of Mike Hosted’s detailed slides charting market and owner-operator trend data, and that if you’re listening to our standard audio-only podcast on other platforms, you can download the full slides to follow along via this link: https://overdriveonline.com/15820610 Find the Youtube version via our website: https://overdriveonline.com/15822598 For more, too, from our time spent with Hosted at the Mid-America Trucking show late last month, look for a Youtube special report by Overdrive video editor Lawson Rudisill with Hosted story of the truly difficult situation in trucking of the last nearly four years and how, as you’ll also hear in this podcast, rates forecasts for 2026 may well hold true to the positive for all of us this year, for the first time in a very, very long time -- since at least 2021. "Why trucking rates are finally heating up in 2026": https://overdriveonline.com/15822613 There’s certainly a lot of hope amongst owner-operators on that score, even with soaring fuel costs, about which Hosted devotes plenty time in the presentation. There's a lot of positivity coming out of the operational trend data, all based directly on operational trends among ATBS owner-operator clients. But a few red flags pop out as well. Among the biggest: Real maintenance spend for the average owner-operator just keeps going up, and up, and up. As the truck ages, it’s going to happen. Yet it’s a sure bet, as Hosted notes, that if you’re not setting aside enough to cover that cost, disaster awaits. Big mechanical breakdowns and associated costs, including the downtime of course, are the No. 1 failure cause for owner-operated businesses in trucking. How bad has maintenance cost gotten? According to Hosted, in 2025 owner-operators spent upward of $14,000 on maintenance. Well more than a grand a month, $250-plus/week. For the average ATBS client, maintenance costs have topped 15 cents for every single mile run -- with an average client running roughly 94,000 miles in 2025. What are you putting aside for maintenance and/or for building that emergency reserve savings? If you haven’t boosted those set-asides in a while, there's no time like the present. A few resources to help: **Overdrive's Load Profit Analyzer, a calcultor for comparing load offers and gaming out rates scenarios based on your costs: https://overdriveonline.com/load-analyzer **Routine preventive maintenance pays owner-op dividends: https://overdriveonline.com/15736532 **Save money, and stay out of inspectors' crosshairs, with smart maintenance: https://overdriveonline.com/15736720

“Owner-operators want tools, small fleets want tools, to be able to do these things. And it’s not that they’re necessarily trying to save money, usually, but they want to save time.” –Tyler Robertson, founder of Diesel Laptops, on the success of his business providing software/hardware to truckers for self-help in the diagnosis-and-repair process Irmo, South Carolina-headquartered Tyler Robertson, head of the Diesel Laptops diagnostic hardware and software provider has striven for an all-makes focus since its early days, in use by untold numbers of owners as well as maintenance pros around the nation since he founded the company in 2015. In this week's podcast, walk through Robertson’s history and just what Diesel Laptops offers to truckers and shops to analyze fault codes, providing a diagnostic assist, even getting you to potential parts you might need to fix the problem. As Robertson suggests in the quote off the top -- tools to help service shops help you, as it were, with timely repairs. Robertson and Diesel Laptops make what might be the smallest fault-code scanner in the world, pairing via Bluetooth to a smartphone app that fills out information around diagnostic clues when the dash lights up. That Diesel Laptops "Diesel Decoder" has been around for a couple of years, but recent updates allow for new functionality Roberston details in this episode, including the ability to force regens if needed, likewise to one-tap from a fault code all the way to a part number. At the Mid-America Trucking Show last month, Diesel Laptops was lauded as the latest inductees in the Howes Hall of Fame, where the Howes Products company pays tribute to individuals and organizations truly making a difference in the trucking and farming businesses it serves, the wider industries , too. Even before official founding, Robertson was on something of a mission to democratize truck and equipment diagnosis and repair. It started as a side hustle the engineer built himself, selling tools online and elsewhere. As so many boostrapped companies’ stories do, Robertson's starts in the trunk of his car. "I used to go to truck stops and sling tools out of the back of my car," he said. "You've got to go where the customers are." Hear much more about Howes' reasons for honoring Diesel Laptops, and more of Robertson's story, in the episode. More about Diesel Laptops and past Howes Hall of Fame inductees: https://www.overdriveonline.com/15820626 The Howes Hall of Fame official site, where you can browse the virtual gallery of past honorees and suggest a future member yourself: https://howesproducts.com/hof More Overdrive Radio delivered directly to your email inbox: https://bit.ly/overdrivesubscribe

"Carriers have been vetted to death. ... For 20 years, carriers have been vetted, vetted, vetted. And brokers have not. There's no entry-level audit, no checking in every year like the carrier has to do. The carrier has a responsibility and an ability to start asking questions." --Dale Prax of Freightvalidate Asking questions, that is, to fully "vet the brokers," noted Prax, freight fraud watcher, FMCSA's onetime "worst critic," and proprietor of FreightValidate , a vetting tool offered to both carriers and brokers and unique in that regard. H spoke to the one-sided nature of vetting that’s gone on for decades now. In this Overdrive Radio edition, track back through the opening panel discussion at the Mid-America Trucking Show where Prax delivered those words. As was the case last year during the opening, the fraud in freight markets was a big part of the discussion. Our own Alex Lockie detailed the fraud focus in a report last week you can find at this link -- https://overdriveonline.com/15821288 -- featuring Prax and his work alongside so many around trucking to light a fire underneath regulators (and truckers and brokers themselves) on combating the bad actors. It wasn’t the only big theme coming out of this year's MATS. Panel moderator Brent Hutto, now working with Truck Parking Club, teed up another topic up at the very start -- the notion of AI, and what quick advancement in various forms could mean for freight relationships for owner-operators and trucking more broadly. Panelists included other voices regular readers will be familiar with, including past Small Fleet Champ Jason Cowan of Silver Creek Transportation on his own growing adoption of automation for parts of his back-office processes. Yet Cowan also underscored the importance of really working personal relationships for any owner-operator looking to grow. "I would go to people and say, 'Hey I want to haul your freight,'" he said of his early efforts to ink shipper contracts. The answer, too often, was a question barked back to him, "Well how many trucks do you have?" In those early days, shippers were looking for fleets larger than his three trucks, yet he never lost an opportunity to offer to be the pressure-release valve for any who would listen. "Hey listen," he might say, "here's my card. When somebody drops the ball, give me a call." Thus was a meager start to long-term business relationships with a myriad customers. Silver Creek's up to around 75 trucks today after a recent acquisition, proof positive the approach at least can work to get you started, if you deliver. More about that acquisition: https://overdriveonline.com/15773179 There's more where that came from, likewise from the other panelists featured in an opening MATS session sponsored by Progressive Insurance and DAT Freight & Analytics: **Lee Klaskow, Senior Analyst, Bloomberg Intelligence **Jamie Hagen, Owner & President, Hell Bent Xpress: https://overdriveonline.com/15819686 **Bill Driegert, Executive Vice President, DAT Carrier Products + Convoy Platform **Sanjay Vyas, General Manager for Commercial Lines Product & Pricing, Progressive **Adam Wingfield, Founder & Managing Director, Innovative Logistics Group Also in the podcast, OOIDA Executive VP on the outlook for the broker transparency rulemaking (still hearing May from the FMCSA) and delay on drafting the next big highway bill in Congress. Partisan arguments over war, over immigration and so much more increase the likelihood Congress might kick the can down the road on the front, Pugh said. But time will tell. More ongoing coverage of news, custom trucks, analysis and more from MATS at this collection: https://overdriveonline.com/tag/mats

"If you're really concerned about safety numbers, we want zero fatalities, we want all these things to happen ... we have to train people, we have to pay people, and we have to give them a safe place to rest. That's the first three things we should be doing, and until we do that, we're never going to fix highway safety. It's never going to get better." --Owner-Operator Independent Drivers Association Executive Vice President Lewie Pugh The good news is that, according to Pugh, FMCSA and the Department of Transportation more broadly are finally listening to truckers and other small-business interests in their push toward safety improvement, leaving behind old notions of a driver shortage. Pugh contends the notion has for decades influenced the credentialing and training system such that drivers are in effect rushed into the business, with too often terrible outcomes. Nowhere was new federal attitudes toward small business truckers in evidence more than at this year’s Mid-America Trucking Show, where regulators spent a great deal of time and effort communicating with owner-ops in attendance: https://www.overdriveonline.com/15820771 Also in the podcast, find more emphasis on OOIDA priorities with respect to the administration, and a rundown with Pugh in light of the broader freight markets, particularly after the dramatic escalation of fuel prices of late with the Iran conflict. We all found a measure guarded optimism among owner-operators in attendance, yet plenty of hope the conflict draws down quickly. Plus: We check in with Jorge Rivera Lujan, featured on Overdrive Radio earlier in the year regarding his and other plaintiffs' legal challenge to FMCSA's rule effectively eliminating most non-domiciled CDL issuance for non-citizens. Lewie Pugh got the opportunity to meet the independent owner-operator at MATS, and well knows that if the rule remains intact Rivera Lujan will lose his CDL and the current status of his business late in the year when the CDL expires: https://www.overdriveonline.com/15816105 Rivera Lujan was brought the U.S. as a child, and with another Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals recipient was able to communicate his quandary at MATS to officials as high as Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy. In some ways, there could be hope for folks like him, owner-operators adversely impacted by the non-domiciled CDL rule change in effect since March 16. Plaintiffs in the case against the non-domiciled CDL rule have filed for expedited review by the court as of about a week ago, and time will tell on that front. Meantime, owners like Rivera Lujan and others impacted explore other avenues for their futures, his experience at MATS being an eye-opening one in regard to opportunities all around trucking. Pugh stands by the non-domiciled rule change as written, generally, yet also hoped "this is unfortunately the reality we live in in our country. ... Whatever we do it seems like it goes too far one way or the other, and innocent people who are trying to do the right thing get caught up in it," Pugh said. "People smarter than me write these rules and regs, and they probably have reasons we don't understand. "It's almost impossible to write a catch-all law. It's a shame for [Rivera Lujan]. Hopefully they get something in there to change that or that could help." As for the show itself, Lewie Pugh saw a measure of hopeful positivity among owner-operators there quite in spite of dramatic fuel run-ups, with a glimmer of hope on offer in market conditions after the long drought of the last three and more years. Much more from MATS in this collection: https://overdriveonline.com/tag/mats Sign up for Overdrive's newsletter *https://bit.ly/overdrivesubscribe* for more reporting from all around small-business trucking.

