Overdrive Radio

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

Year 2025 is in the rear view, just back there behind the trailer. With any luck at all, owner-operators are making good time outrunning all that happened during what was some kind of a momentous year in and around trucking. As my colleague Alex Lockie put it in his year-in-review last week just ahead of New Year celebrations, 2025 may well go down as the year when the you-know-what truly "hit the fan" in trucking: https://overdriveonline.com/15774734 Among surprises, though, was real engagement from regulators in response to longtime asks of small trucking. That's even as owner-operators' hopes for economic improvement at the beginning of 2025 with the second Trump administration went largely unrealized by the time the clock wound down on the year. Ongoing surveying of Overdrive readers shows a majority reporting income tracking along at levels either worse than or similar to those seen in the very-sluggish year 2024: https://overdriveonline.com/15774647 As of this writing, too, only just more than a third of readers are expecting 2026 to fare better on that score. Yet as this week's podcast makes clear, there are at least some reasons to be optimistic. The episode springs into 2026 with a look back at the 10 most-listened-to podcasts of 2025, near all providing trucking-market touchpoints in stories that continue to evolve, with impacts slowly developing. From the federal push for a non-domiciled CDL purge and boosted English-language proficiency enforcement to freight-rates impacts with negotiation tactics and interest-rate cuts and owners' increasingly sophisticated attention to business brass tacks, all could prove positive for owner-operator demand and bedrock income day-to-day, week-to-week as time marches on. Run back through the year with us in this week's episode, and find here a playlist featuring two honorable mentions for podcasts just outside the top 10, which start the playlist counting from No. 12 to the No. 1 most-listened-to episode of 2025. Happy New Year! Playlist link: https://soundcloud.com/overdriveradio/sets/countdown-to-kick-off-2026-the

We hope everyone had a Merry Christmas last week, and looks ahead with hope for improved conditions for the new year. To get in right frame of mind, what better than to drop back into this special edition around Christmastime 2022, when we drop in on quite an experience for Overdrive Executive Editor Alex Lockie out at the Danbury, Connecticut, stop on the Wreaths Across America convoy tour from Maine down to Arlington National Cemetery for the big central wreath-laying event. As with this year's Wreaths event, it was but one among thousands around the country at veterans' cemeteries designed to pay respect to those who've served the nation. Lockie there in 2022 met Hampton Roads Moving and Storage owner-operator Steven Meyer and his 1998 Freightliner FLD, pulling a custom wrapped Kentucky trailer of his own design and dedicated to honoring distinct individuals. Together, through Meyer's narration their histories chart a story of achievement, of sacrifice, and ultimately of elemental things about human nature. For both men in the moment, the story delivers a measure of hope for the future of humanity. Read Lockie's 2022 reporting from the event via this link: https://www.overdriveonline.com/channel-19/article/15304350/what-wreaths-across-america-means-to-trucking-and-all-of-us

Despite a record turnout in early December, trucker Noah Melton of small fleet Big P Express out of Southwest Michigan isn't 100% satisfied. Melton's one of the organizers of the Red Arrow Convoy, running 45 miles along the Red Arrow Highway near Lake Michigan every year for the past three, and growing in size and participation, that's certain. A grand total 89 trucks participated this year: https://www.facebook.com/groups/232190276570407 Yet "I want to break 100 trucks in the worst way," Melton told Overdrive Senior Editor Matt Cole in the conversation featured in this week's podcast to take you into the Christmas holiday. The Red Arrow Convoy's origins trace back to a fellow driver's efforts at its start to make a cheerful display for members of the wider community in the region, and to have a little fun among like-minded truckers -- the parade features all manner of straight trucks, tractors and trailers (even freight in some instances) dolled up with Christmas lights and other decorations offering plenty spectacle to set the stage for Christmas festivities. It's clear communities the trucks pass through along the highway have embraced the event, with many townships coordinating their official Christmas celebrations with it and "thousands of people from local communities" coming out just to see the parade, Melton said. "Some even have campfires next to the road." Imagine it: "89 trucks all lit up with Christmas lights, horns blaring and jake brakes popping," Melton described the event. "You would see grown men and grown women jumping up and down like a kid in a candy store." From the start of the event, though, a main goal has been simply to "give the drivers something fun to do before Christmas, as some of us are on the road" during the actual holiday, Melton added, yet it's "also to raise awareness to the community that truckers are just regular people like them." With the podcast, hear Cole's talk with Noah Melton about his trucking history, most of it with Big P Express, and the story of how the regional group of truck drivers having a little fun around the Christmas season quickly came to be the big undertaking that is the Red Arrow Convoy today. With plenty future plans, too. Drivers interested in participating next year can join the drivers' private group for planning purposes here: https://www.facebook.com/groups/705730534890286

"Every day had an episode like that along the way. It was just the high, and the low." --XPO driver David May, reflecting on the roller coaster of emotion hauling in the Maine-to-Arlington Naitonal Cemetery run of Wreaths Across America Off the top of the podcast, we dive right into the experience of military veteran and longtime professional driver David May, trucking out of the Buffalo, New York, area and speaking the range of emotion delivered by his 2024 participation in what is the annual effort of Wreaths Across America. That's the Maine-headquartered organization that for many years now has been built momentum across the nation, every December honoring fallen U.S. military members by laying wreaths on graves in ceremonies at military cemeteries. Trucking plays a big volunteer role in it, for certain, with wreath deliveries from Maine to points far afield, this year reaching nearly 5,600 sites, according to Wreaths Across America organizers: https://www.wreathsacrossamerica.org/Home/News/1495 The big day for the 2025 effort was this past Saturday, December 13, and for this Overdrive Radio podcast, we're marking another big haul for participating truckers and trucking companies by revisiting David May's experience as part of the 2024 convoy moving out from Maine toward Arlington National Cemetery for the big event held there annually. To give you an idea of the scale of that one, this year at Arlington, organizers noted, wreaths were placed on 265,000 individual headstones there through the work of 30,000 volunteers. That haul alone is a massive undertaking, no doubt. Honoring the memory of the fallen isn't the only aim of the Wreaths organization. Here's the goal in full: "Remember the fallen, Honor those who serve, and Teach the next generation the value of freedom." Through our conversation with David May you'll hear quite a bit of all of that -- Remember, honor, teach -- yet also a window on just what his experience of the 2024 convoy toward Arlington was like. May's hauled day-to day for XPO going back decades to when he was with Con-way Freight before the XPO buyout,. He's a past America's Road Team captain, where he first learned about Wreaths Across America in its early days. In 2024, he hauled wreaths in the convoy piloting the camouflage-wrapped “workforce heroes” truck of the road team, but it's his individual experience, the veterans met and the fallen remembered, that most stand out. That includes memorable time spent with a Vietnam veteran in-cab, and much more besides. Just a few pieces of past coverage of the Maine-Arlington convoy, and other wreaths events around the country: **2023 interview with Don Queeney, Director of Transportation for the organization: https://www.overdriveonline.com/15304674 **2022 convoy stop in Connecticut: https://overdriveonline.com/15304350 **2021 in the San Joacquin Valley, California: https://overdriveonline.com/https://www.overdriveonline.com/15286668 **2014: Trucker Vince Strupp recalls prior-years' participation in the convoy: https://www.overdriveonline.com/14887458 **2013 in Nashville, Tennessee: https://www.overdriveonline.com/14885399

As you'll hear off the top of this week's Overdrive Radio podcast, this “exit interviews” part 2 in our final run to conclude Overdrive's Trucker of the Year competition for 2025 features an all-flatbedders group. You'll hear a bit of what some call "bygone" driver-to-driver camaraderie amongst the four owner-operators featured around -- what else -- the subject of tarping. Arkansas-headquartered Scott Smith, owner-operator of Sapphire Cartage, described some new work hauling outbound to Atlanta with overlength freight. The rates are great with permits required, and lightweight, delivering fuel savings. Yet also: tarps required: "Putting on three tarps, putting three tarps' worth of bungees, taking off three tarps, folding up, putting up three tarps," he said. "Anybody got any sympathy?" Much laughter followed, of course. Also in the podcast: **West Virginia-headquartered independent George Kincaid: https://overdriveonline.com/15743659 **Longtime Kelsey's Trucking owner-operator Ron Kelsey, who hauls in a beautiful 1981 Peterbilt 359 repowered in the 1990s with a C15 Cat and working with two principal direct customers upwards of three decades: https://overdriveonline.com/15751895 **And Rufus Morris, out of North Carolina, leased to Material Logstics Management and for whom it's been an eventful year for his equipment: https://overdriveonline.com/15747142 Much like the story you heard from John Treadway last week, an eariler-than-expected in-frame reared its head with a cracked head for his 2004 Peterbilt 379. Then: more troubles rose in the following weeks and months. His advice to any aspiring owner-operator: Be ready for anything, at any moment. Tough moments at roadside can be enough to make even a seasoned veteran like Morris question himself. "I've had plenty times this year when I was like, 'Man, is it worth it?'" Morris said. But taking stock further, staring at that beautiful 2004 379, and despite all of its problems, "it's a good life," he added. "Yeah, it's worth it." Just be prepared for anything. With that something of a “final thought,” as it were, from Morris, the end is in the beginning for this edition of Overdrive Radio, full speed ahead to 2026 for these four Trucker of the Year contenders, this year's competition sponsored by Bostrom Seating, who will deliver a new seat to the winner, ultimately. Enter the Trucker of the Year competition at this link: https://overdriveonline.com/toptrucker -- we're in the process of updating the form page there for 2026, but know that all entries received before the end of 2025 will be considered for the new year's program. All of the Trucker of the Year 2025 profiles you can find at this link: https://overdriveonline.com/trucker-of-the-year

December's here, and it's time for the big push through to 2026 and opportunity a new year always brings a business owner to set goals, to lay plans and start acting on them. Yet as you'll hear in this edition of Overdrive Radio, it's also true that in so many ways the time for all of that is now, for any small trucking business owner, at any given moment. Like a football coach responding to what the opposing team throws at his own, a quarterback changing the play at the line, successful owner-operators are nothing if not masters of the art of getting prepped for the unforeseen. It's an impossible ask of anyone in some ways, but also a reality you'll hear through today's talk with four Overdrive Trucker of the Year contenders for this year's title. None less so than owner-operator John Treadway, our September Trucker of the Month. He delivered the shocking news of his pristine 1998 Peterbilt 379's October catastrophic engine failure. How might one prepare for that? Owner Treadway's long experience taught him, like others featured in this roundtable talk, the importance of the back-up plan, and not only could he afford what will ultimately be a reman Caterpillar crate engine powering the unit. The original Cat in the 1998 379 he's hopeful to rebuild with some close associates, furthermore, to in future repower his back-up power unit. That backup, a 2006 379, with plenty miles on the odometer itself, is yet another element of Treadways effective prep for the October catastrophe. It's enable him to continue serving his primary and other customers as Caterpillar works through issues with the engine replacement. His isn't the only update you'll get from owners in this podcast, where host and Overdrive Chief Editor Todd Dills put two principal questions to four owners: 1. How's business looking as we head into 2026, and have any goals set early in year 2025 been brought to fruition? 2. Reflecting on your own history trucking, what's the single best piece of advice you might deliver to new and/or aspiring owner-operators to help on the long road to success? Featured, along with Indiana-headquartered Treadway: **John Penn, our most-recent Trucker of the Month in October, hauling LTL furniture principally: https://overdriveonline.com/15770500 **Similarly LTL-focused fresh meat reefer hauler Jason Shelly, based in Pennsylvania: https://overdriveonline.com/15753418 **And two-truck dump fleet owner (with a third truck in more OTR work) Hunter Hubbard: https://overdriveonline.com/15741276 Overdrive's Trucker of the Year competition is sponsored for 2025 by Bostrom Seating -- there's a new seat on the line for the contenders. Consider this roundtable the "Exit interviews" with each ahead of announcements late this month of finalists, after the judging round. Stay tuned in the coming weeks for more featured contenders.

Off the top of the Overdrive Radio podcast this week is the voice of fuel-payments provider Wex's Vice President of Global Anti-Financial Crimes William Fitzgerald, laying out a 1 in 12,000 transaction rate for detection of fraud over the company's entire fuel-payments network. That is, 1 in every 12,000 purchases are flagged as suspiscious, potentially fraudulent, and blocked in automated fashion among its millions upon millions of fuel transactions facilitated annually. Translate that incidence to the roughly 350,000 fuel transactions National Association of Small Trucking Companies President David Owen knows move through the association's own Quality Plus fuel network any given month, and that's right at 30 transactions being held up by the system. William Fitzgerald was speaking at NASTC's annual conference to outline the evolving landscape of fuel fraud/theft for attendees and showcase tools within Wex's (and some other card providers') networks that are increasingly successful in helping carriers of all shapes and sizes eliminate fraud's impact. Along the way, too, the company's been able to reduce the rate of so-called "false positives," legimate fuel purchases held up by the card provider's systems. Fitzgerald's well aware such hold-ups can be particularly annoying, and unproductive. Illustrating the huge financial impact of stolen fuel, though, he asked this hypothetical question to a room of NASTC conference attendees: "What would be an acceptable false-positive rate in your minds?" he asked. "How many good transactions would you be OK with me stopping to prevent a bad one?" The goal is zero false positves, of course, as Wex and other card providers calibrate a variety of techs operating in the network's background to get there, in addition to more human-focused efforts aimed at education to prevent account takeovers and the like that can bring the biggest hits to a fuel buyer's bottom line. Results from ongoing efforts at Wex in particular have been good in recent months, he said. "We've got overall, over the last 10 months, a 25% reduction in losses, a 32% reduction in false positives," and a big increase in detection, too, he said. Those results he attributed largely to technical innovations in company's network, some described in part in a recent paper authored by the company you'll find at this link: https://www.wexinc.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/09/WEX-Closed-Loop-Fleet-Card-White-Paper.pdf But the human element in fraud prevention might be the biggest factor any size carrier can address to make the most gains in preventing losses, empowering themselves through self-education and passing that on to team members for those of you with more than just a single truck under your management. "We've seen the most yield" in fraud prevention, he said, "with education and empowerment." Fitzgerald described efforts of Wex to illustrate the kinds of schemes that might result in infiltration of its own backend, including simulated phishing attacks through targeted fake emails designed to get a user to provide access to their login data with a goal of compromising accounts. Wex sends such emails to its own employees on occasion to lure them in, thus serving an educational purpose in awareness. Their most "successful" such an effort? An offer of "free Taylor Swift tickets. Everybody clicked on that," Fitzgerald said. In the podcast, track through Fitzgerald's entire NASTC talk, tracking through those backend upgrades but also plenty more you can do to work with the company's team and tools in its system, like its SecureFuel solution, to prevent fuel theft. Likewise, should the worst, to work with law enforcement to apprehend the thieves. Mentioned in the podcast: **'Personal cyber hygiene' in age of social engineering hacks: https://www.overdriveonline.com/15755615 **More from NASTC's conference on insurance, ELD data: https://overdriveonline.com/15770374

This week's Overdrive Radio edition puts a wrap up our series featuring 2025 Trucker of the Year contenders with the story of Orleans, Indiana-headquartered John Penn, his one-truck business operating with authority and hauling finished furniture on multistop runs West and/or South from his home base, other brokered freight back. He's the owner of another power unit, too, that he keeps as a spare, both rigs Freightliner Cascadias he details in the podcast and in this in-depth feature about his business, where he was named the October 2025 Trucker of the Month: https://www.overdriveonline.com/trucker-of-the-year/article/15770500/trucker-of-the-month-reaps-10mpgplus-rewards-learning-growing Both Cascadias feature specs that help him achieve maximum fuel mileage -- upward of nine miles per gallon in the older unit (10-speed manual transmission) and more than 10 mpg in his current 2019 model, with the DT12 automated manual transmission. We didn't know it when he entered our Trucker of the Year competition, but he's also the newest member of Freightliner's Team Run Smart group of owner-operators sharing their own successes in various ways with their Freightliner equipment for the benefit of anyone interested. Team Run Smart hadn't yet officially intro'd him as part of the crew there when we published the above story about him. Reps confirmed he was going to be a part of it for sure, but what they didn't tell us was they'd post his official intro video to their Youtube networks that very same day: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gFyerQQX7lY Find him now at his profile page on the Team Run Smart site: https://www.freightliner.com/team-run-smart/pros/john-penn/ I'd encourage you, too, to track back through all of our Truckers of the Month and Trucker of the Year contenders for 2025 at the main page for the competition: https://overdriveonline.com/trucker-of-the-year Plenty business best practice examples there, plenty to learn from in the stories of 10 exemplary owners this year. Keep an eye out there for the 2026 competition's entry page, where you can get in the running yourself in the coming weeks. Though owner-operator Penn's modest about his success, it's clear the owner's doing quite a lot right with a very low operating ratio given his business's efficiency, and with a home life that's benefiting, too, as a result. Dive in with Penn from the very beginning, when he first got his CDL around the turn of the century, the start of a journey toward maximum trucking efficiency.