The answers to the question in the title here came rapid-fire, and with certainty, from reps of six different state agencies with oversize and overweight permits responsibilities, amid much laughter from the assembled at the Specialized Carriers & Rigging Association's transport symposium last month. To tally the answers up: four definitive 'No's, one 'Absolutely not,' and just one 'Doubtful.' Offering one of the nos was Alex Jensen, in permits with the Iowa Department of Transportation, who expanded on his and others' reasoning. Just as no two overdimensional loads are much alike, different states have different priorities, rules and infrastructures, as Overdrive's reporting around your Highway Report Card state road-maintenance assessments have also made clear in recent months. "All of our bridges are built to different standards, different ages. We have different engineers, different pavement," Jensen said. "Even the characteristitcs ... the geography, the road conditions, bridge conditions, it's all different." Unless the federal government were to mandate some unforeseen, next-to-impossible on-size-fits-all system, he added the 50-state-by-state permitting regime is probably here to stay. "I know it sucks, but it's just the way it is, unfortunately," Jensen said. Quipped Virginia Department of Motor Vehicles' Brandi Thorpe, "Unless we can get Jeff Bezos to AmazonPrime us a new structure," truckers and state permits officials are stuck with what they've got. The six officials were in conversation with ATS's Joanna Jungels (serving as moderator) at the SC&RA symposium, with plenty in the way of audience Q&A, too, where the back-and-forth really heated up with actionable intelligence. The full panel is featured in this week's edition of Overdrive Radio, offering insights and intelligence from these four additional state reps from an alphabet soup of agencies in addition to DMVs and DOTs: **Wyoming -- Port of Entry Operations Manager Troy McAlpine with the Wyoming Highway Patrol **Louisiana -- Permit Office Manager Julie Gautreau with the state DOT **Oklahoma -- Deputy General Counsel Mitch Surrett, also with his state's DOT **Indiana -- Judy Williams with Indiana's Department of Revenue You’ll hear a lot about increasingly super-complicated moves of superloads, still requiring lots of manual route planning, yet also how technology has enabled effective auto-issue in most states today at a very high rate. Learn, too, each state's approach to punitive actions for bridge strikers or construction-zone scofflaws. An audience member asked whether the states had a three-strikes or other cut-and-dried rule that might get a carrier banned from permit-issuance in the state. Most approached such on a case-by-case basis, with cutting off auto-issue access a common first step. Yet, noted Jensen, "hit a bridge, running without permits, kill a construction worker ... we'll go through the administrative suspension procedures if we need to, but I can count on one hand the number of times it's ever gotten that serious." More often, steps precede it, including more law enforcement escorts required on otherwise non-escort-necessary loads, if you needed other incentive to avoid drastic mistakes. "They do a full Level 2 inspection before you get moving, and they might find things you don't necessarily want them to find," Jensen noted. Catch Overdrive's most-recent "Niche Hauls" series installment on the heavy-oversize niche (from 2025) via this link: https://overdriveonline.com/tag/niche-hauls

It’s been some kind of a year and more for Hell Bent Xpress owner Jamie Hagen. The South Dakota and Michigan-headquartered fleet he’s built from one truck over many years is back to 10 all-Mack power units after some reduction in the last, difficult year. Hagen was among Overdrive’s Small Fleet Championship finalists a couple years back. Along with past Small Fleet Champ Jason Cowan of Silver Creek Transportation in Kentucky, last year Hagen was tapped for the opening panel discussion at the big Mid-America Trucking Show: https://overdriveonline.com/15741773 The pair of champs will run it back in that panel to set the stage for small-business issues at the big show again this year. It's on the MATS schedule for early the morning of March 26 to kick things off, and for this week's edition of Overdrive Radio Hagen delivers a bit of a preview of what we’re likely to hear there: https://truckingshow.com/schedule/ Safe to say you can expect discussion of fuel economy and purchasing, given the last couple weeks. It’s so bad on the fuel front there’s evidence of owners just parking their trucks to wait it out. (A friend of mine here in Nashville took a car to the airport this past week. His driver: an owner-operator in just such a situation, who noted he was going to wait it out and just do the Uber-driving thing meantime. Gasoline, at least, is still a good dollar/gal. and more below diesel, even near $2 less in some cases.) Hell Bent Jamie Hagen’s got a not-so-secret weapon in his fuel arsenal in one of the first Mack Pioneers to roll off the assembly line last year. He's got a driver in it at the moment as he himself focuses with his wife and business partner, Hillary, on office duties. "He's been getting after it," Hagen noted of the truck's operator, who's "really good at fuel economy." The Pioneer, spec'd for max efficiency pulling a van, averaged 9.8 mpg for the last month. While that's a whole lot better than 5.8, Hagen noted, the Iran war and the diesel run-up since just wasn't "on the bingo card" looking out at prospects when planning for 2026. Even with excellent efficiency, the fuel-price hike of the last two weeks virtually erased gains in brokered rates he'd seen since the Fall. It's all made him "gun-shy," to an extent, about future investments, given Hell Bent's push to ever-more-efficient equipment with five more Pioneers acquired last year to replace older units. As he put it, "you just never know when the bottom's going to fall out" with cost and revenue volatility as bad as it's been. With good direct freight and rates coming out of the Dakotas, a project this year will be to identity customers for the return trips to further cut the reliance on brokers, Hagen notes in this week's episode, where we touch on the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration's broker transparency and other regulatory efforts, and much more. More upcoming at MATS in this collection: https://overdriveonline.com/tag/mats