Today, a special edition of Overdrive Radio marks the federal Veterans Day holiday, commemorating the military service of so many around the United States. In the podcast, in particular, we'll honor the stories of two vets -- Army and Navy, respectively -- who are equally clear-eyed emphasizing what their service meant for their long careers in trucking business ownership. After medically retiring from the Army as an E6 Staff Sergeant following deployment to Iraq during Desert Storm trucking as convoy security, Florida-headquartered (Ocala area) owner-operator Scott Reese operates Reese Services with his own authority, utilizing a 2021 Freightliner Cascadia. Reese also runs a box truck with a driver employed for it that operates more locally. Roger Burdgette, meanwhile, is headquartered near the Savannah ports in Georgia as CEO of Podium Logistics. He's built the fleet to now 50 trucks, serving the container port but also flatbed needs of customers in the area. Both business owners happen to be beneficiaries as veterans of the SelecTrucks Freightliner-affiliated dealer network's "Proud to Serve" benefit program for veterans, offering essentially a cash credit on purchases of power units, factory-backed warranties and more at one of the now 44 SelecTrucks locations nationwide: https://www.selectrucks.com/special-offers/veterans-discount/ That program celebrates a significant milestone in its eight-year run since Proud to Serve was launched in 2017 as a way to give back to military servicemembers among SelecTrucks customers. As Daimler Trucks Remarketing President Chris Backeberg noted, the program's now delivered more than $1 million worth in savings to military vets. Each veteran's used-truck purchase comes with $6,500 back with up to two options selected from: **A down payment match **A warranty upgrade **And/or new tire purchase assistance. In addition to the discount, SelecTrucks donates $500 for each qualifying truck purchase to a charitable organization supporting veterans. Total donations have reached more than $80,000 since 2022, including a $25,000 donation this year. Said Backeberg, “We're proud to stand behind veteran entrepreneurs as they build their business. Saving these men and women over $1 million is our way of showing appreciation for their service and sacrifice.” Via the podcast, dive into conversation with Scott Reese, whose partner dealer in Jacksonville, Florida, helped him out of more than one jam in recent years. That's in addition to delivering that $6,500 discount. The dealer was particularly helpful when Reese was diagnosed with cancer some years back and had to come off the road for a time. Following Reese, Roger Burdette stresses how military service truly set him up with the self-discipline needed for a drive to entrepreneurship in trucking. The 50-truck Podium fleet isn't his first trucking-company rodeo, either, started up in 2018 after a previous fleet he grew to 30 trucks over more than a decade was sold to an interested buyer. Like Reese, he's also benefited from the SelecTrucks "Proud to Serve" discount, with around 70% of his fleet procured from the dealer. Both men offer recognition for the importance of Veterans Day for the country, and for them specifically, too. Roger Burdette personally remember those who gave much more than himself, as he put it, when the day rolls around each Fall. "When it rolls around I really think about those who had even more sacrifice than we did," he said. "There's a different day for that," he knows. Yet "there's different degrees of sacrifice, and that's huge."

This week's edition of Overdrive Radio drops into our awards ceremony October 23, 2025, with four Small Fleet Champs -- the owners of Clifford Hay Inc., Thomasville Funiture Xpress, Turnage & Sons, and Oberman Logistics all on hand for the event in Nashville, Tennessee. Before the dinnertime program got started that fine Thursday evening, Overdrive editor Todd Dills had the chance to sit down with all of the owners, with results in this wide-raning roundtable talk around what TFX co-owner Scott Denmark pointed out was more of a rectangular table in fact. Be that as it may, the pair of Scotts (Scott Cruthis is Denmark's co-owner) is joined here by Clifford Hay and Wes Oberman, likewise Robbie Turnage, all swapping stories and biz advice in response to two principal questions: 1. What's been your biggest business challenge in recent years, and how are you working to overcome it? 2. What's the best piece of advice you might give an aspiring small fleet owner? Topics range across matters of trucking insurance hikes, investment to handle tire maintenance in-house for sizable savings and no small number of breakdown headaches and towing horror stories met head-on. Both Cruthis and Turnage own their own fifth-wheel tow hooks, giving the fleets capability to rescue a rig sidelined without getting dinged with a huge tow bill (and saving on maintenance by doing necessary work in-house,too). Turnage told the story of a near $15K tow bill for a grand total of four miles of towing for a job the tow company claimed required a rotator and a hefty "EPA clean-up fee." Turned out the tow operator didn't even own a rotator and certainly didn't use one for this particular job. Turnage found it out when he showed up in Pennsylvania with an appointment to pick his truck up, and the tow operator put him off and put him off for hours before finally relinquishing the equipment. How'd he get out of that one? Hear more about it in the podcast, along with a variety of other war stories from each of the individual owners. All are certainly doing a lot right, and with similarities amongst each other in many respects, though their operations couldn't be more different. Turnage and Sons operates all company-owned equipment, hauling milk in big tankers. Thomasville Furniture Xpress run less-than truckload -- yes, furniture, with a mix company and owner-operator equipment. Oberman Logistics is all owner-operator, mostly platform freight run through brokerage partners, and Clifford Hay up in New York has six owned trucks and probably couldn't be more diverse in terms of trailers owned and utilized for a wide variety of freight. Along the way, hear Overdrive's Dills introduce each fleet from the stage, and plenty advice from the champs about preparing to make any big move from one truck to many. There's also an anecdote about a 579 that gets misstated as a vintage, just 1-million-mile Pete 359 -- with plenty of surprise, laughter and obvious camaraderie amongst the owners assembled, that's certain. A lot to glean from the long careers of these five, and here's big congrats to all four and a note of thanks for joining us and event sponsor NASTC in the effort. More about the finalists and the winners: https://www.overdriveonline.com/small-fleet-champ/article/15770012/overdrives-2025-small-fleet-champs-tfx-oberman-come-out-on-top NASTC named its America's Best Drivers, Best Broker and Transportation Ambassadors at the conference as well, detail here: https://www.overdriveonline.com/life/article/15770618/nastcs-americas-best-drivers-team-new-ambassadors-named-for-2025

"Be on-time, put out the extra effort. ... No matter what you're going to be in life, be the best." --Owner-operator John Treadway on his motivation through the years Raised to “be the best” at whatever he did, owner-operator John Treadway is clearly working hard to achieve that lofty goal with his one-truck business. It's a two-truck business, actually, with Treadway trucking with his own authority mostly in a stunningly beautiful 1998 Peterbilt 379 he calls "Teal Appeal," but with a 2006-model Pete kept as a spare to run in winter, and as a failsafe to serve his central customer. Treadway was Overdrive's Trucker of the Month for September, featured in this story by Senior Editor Matt Cole, whose long talk with Treadway makes up the bulk of this week's podcast: https://overdriveonline.com/15767883 Owner-operator John Treadway hauls flowers year-round for a greenhouse operation near his base in Kokomo, Indiana, with his Tway (prounced TEE-Way) Rose Transport, now with authority for going on a decade after some decades more leased to other companies. His story stretches back to his start trucking with the 1990 purchase of a 1985 Kenworth Liberty Edition cabover he used to haul grain with his older brother, eventually moving on to pull flatbeds and a variety of other trailers. It's reefer work these days for the flower operation, and since we saw his tractor at MATS early this year he's put work into a 2017 Great Dane reefer to match the lines and colors of "Teal Appeal" 1998 Pete, as you'll hear in the podcast today. Yet so much of Treadway's approach to trucking he traces to the time before he ever held a steering wheel, his life built in the business on top of those be-the-best values instilled at an early age along with admiration of truck drivers whose names he may have never known but from whom he garnered examples to which to aspire. Along with business brass tacks he keeps early lessons learned ever at the front his mind about what it takes to build success as a one-truck owner, and to have a little fun along the way. "One of my good friends told me a long, long time ago, 'To be an owner-operator, that's a 364-day-a year job,'" Treadway said. "You're driving through the day, you're hauling the loads, but it doesn't stop. The weekend comes, and you've got repairs to do, and then on top of that if you want to add a piece of chrome or something, you have to try to fit all that in. There's just a grind to it. You've just gotta keep grinding, and keep moving forward." Read about all of our 2025 Truckers of the Month, contenders for the annual prize of a Bostrom seat from Trucker of the Year sponsor Commercial Vehicle Group and a custom replica of the winner's tractor: https://overdriveonline.com/trucker-of-the-year Also in the podcast: Shout to Overdrive's Small Fleet Champs announced Thursday, October 23, at the National Association of Small Trucking Companies' annual conference in Nashville with fellow finalists on hand with the hundreds assembled for the opening night dinner and program: https://www.overdriveonline.com/small-fleet-champ/article/15770012/overdrives-2025-small-fleet-champs-tfx-oberman-come-out-on-top Keep tuned for a roundtable talk with all in attendance conducted just ahead of the event in a near-future Overdrive Radio edition. No shortage of wisdom shared amongst this group, no doubt.

This week's edition of the Overdrive Radio podcast features the semi-annual ATBS owner-operator income benchmarking session delivered in late September by ATBS Vice President Mike Hosted. The audio contains the full presentation, but know that there's a video version accessible via the Youtube version at this link: https://youtu.be/CYxCHAb1RnY To follow along with the audio here, download a bevy of detailed slides charting cost, revenue and income trends among ATBS's tens of thousands of owner-operator clientele at this link: https://overdriveonline.com/15769723 There's plenty in the way of trends analysis showing where we've been up to the present moment in the wider freight economy in Hosted's talk. Since the COVD run-up in freight and rates, though, we suspect most owner-operators know where that's gone. Hosted put it pretty plainly, looking at contract freight volumes and rates at a certain point in the presentation that you'll hear. "Now we've been contractingi in frieght volume for the last two and a half years," he said. It's been about the longest contraction (though not always happening quickly these last years) that he and many others have ever seen. There's hope in some ways for a turnaround, given what he called a measure of stability freight-volume-wise seen in some of the numbers lately. Likewise, hopes for a hit to trucking capacity via the Trump administration's foreign-domiciled drver credentialing rule changes -- or another factor. Not that Hosted plays much of the old prognosticating game this time around. "I keep hearing middle of next year, second half of next year," he said, but "i've been hearing that for three years now. I'm tired of saying that. I don't know when things are going to get better," fundamentally. Control what you can control, he added, to rein in costs and keep an eye on generating revenue above and beyond them. Hosted has made an effort in recent times to emphasize what's know as contribution margin, a measure of total revenues incoming minus variable costs incurred. That'd be your fuel costs, tires, maintenance generally, anything you spend to keep the equipment moving down the road to generate that revenue. The contribution margin figure can be used monthly or weekly to help determine just when you've met your fixed costs for the same period. Fixed costs are incurred at time intervals and are what they're called in the very name – fixed, predictable. Know your contribution margin as closely as possible and you can, on an ongoing basis, know when you've met your fixed costs for a given month, for instance, and all the contribution margin earned thereafter during that period is pure profit. "The important thing is when you hit that fixed cost, your profit per mile is through the roof," he said. Owner-operators think about costs, revenues and profit in so many ways, but Hosted wagers this approach could help in choosing freight, and motivating an owner-op to strike when the iron is hot, as it were, not in the freight market broadly but in the run of your own day-to-day business. ATBS is coproducer of Overdrive's Partners in Business, which you can access via this link: https://overdriveonline.com/pib The owner-operator business services provider is accessible via its website: https://atbs.com

Off the top of this week's Overdrive Radio episode one thing's clear. Longtime Alaska-based truck driver Lisa Kelly is now a business owner. That's right, in the very long time since Overdrive editor Todd Dills last spoke to her (though not the last time you read about her in Overdrive), she bought a 2019 Peterbilt 389 and leased on with a company to work Alaska's Dalton Highway (the "Haul Road," as its known): https://www.overdriveonline.com/channel-19/article/14874578/haul-road-to-the-himalayas-interviewing-lisa-kelly It's also the 389 she's hoping to earn money enough to either repair or replace as shown in episode 1 of the brand-new season of the History Channel's "Ice Road Truckers" franchise, back after a long hiatus. Owner-operator Kelly's got long history with the show, part of the first seasons that were filmed in Alaska after it got its start along routes partially on frozen lakes in far northern Manitoba in 2007. She couldn't talk publicly about the fleet she's leased to today, per an agreement with the owner when she decided to go back to IRT, yet she was willing to share her own business's name. "I'm Arctic Fox Trucking," she said, and yeah, there's a story there. "Back in the day when we were filming in Alaska, Season Three," she said, the Arctic Fox moniker was bestowed upon her by a young woman among the show's producers, one among many nicknames passed around for cast and crew on the show. "She thought it would be funny," Kelly added, yet "I didn't get it" at first. Finally, though, she did, perhaps when Esquire magazine dubbed her the "sexiest trucker alive" in a headline back in 2010, coupled with photos of Kelly and the Kenworth she drove for well-known Alaska-headquartered Carlile Transportation. For all such attention she got back in those days, it was another quality that stood out perhaps more prominently -- a no-nonsense attitude toward the work of trucking. It all ended with her in a role as something of a de facto ambassador to the world for North American hauling. What's life been like for her since? Catch plenty more about all of that, including a good bit of time away from the road before buying that Peterbilt, in the podcast. The current "Ice Road Truckers" season -- find two episodes available for streaming today via this link: https://www.history.com/shows/ice-road-truckers -- features a cast of two other haulers with Kelly working for Operations Manager Bill Dahn's Muskie Creek Ltd. company, hauling north on six weeks' worth of winter roads to communities otherwise cut off from land routes. The first episodes also features Harris and Sons Transportation owner and operator Shaun Harris and his sons Riley and Zach, as they survey ice that just doesn't seem to be firming up fast as usual, with the work piling up for the season west in Saskatchewan. As always for the reality-TV franchise, there's plenty drama in those first couple episodes, offering an entertaining window into a brand of trucking that's certainly more man v. nature than most. In the podcast, drop into Kelly's story of how she came to truck ownership some years after the end of the "Ice Road Truckers" original run, as the owner-operator takes us back to her time as a Carlile Trasportation company driver, then all that's happened since. Short version, as it were, of a long, long story. "A lot happened, and nothing happened," she laughed, to start it off.