Off the top of the podcast this week, the voice of February Trucker of the Month Adam Mackey, headquartered in Mustang, Oklahoma, about his "Aftersolo" Youtube channel where's been documenting his journey through owner-operated trucking since 2022. Named after his dog, Solo, whom he'd sadly lost around that time, Aftersolo features plenty in the way of DIY care he's put into the Freightliner Columbia and Utility flatbed that carry the Mosermackey Trucking business forward. The channel is a remarkable repository for various and sundry of the owner-operator’s maintenance and modification projects on the Columbia, likewise all manner of other topics around the business. First things first, though. It's been a week, to say the least, in the world oil markets. If you’ve been paying attention to OverdriveOnline.com you’ll note an update that diesel prices passed $4/gal. early last week in Nashville where Overdrive Radio host Todd Dills is headquartered, fast on the heels of U.S. and Isreali strikes on Iran: https://overdriveonline.com/15818628 Today (Monday, March 9) Dills reports predictions of a "runaway market" in that story a week ago appear correct. "We’ve passed five dollars for a gallon of diesel here" in Nashville, Dills says, "well above six out on the West Coast of course and elsewhere." If you’re in a leased operation or working with shippers where you benefit from fuel-surcharge rate adjustments, here’s hope those are updating quickly to cover rapidly increasing costs. If you’re working with brokers, don’t be shy about educating them in your negotiations, such as they may need it, about cost-offset needs in the rate. For many independents like Adam Mackey, it's surely been a week full of that, and it's a real shame the diesel run-up has come when it has, given the gains in freight-market strength in the last several months. This all certainly throws a wrench in those gears: https://overdriveonline.com/15818852 Keep tuned to OverdriveOnline.com for more quite soon on how quickly spot markets adjusted, or not, to last week’s dramatic run-up. For the bulk of the podcast, hear independent Mosermackey Trucking business owner Adam Mackey’s story, in his own words, also chronicled in this feature attendant to his February Trucker of the Month nod a couple weeks back: https://overdriveonline.com/15817984 In business with authority since before the COVID pandemic, after years hauling as a company driver with Old Dominion Freight Line and some other outfits before that, Mackey's trucked with authority from the very start and has focused most on flatbeds loads, filling in with power-only work of various types, too. He’s set up with a go-to broker he’s built a solid relationship with for much of his oil-field-related freight today, sure to benefit at least from oil market run-ups in the short term, despite added costs for his and every other trucking business out there. Mentioned in the podcast: **Enter your own or another deserving owner-operator business to compete for the 2026 Trucker of the Year award: https://overdriveonline.com/toptrucker **Overdrive's Load Profit Analyzer: https://overdriveonline.com/load-analyzer

In this week's edition of the Overdrive Radio podcast, catch the address delivered by, and Q&A with, Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration chief Derek Barrs at the annual transportation symposium of the Specialized Carriers and Rigging Association, held last week in Birmingham, Alabama. Barrs touches on quite a lot, including the last-week-introduced Dalilah Law that might cement the FMCSA’s preferred approach to limiting non-domiciled CDLs for non-citizens but that also casts a wide net on CDL recertifications: https://overdriveonline.com/15818235 His talk came the morning of the very day, Feb. 26, that petitioners challenging that non-domiciled final rule filed a formal request for a stay of the March 16 effective date, pending court review. While Barrs didn't note the new filing or the past court action against the prior rule version, he cast the agency's moves on CDL qualifications as fundamentally necessary. "We are taking steps from our non-domiciled CDL process to make sure that we strengthen that so that when we issue that, we're not issuing to someone who has not been truly vetted," Barrs said, "and we're not giving driver's licenses to individuals who are only supposed to be in this country for two years but we're allowing them to have CDLs for eight or nine years. That is the most ridiculous thing I've ever heard in my life" -- a reference to evidence uncovered by federal auditors in a variety of states of legal presence and CDL term mismatches. After the applause died down, Barrs added, "That is a one-size-fits-all." That's not how the likes of owner-operator Jorge Rivera Lujan and his fellow litigants see it, however. Their challenge to the FMCSA’s non-domiciled CDL final rule noted quite a different dynamic in FMCSA’s safety justification for its rule, which would invalidate Rivera’s CDL eligibility. A non-domiciled CDL holder for many years now, owner-operator Rivera, unlike many more recent arrivals to the country, has lived virtually his entire life in the U.S. after his undocumented parents brought him to California. He enjoys the protections of the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals or DACA program, as listeners heard with our talk with Rivera a few weeks back: https://overdriveonline.com/15816105 He and fellow litigants asked the court to stay the rule pending review, generally arguing the agency paints the situation of non-domiciled CDL holders today with too broad a brush, Rivera a principal example. Hear much more from Barrs about the agency's perspective in the podcast, likewise potential upcoming rulemakings around electronic-logging-device and training-provider certification, "chameleon carrier" enforcement and more. As mentioned in the podcast: **Long Haul Paul pays tribute to Travis "The Snakeman" Wammack, forever memorialied in none other than the them of Overdrive Radio. ****Arkansas' HB 1745: https://overdriveonline.com/15742569 **Dalilah Law: https://overdriveonline.com/15818340 **DOT/FMCSA press conference week prior to Barrs' talk: https://overdriveonline.com/15817793 **Lawsuit challenging non-domiciled CDL rule: https://overdriveonline.com/15818372