No news has been bigger in trucking this year than the DOT's announcement Friday, September 26, of changes to the rules around non-domiciled CDL issuance, effective now: https://www.overdriveonline.com/regulations/article/15767991/fmcsa-to-force-nearly-200k-nondomiciled-cdl-holders-out-of-trucking New restrictions on issuance hold potential to limit foreign-domiciled CDL drivers' ability to work OTR in the U.S. The influx of asylum seekers into the country in recent years has meant a lot of those asylum seekers ended up getting those non-domiciled CDLs. Going forward, they won't, unless they have an employer-sponsored visa for temporary work in the United States. The same day DOT announced the changes, likewise initial results from its ongoing audit of state CDL programs around non-domciled CDL issuance, our own Matt Cole was out at the Guilty by Association Truck Show in Joplin, Missouri, where he reported from a sort of listening session hosted at the event by the Owner-Operator Independent Drivers Association and featuring questions and commentary from owner-operators in attendance. Responses came from FMCSA's own Senior Policy Advisor Michael Hampton. This week's episode features a good near-hour's worth of audio from the session, and applause lines weren't hard to come by -- rare for a regulatory session, that's certain. One came fairly early on in response to a commenting owner-operator's contention that, as was noted by many Overdrive readers earlier this year, maybe a non-domiciled CDL shouldn't even exist, particularly as an option for a non-immigrant in the country with temporary status: https://www.overdriveonline.com/15747114 Perhaps the biggest applause line, though, came when FMCSA's own Michael Hampton contended that more hours of service flexibility would result in better safety, as the agency readies two studies of flexibility enhancements we highlighted two weeks back here on the podcast: https://www.overdriveonline.com/15755974 Hampton urged truckers to participate in those studies when they get rolling -- the agency will need data to help it get further changes to the split-sleeper rules, and/or a 14-hour clock pause button, across the finish line in future. Participation's going to be paramount to analyzing safety impacts and, with any luck, truly showing that Hampton in his contention is in fact correct. As also mentioned in the podcast: **Big congrats to Overdrive's four 2025 Small Fleet Champ finalists! Recent announcement: https://overdriveonline.com/15768558 **DOT OIG's audit of oversight of CDL skills testing and training: https://overdriveonline.com/15755980 (second brief down the page)

One of the trucking industry's biggest events, the biennial Guilty by Association Truck Show at 4 State Trucks in Joplin, Missouri, is officially under way at Exit 4 off I-44. With hundreds of trucks in attendance (organizers expect 800+ to participate in the Saturday night convoy), the massive show sprawls across multiple businesses, including 4 State Trucks itself, the Joplin 44 Petro and Pilot truck stops across state highway 43, and more. No matter what your taste in trucks is, you're certain to find what you like on display. There's no shortage of antiques, cabovers, Peterbilts, Kenworths and everything in between. Most of the trucks are no doubt workers, but there are also some true showpieces on display: https://www.overdriveonline.com/custom-rigs/podcast/15767972/guilty-by-association-truck-show-under-way-in-joplin In addition to the beautiful iron exhibited, there's plenty to do around the show, including big-rig burnouts, a truck and tractor pull, concerts, Trucker Olympics and more. Friday morning, officials from the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration were on hand for a Q&A with attendees. See more from that next week. For now, drop into this Overdrive Radio conversation with Overdrive Senior Editor Matt Cole, on hand covering the show after a round of rough weather had participants hard at work day 1 Thursday, September 26. As noted in the show: **The big news from DOT around non-domiciled CDL issuance to foreign drivers: https://www.overdriveonline.com/15767991 **David Foster's 2005 W900L as pictured way back in 2017 (with rainbow): https://www.overdriveonline.com/custom-rigs/article/14891552/dave-fosters-2005-kenworth-w900l **Enter Overdrive's Pride & Polish by October 1 to compete in our own virtual truck show: https://www.overdriveonline.com/page/2025-pp

How might truckers get back a measure of flexibility in the hours of service rules, such as that enjoyed by so many owner-operators of past generations? That is, the ability to split the 10-hour required rest period into two periods of any length they want. That's the option favored by a whopping 88% of readers who responded to Overdrive polling around the subject this time last year, with results published earlier in the year showing most readers wanted the ability just to split as they saw fit, fundamentally. Since the 14-hour duty window came into play more than two decades ago, well before the time of electronic logging device mandate's implementation in 2017, greater duty-window and/or rest period flexibility has been owner-operators' cardinal ask of regulators when it comes to the hours of service. After trucker appreciation week last week, we might see a path forward to it. In this Overdrive Radio edition, Chief Editor Todd Dills and Matt Cole break down the details of the DOT and FMCSA's announcement to start truck appreciation week last week of two proposed pilot programs to fully test two different options for split flexibility. It's not often we start the annual appreciation week with something other than a free soda at a truck stop or other deal from a vendor or supplier to write about. Yet that was the case for Cole last week Monday, when DOT announced formal proposals to conduct those safety-efficacy studies. One's the split-as-you-see fit option of up to 5/5-hour sleeper splits, the other a daily up-to-three-hour pause button, spot to speak, for the 14-hour clock. The news wasn't entirely unexpected, nontheless. The formal proposals had been teased back in June as part of what the DOT called a “Pro Trucker” package of efforts. The formal proposals open up a comment period on how regulators might set up and conduct the programs, each of which will be open to more than 250 drivers to participate: https://www.overdriveonline.com/hours-of-service/article/15755537/what-fmcsas-hoursofservice-flexibility-pilot-programs-could-look-like We're certainly months out from interested participants being able to apply to take part, and given each test could take years to bring to fruition, it could be quite some time before any subsequent regulatory action is taken. That is, unless another federal body pushes the ball more quickly forward, as Cole puts it in the podcast, and "Congress were to get involved." Absent Congressional directive to take regulatory action, further hours flexibilities for all drivers aren't likely in the cards before the next decade rolls around after these studies conclude -- depending on results, of course. That timeline takes us into whatever administration follows the current one. "Personally I don't see this as necessarily a partisan issue," said Cole. "If a Democratic Administration were to come in" come 2029, he felt FMCSA wouldn't be likely to wholesale abandon work put into potential new flexibilities. After all, some of groundwork for the 2020 split-sleeper enhancements was put in under the Obama administration. If these two studies show positive or even neutral safety impacts for participating truckers, it might really get things moving toward change for the next administration's FMCSA. Where to read and comment on the proposals, through mid-November: **Split-sleeper program: https://www.regulations.gov/document/FMCSA-2025-0193-0001 **Split-duty program: https://www.regulations.gov/document/FMCSA-2025-0194-0001 More on the 2020 split-sleeper change, which itself offered a boost in duty-pause and split flexibility: https://www.overdriveonline.com/partners-in-business/safety-compliance/video/15737159/significant-hos-change-fmcsas-2020-splitsleeper-provisions

This week on the podcast, the voices of two semi-finalists for Overdrive's 2025 Small Fleet Champ award: First, Robbie and Levi Turnage of Mississippi-headquartered tanker fleet Turnage and Sons, LLC. They're respectively fourth- and fifth-generation milk haulers who've made good on a business with a stable of dairymen in the region specializing in organic milk over two decades of so Robbie's grown the fleet from just a single truck, following in the footsteps his father, grandfather and great grandfather before him -- the hands-on nature of each successive generation's training and involvement in the shop, behind the wheel, and everything else that goes along with running a trucking business have no doubt contributed to the family business' longevity, with 19-year-old Levi now fully entrenched as well. In the podcast, you'll hear the Turnages in conversation with Overdrive's own Long Haul Paul Marhoefer in the cab of Levi's 2005 Peterbilt 379 "Big Red" parked up in March at the Mid-America Trucking Show. Marhoefer wrote about the pair in a story published in July you can read here: https://www.overdriveonline.com/overdrive-extra/article/15751311/five-generations-trucking-the-turnage-familys-longevity-secret Catch some pictures there of Big Red, too, which placed second in its class at the MATS show. Stay tuned for more reporting on the Small Fleet Champ contender in the coming weeks. Also in the podcast, fellow semi-finalist MRL Transport owner Mark Ledford, who founded and grew Red Baron Transportation to 35 trucks over 15 years starting in the early part of the decade before selling out and restarting with just one truck in 2019 as MRL. That story aired just last week at https://www.overdriveonline.com/small-fleet-champ/article/15753736/mark-ledfords-mrl-transport-master-class-in-trucking-rightsizing He's up to five trucks now, with four drivers employed, and similarly gets his hands dirty behind the wheel himself, a fact key to both maintaining customer relationships spanning back decades now but also inking new business, as he tells in the podcast. Here, he takes even farther back to his origins in trucking working a dock in the 1980s, then his first OTR driving experience with a team operation. On his first run from North Carolina out to California his co-driver woke him up by turning the rig on its side in the middle of the night, memorably leaving Mark to climb out of a window and onto the cab's side, now upright, unable to find his glasses to sharpen the blurry lights all around him. Needless to say, as he notes in the podcast, he never would run team again. Meet all Overdrive's 2025 Small Fleet Champ semi-finalists and read more about them through this month via https://overdriveonline.com/small-fleet-champ Two Champs will be honored along with two fellow semi-finalists at Championship sponsor NASTC's annual conference October 23-25 in Nashville. More about NASTC: https://nastc.com