We're getting ready for big Mid-America Trucking Show next month, March 26-28 at the Louisville Convention Center, and ready to host our Trucker of the Year and cover all manner of the various goings on at the event. It's a big undertaking, from set-up to roll-out of the custom-truck show in the Paul K. Young Memorial competition to federal and state regulatory panels, trucking-business discussions and all the rest happening at the huge event: https://overdriveonline.com/tag/mats Yet we’ve got help from a bit of a not-so-secret weapon who this year happens to be an integral part of the official MATS programming. He’s the player of and songwriter behind much of the music you hear under the voices on Overdrive Radio week-in-week-out, the man we’ve featured here too many times to count and whom regular readers will also know from his stories and tall tales, interviews, oral histories of OTR drivers of all stripes, and so much more all published under the Overdrive Extra banner at OverdriveOnline.com: https://overdriveonline.com/14865330 That writer, that performer, that veritable sage of the road, Long Haul Paul Marhoefer, will feature with others during the Friday night concert at MATS this year. He’s got a couple of records upcoming, too, set for release in the coming weeks: One is archival from 1994, previously unreleased material from an embryonic stage of LHP's evolution as a songwriter he's calling "1994: The Lost Tapes." Then "The After Party Sessions" features live recordings from night shows at various trucking events over the last several years, most held in the custom-outfitted venue trailer of Brandon Carpenter that is the Old Iron Bar. Off the top of the podcast, a bit of taste of that live record via a track that is the very first of Marhoefer’s we ever heard at Overdrive, when he competed in Overdrive’s Trucker Talent Search music competition more than 10 years ago now: https://overdriveonline.com/14888649 He’d go on to place second that year. And his star rose so quickly among owner-operators and drivers in the aftermath that he never competed again -- no doubt in our minds he'd have won it had he. But he became a real fixture in performances around the competitors after that, alongside copious writing and reporting he’s done for Overdrive since, all with a clear desire to tell the stories of others with care, with faith to the their voices and no small sense of empathy for the struggles we all endure. LHP brings all of that to his songwriting as well. He’s endured plenty himself in life and trucking, as he memorably chronicled as host of our Over the Road podcast back in 2020, which saw air in partnership with the Radiotopia podcast network: https://www.overdriveonline.com/t/4405867 Don’t miss his performance at MATS, yet if that show’s just not in the cards for you this year, know that he’ll be out at a variety of other events throughout the year, though somewhat limited compared to prior years given his father, near Madison, Wisconsin, has needed home care that he and his siblings and other family members have been coordinating. The "long haul" in LHP remains a reality for Marhoefer, if he does call his trucking career at this stage a kind of semi-retirement. He still hauls for Ohio-headquartered Moeller Trucking and lives with his wife, Denise, in Losantville, Indiana, the pair an undisputed force in trucking music and culture. In the podcast, he talks through tracks from both the new records as well as 2023 and 2024’s “Legends of the Lost Highway” and “Floodwaters and Fires” records, respectively. Sit back, relax, and enjoy. Hope to see you at MATS. New records should be available around the time of MATS: https://www.longhaulpaulmusic.com/ Marhoefer's chronicle of his near-death encounter with a set of runaway duals in 2023: https://overdriveonline.com/15304967 More at the head of our Music to Truck By playlist: https://soundcloud.com/overdriveradio/sets/music-to-truck-by-no-1

In this week’s edition of Overdrive Radio, drop in with our first Trucker of the Month for the year, West-Virginia-headquarterd Top Notch Transport and its owner-operator Patrick White. White trucks today in a beautiful 2001 Peterbilt 379 hauling a variety of equipment on a step deck, and here tells a story of perseverance through accidents and injuries, and building a team around him to excel despite the barriers fate’s thrown at him. It’s in response to a question from Overdrive Senior Editor Matt Cole that White emphasized the gratitude he felt to his own team, most notably his wife, Ashlyn, now managing many aspects of the business: https://overdriveonline.com/15815895 Cole asked White for his best piece of advice for new and/or aspiring owner-operators. White duly came with this -- no-nonsense, to the point: "Don't give up, don't listen to negative people, and learn everything you can from the old guys" who've done it all before, owner-operator White said. But he didn't leave it there. "Have a supportive wife, or somebody that is there for you, even if it's just a friend," he said, adding of Ashlyn White, who nominated him for the 2026 Trucker of the Year award: "She's the rock, she's the foundation of the business. She really is." As with so many of our Trucker of the Year contenders through the years, Trucker should well be plural in this case for the team behind the Whites’ Top Notch Transport, trucking with authority now for getting on a decade. Ashlyn not only handled tarping and more for Patrick while he was recovering a broken leg last year, more routinely she can and does do pretty much "everything but drive," White noted, from dispatching to handling "all the paperwork and compliance for the business." Hear contending Truckers of the Year Patrick and Ashlyn White's story in this week's Overdrive Radio podcast. Nominate your own or another deserving owner-operator business for the 2026 Trucker of the Year award: https://overdriveonline.com/toptrucker