"I want to honor my wife and her being the 'woman behind the man behind the wheel,' which is a high calling. Our first date ... was the day I bought that 1997 W9, so she didn't know what she was getting into." --August Trucker of the Month Jason Shelly Jason Shelly starts this Part 2 of a series of Overdrive Radio episodes featuring the owner-operator with a tribute to Renita Shelly, who's been Shelly's "biggest fan," as she once told him, since the very start of his business. The truck he invokes in the quote up top and in the podcast is the very first one he purchased, when he was a company driver for Horseless Carriage Carriers in the 1990s and thinking he'd be able to lease on with the car hauler. The fact that he didn't, though, as he told in Part 1, set him off on a journey to a long-term customer and a business that has benefited from all manner of family support, including Renita's, through the years. He's striven to pay it forward in all sorts of ways, and does so here of a fashion with his emphasis on that support, key to many a truck owner-operator's success. His longtime owner-operator father, also pictured in the cover assemblage for this episode, is intimately involved in the accounting/bookkeeping and other aspects of Shelly's one-truck business, including recent work reburshing the 2017 53-foot Great Dane reefer trailer also pictured. But it's Renita he emphasizes most for all manner of sometimes intangible impacts that have nonetheless been a lynchpin of his long-term success. "It's not an easy life, schedule-wise, and just the ups and downs. And at a certain point, she knew I wasn't going to be home until she saw the whites in my eyes, because anything can happen between here and there," he said. And when it did, "she's just been so patient, so understanding." Going into the "second half of my career," he said, he's making a conscious effort to be more accommodating, too, remedy for all those times that "something or other happens at home and I'm 400 or 700 miles down the road and headed the wrong direction," which the "woman behind the man behind the wheel" bears on her own. Shelly referenced the old trucking song there. (We had a podcast episode put together by Max Heine about that one back several years ago here: https://www.overdriveonline.com/15065078 ) So for this episode, a tribute, but also plenty more in the way of Shelly's advice for the next generation of owner-operators trucking. Jason and Renita Shelly are certainly making it work for their family, and diversifying investments as time goes on that ought to set them up long-term financially. Not that Jason's got a particular eye on retirement, which we'll also hear more about in today's episode. As he says, "I don't look to retire, exactly. I may slow down. But biblically, there's no verse that I've ever found in the Bible that says you retire at this age" or that age. Rather, "it says to finish strong." Read more about Shelly: https://overdriveonline.com/15753418 As mentioned in the podcast, the playlist of all the episodes featuring of our Truckers of the Month for 2025, contenders for the Overdrive Trucker of the Year award: https://soundcloud.com/overdriveradio/sets/overdrives-2025-trucker-of-the Read about all of them: https://overdriveonline.com/trucker-of-the-year

"I spend a lot of time making deliveries around here, so I have my little spots I know I can park." --Owner-operator Jason Shelly, speaking to knowledge borne of more than two decades' experience serving customers in Amish markets on the East Coast Those words were among the first owner-op Jason Shelly spoke when he talked to Overdrive Editor Todd Dills in early August attendant to reporting on his longtime one-truck business, Overdrive's 2025 Trucker of the Month for August: https://www.overdriveonline.com/trucker-of-the-year/article/15753418/trucker-of-the-month-jason-shellys-multistop-reeferhaul-niche He'd gotten parked up for the call mid-run on his regular route through the Washington, D.C., area, among the many routine destinations for his multistop reefer-haul business. It sets the scene, as it were, but also demonstrates the expertise he's built through consistency through the years, through specialization in that now 20-plus-year run loaded with fresh meat bound for those Amish markets. In this week's Overdrive Radio edition, sit in with Shelly as he tells the story of how he proved his invaluable nature to the customers starting with a partner serving a premium pork producer, then following through with consistent customer service as demand grew and grew and grew for the product over those decades. Headquartered in Pennsylvania in the town of Telford today, owner-operator Shelly's legacy is certainly a work in progress. He's got plenty of working years ahead of him, but he's been nothing if not outgoing in his efforts to lend the benefit of expertise to those coming up behind him. As experience has shown, those relationships then grow to the point of mutual business benefit, too, as the Trucker of the Month feature about Shelly last week illustrated. Owner-operator Kris Bair, a decade and more Shelly's junior, calls him a mentor, no doubt, a sounding board for ideas and questions. Bair also bought his first truck, a restored 1980 A model Kenworth, from Shelly, with private financing worked out between the both men. For the very brief moment Shelly thought he was going to be potentially getting entirely out of trucking when he and his business partner sold to a larger operation, Bair then traded that W900A back to Shelly for his longtime runner, a 2000 W900 outfitted with a custom Double Eagle big bunk. Does Shelly still have that W900A in his stable today? Dills asked the owner-operator. "I upgraded and financed it for another" young trucker looking to get his start in business. "I'm not looking to get in the finance business" by any stretch, said Shelly, "but I figure everybody needs to get started, and I had some really good guys in my life that helped me get started." He's been able to be that helping hand up the ladder, so to speak, for the generations of owners behind him "several times over the years," he added. Hear his story, in his own words, in this Part 1 of our talk with Shelly on the podcast today. Shelly's Trucker of the Month nod for August puts him in the running for the 2025 Trucker of the Year award, sponsored for the year by Bostrom Seating, who's putting a new seat on the line for the ultimate winner. You can enter your own or nominate another deserving business for the award at https://OverdriveOnline.com/toptrucker.

This week's Overdrive Radio podcast is a re-air for owner-operators and other truckers on the occasion of the 2025 Commercial Vehicle Safety Alliance Brake Safety Week inspection blitz. Get over to OverdriveOnline.com for an updated list of our Top 10 toughest states for brakes violations, to get a bit of a clue into where you might expect inspectors' scrutiny of braking systems to be most intense this coming week: https://www.overdriveonline.com/csas-data-trail/article/15753592/10-toughest-states-for-truck-brake-inspections-as-blitz-arrives Brake Safety Week runs August 24-31, and along with reporting around brake-system inspections there for this episode we revisit a talk with Fleet Safety Services' Jeff Davis delivered at the 2023 annual conference of the National Association of Small Trucking Companies. Davis offered time-honored ways fleets and owner-operators can avoid the inspection to start with. Even in an inspection-blitz week like this one, fundamentals still apply. And keeping on top of maintenance -- particularly with regard to lights -- is a big part of it, but there's more to it than that. So we'll just let the tape roll on the past episode this week. Keep in mind it was released ahead of the Spring 2024 Roadcheck event, initially. There are plenty references to that now-bygone inspection blitz event throughout, but nonetheless plenty to chew on from Davis. More brakes-related resources at OverdriveOnline.com/15753592

This week on the podcast we're diving into the trends uncovered in the July report authored by our own Alex Lockie documenting the rise of the so-called “non-domiciled CDL” in recent years in the U.S. It's a kind of license that many states can and do issue to those in the States from other countries and with temporary work authorization. If you haven't downloaded our report for yourself as of yet, it's available via this link: https://overdriveonline.com/15750917 Lockie painstakingly gathered non-domiciled CDL issuance data from most states in the nation, and put it all in a single, 20-plus-page report that's available now, even as federal officials work to begin and complete their own review of such CDL-issue practices. Context for it? As of but a year ago, very few around trucking had even heard the "non-domiciled CDL" term. That includes Raman Dhillon, head of the North American Punjabi Trucking Association, who tells his story in part in this episode. "I learned in the last seven, eight months or so" that such a license existed, he said. At once, as our own Alex Lockie reported in conversation with Dhillon in June, he could see the influx of people into trucking throughout the pandemic period, and continued issues on the CDL training front with fly-by-night schools rushing people into work behind the wheel: https://overdriveonline.com/15748790 The latter -- the inadequate CDL training issue -- is something he had personal experience with in years past, making it among principal issues for which he continues to advocates a fix. Personally, he's heartened to see the recent federal attention to CDL issuance practices broadly speaking, and non-domiciled CDL issuance in particular. "It's not only a trucking issue," as Dhillon has it. "It's a national security issue. A person crosses the border. Within a couple of months they get their work permit, and within the next month they get their [commercial] license." More time, more training, more vetting, he said, is certainly in order for all kinds of reasons. In the podcast, Dhillon walks back through his own experience immigrating to the U.S. in the early-1990s after his father drove truck in Indian military as he was growing up, through to establishing the Primelink Express trucking company with family and other close trucking associates, then the NAPTA association, in 2018, in the wake of advocacy ahead of the ELD mandate. NAPTA isn't just for Punjabi-Americans, though, as you'll hear. It's set up for any trucking company owner or operator with discount buying groups for fuel, tires, and other parts, likewise back-office support services and more. Dive into the story today with both Raman Dhillon and Overdrive Executive Editor Alex Lockie, who chronicles just how he came to author the 20-page report documenting non-domiciled CDL issuance in most states around the nation. If you haven't read the report yet, go give it a whirl: https://overdriveonline.com/15750917 As Alex Lockie puts it in the podcast, "i look at it as just kind of a factual framework," he said. "We have maps in the report. ... We have a detailed write-up of every single state and what they told me. Look at your state. See where your state is on this." You might just be surprised by what you find.

This week on the Overdrive Radio podcast, another entry in our 2025 Trucker of the Year competition: https://overdriveonline.com/trucker-of-the-year You may have seen Matt Cole's feature a couple weeks back now about longtime independent Ron Kelsey, who's achieved something of an "owner-operator holy grail," as it were, trucking for decades now in a 1981 Peterbilt 359 and hauling direct freight for customers that date back three decades for the owner: https://overdriveonline.com/15751895 Kelsey's recent-history experience, too, stands as testament to the bedrock value of direct-freight relationships when the proverbial you-know-what hits the fan. With a "freight recession" ballyhooed by prognosticators time and again over the last three years, and spot rates down over the same period, Matt Cole asked Kelsey how he'd fared through tough times of these recent years. "I really don't notice a change," Kelsey said, on the ground with his two principal customers. "I'm not No. 1 anymore" among independents hauling for them, given as he's progressed in his career he's not quite as consistently over-the-road as he was in past years. Yet general freight slowdowns he hasn't noticed. "I work when I want to work," and the loads are plentiful, always something availble, loading pipe outbound from the Phoenix and most often steel on the return. Invoiced, customers pay within days, too. "I'm very fortunate," he added, but there's more to his business prowess than just following the tides of fate, as you'll hear in the podcast. He's well set-up to weather anything that comes, ultimately, and has come a long way himself from the young man who would end up inking a deal for his 1981 Pete after two-stepping with the owner way back in 1984. He's hauled with it ever since, getting his authority 10 years later and building what the Kelsey's Trucking business remains to this day. Hear his story in his words in today's episode, starting like many an owner-operator in a straight truck in vocational operations before a trial by fire over the road in the late 1970s. Nominate your own or another deserving owner-operator business for the 2025 Trucker of the Year award via this link: https://overdriveonline.com/toptrucker

This week's edition of Overdrive Radio takes a deeper dive into Overdrive's relatively new Load Profit Analyzer tool: https://overdriveonline.com/load-analyzer Go there and pull up the analyzer to follow along with this detailed walk-through with owner-operator business coach and longtime Overdrive contributor Gary Buchs. As regular readers will likely recall from when it was introduced late in 2024, the Analyzer was in part inspired by Buchs' own efforts at individual load profit analysis, tracing back to his decades as owner-operator himself. (Gary retired from the road in 2019, yet continues private efforts as a mentor/business coach to other owner-operators.) I brought Gary on to talk us through a few divergent load examples in hopes that more owner-operators in the audience might benefit from what is in essence a fairly simple calculator, but might also be a powerful personal accountability tool for business performance long-term. So, with this episode, get to a spot where you can pull out the mobile device or laptop and go to https://OverdriveOnline.com/load-analyzer We'll run through the three cost-input fields you see there, namely: **Fixed cost per day under load **Salary per day under load and **Variable cost per mile Then analyze results for three different loads all originating in Dallas with offers at wildly different rates: $2.30, $3, and a whopping $10/mile on a short haul. When it comes to profits, though, results from the analyzer might be surprising if you closely take into consideration the impacts of time spent on each load. Set up with all those different cost metrics, considering your contribution to your home budget's needs in the salary on the expense side of the equation, fundamentally the analyzer is set up to help you do that with a close eye on business profits. There are always dozens of variables at play in load selection and post-delivery analysis, but engaging with your own numbers with the tool we hope helps yield better profit results over time, as Gary likes to say, as you "touch those numbers" routinely. Give it a whirl with today's podcast. More from Gary on the topic of negotiations in this past Overdrive Radio edition: https://www.overdriveonline.com/15736582

Track back through last week's big trucking-issues hearing convened in Senate Commerce's Subcommittee on Transportation, Freight, Pipelines and Safety to work through some of the pressing issues ahead of the next highway bill, due in 2026. Featured trucking witnesses before the subcommittee and their full written testimonies: **Owner-Operator Independent Drivers Association Executive Vice President Lewie Pugh: https://www.commerce.senate.gov/services/files/9B1EF7F2-DB30-4A08-9844-DC9F237282D5 **American Trucking Associations leader Chris Spear: https://www.commerce.senate.gov/services/files/FA35E84B-5DB2-4784-AD1F-0F0BD0065EC8 **Teamsters Union president Sean O'Brien: https://www.commerce.senate.gov/services/files/1B7508C5-A25B-4ACF-94BD-EBC2F83711FA In the podcast, featuring audio from the hearing, witnesses debate driverless or otherwise automated truck development and regulation, likewise automation's role in safety, which regular Overdrive readers may have caught also in the initial report from the hearing last week: https://overdriveonline.com/15751214 You'll hear about the huge rise in cargo theft the subcommittee also addressed in a hearing early in the year, aided and abetted by identity theft and double brokering and other forms of fraud in freight markets increasingly plied by organized rings. You'll hear about other techs like automatic emergency braking, some mention of flexibiltiies in the hours of service, about ELDs, unauthorized immigration and credentials fraud with practices like CDLs illegally procured for cash. What you won't hear is any mention of the term "non-domiciled CDL," though in response to a question from Senator Bernie Moreno (Republican of Ohio), Teamsters President O'Brien referenced carriers recruiting drivers for temporary work in the U.S. from overseas. The non-domiciled CDL is a credential that U.S. states can issue to such drivers, who don't have permanent immigration status in the U.S. but rather hold temporary work authorization. Some states don't issue these CDLs, and many others haven't been issuing non-domciled CDLs this way for very long, but the practice has certainly taken off over the last several years. Overdrive's own Alex Lockie's last-week-released research showed recent-years growth in states all around the nation with a 50-state accounting -- download the 20-page report via this link: https://overdriveonline.com/15750917 There's a whole lot more than just CDL issuance issues to chew on when it comes the next highway bill, of course. In this week's podcast, we let the tape roll on the hearing. Catch your elected representatives and the associations that represent trucking business owners and operators in action, interrogating a wide array of trucking and broader transportation issues.