In this week's Overdrive Radio, part 2 of our series honoring our Trucker of the Year, John Penn, for the big win for 2025. Part 1, ICYMI: https://overdriveonline.com/15815690 In this edition, Penn details his approach to maintenance with an experiment he's conducted to extend oil drain intervals beyond the manufacturer-recommended 75,000 miles for his 2019 Freightliner Cascadia. Also: You'll hear about Penn's close attention to customer opportunity, and keys to prevention when it comes to the maintenance issues with emissions system in the Cascadia -- no "deleted" emissions here. He’s running with all the sensors and the diesel particular filter, the diesel exhaust fluid dosing, and the rest, and hitting big fuel-efficiency numbers we detailed in the last episode featuring him. Above 10 mpg for a lifetime average is certainly nothing to sniff at, but has he been plagued with sensor failures and other problems common to emissions-equipped diesels? The answer is not really, though he’s had some minor issues for certain. Part of his success on that front starts with his approach to the used market for such trucks to begin with -- with a keen eye not just on a prospective purchase's miles for previous-life wear and tear, but engine hours, too. The lower the hours, the less the unit’s prior owner likely idled the rig -- one of the big killers of emissions equipment in modern trucks in his view. Penn, despite his late-model equipment, might well qualify among the oldest of the old-school in that regard. As he put it about his own idling practice: "This piece of machinery is feeding us and keeping a roof over our head," Penn noted, "so I want to treat it the best I can. I will not idle, ever. I don't care how hot it is." That's right, even in Texas in mid-summer, where he finds himself often enough at the end of one or another of his LTL furniture runs. "I don't have an APU or anything," he added, but he does utilize a fan and his truck's window screens. He’s comfortable with the tradeoff. "I'd rather put my truck's health in front of my comfort," he said, laughing. He does run with a fuel-fired heater for those dangrously cold temps, but it’s safe to say Trucker of the Year John Penn is one tough customer when it comes to downtime OTR. In the podcast, dive into new opportunities he’s set himself up for with diligent, always-on customer service and networking. "You never know when an opportunity is going to pop up," he said, about potential new direct freight opportunites he details here. And he's made great strides, too, paying his growing experience forward to peers. There's good possibility of a bit of expansion for his one-truck JP Transport business as soon as this quarter, with addition of a leased owner he's really bonded with as a back-and-forth sounding board for trucking information, knowledge, advice. The like-minded pair may soon make for a great two-truck hauling team in JP Transport. Enter the 2026 Trucker of the Year competition: https://overdriveonline.com/toptrucker

"There's a lot of loopholes in a lot of places, systematically, but they're blaming the driver for everything." --owner-operator Jorge Rivera Lujan, about the federal non-domiciled CDL rule changes and what he feels is misplaced curtailment of credentialing, and similarly misplaced public attitudes toward non-citizen CDL holders Off the top of this week's edition of Overdrive Radio, an introduction to Utah-headquartered one-truck independent owner-operator Jorge Rivera Lujan. As hinted at in the quote above, he speaks to views of flaws in the FMCSA's September Interim Final Rule that would (and already has in some ways) severely restrict non-domiciled CDL issuance to a variety of classes of non-U.S. citizens. Those include asylum seekers in immigration limbo and many others. The rule seeks to cut off access to a CDL even for folks like him. Rivera Lujan's a recipient of the protections offered by the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program since near the time it became policy in 2012, as you’ll hear. If the owner-operator's name sounds familiar, that’s because he is the named plaintiff in the title of the court challenge to the non-domiciled rule, filed shortly after he and many other non-domiciled CDL holders realized that under the terms of the rule, they wouldn’t be able to renew their licenses or get another kind of CDL to continue their work. In his case, it was a direct threat to work and business he's done now for more than a decade. Rivera Lujan has been in the U.S. since he was brought here at pre-school age by his parents. The owner-operator’s younger brother is in trucking, too, with a small fleet now that’s a separate businesss. The younger brother enjoys a key difference from Rivera Lujan -- the brother was born here, and is thus a U.S. citizen. Aside from some side non-trucking business, Rivera Lujan fundamentally is like so many among Overdrive's principal owner-operator readers with motor carrier authority. "I have one truck, and I have some direct customers," he said, "because who says you have to use brokers all the time?" Jorge Rivera Lujan’s in agreement with many around trucking that the English proficiency standards should be enforced, yet he feels in the wider public's imagination ELP problems are blamed on the non-domiciled CDL as if they are one in the same. He feels that too many are painting non-domiciled CDL holders in the country today with a too-broad brush. Are there problems with many such CDL holders’ licenses extending beyond their legal stay in the country? Sure, as has been readily demonstrated. Do non-domiciled CDL holders exist who shouldn’t be hauling over-the-road because their English skills aren't sufficient for safe operation or for other reasons? Again, sure, but one might say the same about plenty native-born citizens with CDLs who could use a lot of additional training, he feels. Fundamentally he feels it's not sufficient reason to curtail most non-domiciled CDL issuance, and too many seem willing to just throw long-term U.S. residents like him and plenty other documented visitors -- who pay taxes, who have legal presence and in his case have built businesses over many years -- under the proverbial bus. He has a lot to say generally about immigration, about his own path toward as-yet-unrealized citizenship, and the trucking markets writ large post-COVID. Likewise: where he feels regulators might best focus their attention when it comes to credentialing -- rather than dropping bombs on the very end of the CDL-issuance food chain: the driver. So far, the federal court seems to agree. As mentioned in the podcast: **N.C. put on notice by FMCSA for non-domiciled CDL problems: https://www.overdriveonline.com/15814284 **Jorge Rivera Lujan v. FMCSA contends non-domiciled rule unlawful: https://www.overdriveonline.com/15769818 **Further reading via this Overdrive Radio post: https://overdriveonline.com/15816105

A round of applause is due for Overdrive’s 2025 Trucker of the Year, selected from a field of 10 semi-finalist Trucker of the Month honorees, then three finalists. Off the top, one of the freight partners of the winning independent lauded the owner-operator for core strengths of the owner in her day-to-day work he does for a dedicated customer of the brokerage and small fleet Rankin & Sons. "I can't think of anyone who deserves it as much as he does," said Jeanna Bean of the winner, Overdrive 2025 Trucker of the Year John Penn. We also spoke with a close associate of Penn, Schneider-leased owner-operator Kevin O’Sullivan of Arizona, who recognized the real strength of the competitive field of all of our 2025 Truckers of the Month, especially the two fellow finalists. "There was a lot of good competition," said O'Sullivan. "He came out on top, and I'm glad he did. That man is a wealth of knowledge and, everything he's learned the good and bad, he's definitely not afraid to put it out there and help other people." If you followed the 2025 competition, you'll remember owner-operator John Penn's story, competition judges in the final round praising Penn for qualities shared by his fellow finalists – drive, clear focus on long-term business stability, mechanical aptitude, and so much more: https://www.overdriveonline.com/15770500 What may well set him apart, though, is all he’s done to take advantage of what contemporary engines and drivetrains can help deliver -- maximum fuel economy, with Penn hovering near and occasionally above 11 miles per gallon routinely in his 2019 Freightliner Cascadia. It shows in his one-truck business’s very-low operating ratio. Penn hauls LTL furniture with own authority as JP Transport, those outbound dedicated runs for the Rankin & Sons broker’s customer, whom he treats like his own. He's hard at work taking advantage of return-load opportunities coming back toward home in Orleans, which you'll hear more about in a follow-up Overdrive Radio edition. In this episode, John Penn gives credit where credit's due, telling the stories of the men who mentored him early in trucking, the woman who's been with him every step of the way, and others who inspire him today -- including competitors Ron Kelsey and Jason Shelly. "I was shocked, first of all, honored," Penn said of learning of the win, particularly alongside Kelsey and Shelly. Both owners are, simply put, "the top of the heap." Read about both Ron Kelsey and Jason Shelly here: https://www.overdriveonline.com/15774237 And know that Penn’s a pretty modest guy -- his business is pretty special in its own right likewise his willingness to share what he’s learning with others in an ongoing dialog about just what can be done -- long as it makes sense from a biz perspective. As O’Sullivan put it at a certain point in our conversation, referencing Penn’s fuel-mileage excellence in particular, "he's certainly set the bar high for the rest of us." O'Sullivan offered three words to describe his friend, mentor and potential future busines partner: Informative, genuine, down-to-earth, qualities that underpin Penn’s two-decade odyssey to stability and profit with authority. With the win come a new Bostrom seat from the program sponsor, likewise a scale-model version of his aerodynamic 2019 Freightliner Cascadia by Eston Hoffman of Hoffman Mechanical Design. Plenty bragging rights, too, for the time to come. In the podcast, Penn tells his story with appreciation for the people who’ve been there setting him straight on the course to success, giving credit where credit's due. Enter your own or another owner-operator business you admire for the 2026 competition: https://overdriveonline.com/toptrucker

"These are very entrepreneurial people, and very smart. And at this level, it's a business." --Wex Fleet One's William Fitzgerald Of the top of this Overdrive Radio episode, Fitzgerald, over the Wex company’s anti-crime efforts, made reference to just how organized the rings perpetrating a variety of scams all around the trucking industry have gotten. And the money involved -- money you want to keep, whether it’s a piece of freight transaction with a broker, money in your business accounts used to fraudulently buy fuel or steal freight, or one of the many other flavors of fraud you’ll hear touched on in this week's podcast. At the annual National Association of Small Trucking Companies conference, a panel convened to offer perspectives on crime, aimed at answering the question of just what we mean when we talk about "freight fraud." Too often, leaders around the industry and regulatory bodies tend to lump all manner of crimes in that bucket. We saw it to an extent again with news last week about the Department of Transportation’s intent to utilize AI tools against it: https://www.overdriveonline.com/15814889 Overdrive Executive Editor Alex Lockie's report there delved into ways experts believe automated systems could be used for recognition of bad actors, yet specifics in DOT Deputy Secretary Steven Brabury's talk were few and far between. (Keep tuned for follow-ups as Lockie keeps ears to the ground for federal responses to follow-up questions sent to DOT.) For NASTC President David Owen, It was one woman’s work around an old but ever-evolving issue -- that of "reincarnated" or "chameleon" carriers gaining authority over and over and over to outrun safety-record issues -- that got him thinking more closely about how the association might help small carriers of all stripes with education about and mitigation of all manner of frauds. Owen brought writer and researcher Danielle Chaffin into NASTC as Senior Sales Engineer following work mapping out numerous authorized entities she could link to each other in the registration system, as others like Dale Prax have done. She could see fairly simple, she felt, patterns of misrepresentation bad actors utilize. In enforcing the rules against such entities, the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration seems to date reactive. A crash happens, FMCSA sees the employing carrier has reincarnated once or multiple times, and shuts them down. That seemed to be the case after the triple-fatal crash of Harjinder Singh. FMCSA shut down his employing carrier soon after that crash came to light: https://www.overdriveonline.com/15753590 If enforcement efforts could recognize a chameleon-type operation before such a disastrous event could even occur, though, would certainly be welcomed by most legit trucking companies. It's heartening to see DOT leaders at least paying lip service to putting systems in place to help. With the most high-profile crashes, for all the focus on CDL drivers behind the wheel, non-domiciled or not, all are employed somewhere. There's no shortage of analysis concluding many such employers are running around the normal hoops through which good carriers small, large and in between must jump to stay within the bounds of the rules to sustain real, legitimate business. Chameleon-type operations represent but one of the myriad types of frauds perpetrated on legitimate truckers and the American public. Panelists run through a variety of schemes and ways to tackle them head-on: Resources: **Cargo theft prevention: https://overdriveonline.com/15769312 **Recognizing double brokers, vetting systems: https://www.overdriveonline.com/15707529 **Identity theft: https://www.overdriveonline.com/15708218 **Wex's William Fitzgerald's fuel-fraud talk: https://www.overdriveonline.com/15772651 **'Cyber hygiene' and social-engineering hacks: https://www.overdriveonline.com/15755615

Off the top of this week's Overdrive Radio, Kevin Rutherford recalls his first time on a stage speaking to a roomful of owner-operators, back in 1999 at the Mid-America Trucking Show as part of Overdrive's Partners in Business seminar series at the time. The first question he asked the room was for a show of hands among those who had ready access to a detailed accounting of their business performance, such a profit and loss statement or weekly/monthly load-by-load accounting of costs, revenues and profits. Essentially: Who here knows their numbers? He asked the same question back in October to small fleet owners and owner-operators, near 30 years later, and results were similar. "About five to 10 percent of the room" raised their hands in 2025, just as in 1999, he noted. "I set a goal in 1999 ... that every time I asked that I wanted more hands to go up, and I have failed miserably. I haven't even moved the needle" on it. Yet still, as he contends in this podcast excerpting parts of his talk at the annual conference of the National Association of Small Trucking Companies in October, "if I can give you one thing that's going to turn your business around, it's that you have to have those numbers," he said. "It's more and more important all the time." Rutherford at NASTC took attendees through what’s been his principal goal for more than two decades now -- helping one-truck businesses optimize every single aspect of their work toward the profit goal. As noted, he’s failed to capture the full attention of most owners, yet there’s evidence among those he’s reached his message is resonating, and it's working for many. In the midst of the last few years' storm of difficulties for trucking businesses of all sizes, it's easy to find news of this or that trucking company’s recent bankruptcy, of course. Yet "while we're watching carriers drop like flies, I'm watching carriers I've worked with for years set records," he said. In this "crazy freight recession everybody's talking about, I'm seeing single-truck owner-operators put out records, revenue and profit records, that I've never seen before, that I didn't think would be possible." Achieving such isn’t something that’s accomplished overnight, and certainly isn’t what you would describe as "easy." Yet Rutherford hopes more owner-operators might resolve this new year to take one area of focus – and he talks about plenty in what follows here – and take that area and really resolve to improve execution. Start with one, then move to the next one, and the next one. For the business owner with one truck, when it comes to controlling costs and really beating the competition, Rutherford feels the competitive advantage is real. "Single best model in the industry -- a single-truck owner-operator with really good relationships with good small brokers," he said, "serving customers better than anybody else can." Along the way through his talk, he delivers three points of emphasis for owners who using load boards -- they shouldn't be 100% satisfying freight needs, but rather serving as a strong educational window on the market, and a path to those strong broker relationships on specialized lanes that might carry independents forward toward being that truly Remarkable One Truck Company, or ROTC for short. That's the name he and NASTC have given their partnership to help deliver business insight and education to both Rutherford's network and NASTC members. Kevin Rutherford's network: https://letstrucktribe.com NASTC: https://nastc.com Find Overdrive's own Partners in Business start-to-finish playbook for an owner-operator career, informed by both Rutherford and NASTC's work through the years, via https://overdriveonline.com/pib