"Hard to keep something nice if you're in the hopper world. There's dust, gravel, mud, farms, small driveways. ..." --Little Z Transport owner-operator Lucas Zach, Gilman, Wisconsin Despite the difficulty, owner-operator Zach keeps his 2017 Peterbilt 389 and matching Timpte hopper pristine as can possibly be. He's put quite a lot of custom work into it with shop and fleet partners to cut a fine picture on those duty gravel roads in and out of farm operations, keeping his father's Tim Zach Trucking business's customer base rocking and rolling alongside his own operation. Catch a few views of the rig with Harlan Martin's 2023 389, too, via https://overdriveonline.com/15751123 In this week's edition of Overdrive Radio, Zach details the lengths to which he's gone in recent times to keep the 2017 out of the danger of those rock chips, dust and dirt with the story of a load of corn he picked up on a farm in South Dakota. Arriving for the load, the farm's owner urged him to follow the owner's pickup down a gravel and dirt road. "We just gotta go up the road about five miles," the farmer said. Zach continued the story: "He made it five miles up the road and I was only doing 10-15 mph, and he's long ahead of me doing 50 mph in his truck. ... He takes a right and goes another five miles to the east, then there's another five miles. ..." All told, Zach traversed 18 miles' worth of gravel to get to the load point, slow and slower, as it were. "He's anxious to get me loaded," he said, yet "here I am trying not to rock-chip everything all up." Hear much more from Zach about the truck and his operation in the podcast, along with a fellow owner-operator likewise keeping family truck-ownership traditions alive in Wisconsin. Little Brothers Transport owner Harlan Martin was just 22 years old when we spoke to both he and Lucas Zach at the Crossroads Truck Meet in Missouri in May: https://www.overdriveonline.com/15745021 Martin's the youngest of three co-owner brothers in Little Brothers Transport, with which owner-op Zach's business contracts on occasion to haul cattle, supplementing LB's 13 running units (with some owner-operators leased on) and about twice as many trailers of a variety of types to serve a diverse and growing customer base, long the province of many a successful small fleet. Speaking of successful small fleets, for the small fleet owners among you time is running out to enter to compete in Ovedrive's 2025 Small Fleet Championship, open to companies of 3 to 30 trucks this year and sponsored again by the great folks at the National Association of Small Trucking Companies – for four finalist fleets there's a trip to the late-October annual NASTC conference in Nashville on the line, likewise the Small Fleet Champ title belt in two categories. Get your entries in by July 31 via this link: https://overdriveonline.com/2025sfc

Overdrive's June Trucker of the Month Scott Smith, owner-operator of Sapphire Cartage out of Searcy, Arkansas, has a couple of secret weapons when it comes to bookkeeping, tax accounting and business analysis. The first is his wife, Stephanie, who after time in the health care field and then with Scott rearing four young children, found new work Scott Smith describes in this week's edition of Overdrive Radio. Stephanie's built accounting expertise as support for a small-biz accounting software system, and her expert handling of the Sapphire Cartage back office has taken that load off of the independent. The second of those secret weapons regular readers encountered in the June 30 feature detailing Smith's history trucking: https://www.overdriveonline.com/trucker-of-the-year/article/15749527/trucker-of-the-month-bets-on-equipment-diversity-as-failsafe Namely, it's a custom spreadsheet the owner-operator built himself to effectively analyze per-ton rates in the hopper-bottom freight business when it comes to load offers. But not only that -- it's his go-to tool for week-to-week business performance as well. As was detailed in the story, Smith uses the spreadsheet to set revenues against not only hard costs like those for fuel but his weekly home needs, his own personal driver salary, if you will. What he needs to contribute to household take-home figures as an expense there, on a weekly basis. What he describes in the podcast brings to mind in some ways Overdrive's own Load Profit Analyzer tool you can access at any time to game out rate scenarios or compare load offers: https://overdriveonline.com/load-analyzer With that tool, using your own fixed cost per day, variable cost per mile and that self-pay salary figure per day to then compare as many loads as you like for profit potential, you too can set those driver-pay needs to be calculated on the expense side of the profit analysis. For June Trucker of the Month Scott Smith, though, it's his own system that accounts for all of it -- indeed a now not-so-secret weapon we'd wager many owners out there might do well to emulate in whatever form works best for the operation. In the podcast, hear more about Smith's operation and history trucking from the start, back in the early 2010s when like many out there he just happened into a love for the road via work in a different sector than the hopper- and flatbed-hauling work he does today. Nominate your own or another business to contend, like Smith, for Overdrive's 2025 Trucker of the Year award: https://overdriveonline.com/toptrucker Read about all of our 2025 Truckers of the Month via https://overdriveonline.com/trucker-of-the-year

"Remember to shake a stranger's hand. You might accidentally make a new friend." --Bill Weaver It's been a heavy week amid the Independence Day goings-on, trucking news and all the rest, but start this Overdrive Radio episode with a song with a whole lot of joy, sure to get the spirits up, as it's writer, singer and performer -- the great Bill Weaver -- told the tale of its origins in the always-headed-home aspects of work OTR, since the moment he conceived it: “I'm Rollin'.”: https://www.overdriveonline.com/14889662 Yet it also brings a bit of a tear to the eye this week. Bill Weaver passed away Monday, June 30. For "Long Haul Paul" Marhoefer, the news came by way of a mutual friend, Tony Justice, who shared his own recollections of Bill. Justice's words I know ring out for so many who knew Weaver: “I can't even begin to find the words to express what he meant to me,” Justice said. “Best word would simply be friend, family kinda friend, my best friend. ... Hard telling the miles me and ol' Bill covered while trucking and talking on the phone, a few hundred thousand easily, or how many times he made me laugh. He is irreplacable, and will leave an empty spot in my heart that will never be able to be filled again.” And he finished this way: "Till we embrace again on the other side I'll be jamming your music, brother. This aint good-bye, its a see you later.” Weaver leaves behind his wife, CarolAnn, and so many friends and family members. Our hearts are with them all no doubt. In the podcast, celebrate with us some of what Bill Weaver leaves behind, with reairs of two podcasts featuring his "Every mile I drive" and "Burning the old school down" records, from 2016 and 2018 respectively. CarolAnn Weaver said she's planning a memorial service for Bill likely for early August, and had Weaver's International in the shop for service looking at a likely sale fairly soon. It wasn't due for service, she said, yet it'd been sitting for a year. Questions about the rig CarolAnn referred to Taylor Barker, fellow trucker-songwriter and also a great friend to Weaver. The truck, CarolAnn said, was Weaver's pride and joy. CarolAnn offered these words to mark his memory. “Bill was very special character who impacted everyone he met,” she said. “He never met a stranger and greeted everyone with open arms of compassion. I am so thankful and blessed that I had him in my life for 16 years and he helped me become a better and stronger person. He helped me find my way back to God, and to me that is priceless. I want to say thank you to all his fans that supported his love of music and appreciated his honest, heart-written words he shared through songwriting. He had a brilliant mind, so smart yet humble. I kid with everyone that he was my encyclopedia.” CarolAnn went on to reference something Tony Justice also noted in his recollection of Weaver. It's true that he said it near every time we ever spoke to him in person, most often delivered right before you were ready to part ways: “Remember to shake a stranger's hand. You might accidentally make a new friend.” Bill, thank you for being one to us, that's certain. Long Haul Paul's tribute to Weaver: https://overdriveonline.com/15750036

Today in Overdrive Radio, walk through Kevin Bruns' purchase of a 2019 Cummins-powered International LoneStar after several years of local dump truck ownership and work around quarries and construction sites in the Nashville, Tennessee, region. That followed early experience with authority hauling cars a couple decades back, based outside Chicago where Bruns is from originally, then pneumatic tanker work as a company driver, all of it in prep for where the owner-operator is today, married with two young children and back out on his own with authority as Bruns Trucking: https://overdriveonline.com/15749776 He restarted that authority a year and a half back, and with authority-age requirements so many brokers have today, up until recently he's hauled power only with dry vans for several large outfits, now testing the waters with a step deck trailer fairly recently purchased, where he's seeing good rates with the trailer in service for just a couple of months. The owner-op's making plenty time for outside pursuits, too. One of the reasons we came together last week was his then-impending competition in this past weekend's Semi Stampede uphill truck drag race competition at Kunle Motorsports Park due south of Cleveland: https://overdriveonline.com/15748980 Bruns attended with his big-truck-fan son last year, and this year was planning to compete in the stock class, bobtail. "I don't need to throw my driveshaft out," he quipped. Indeed, and you can find a video from his competition here: https://www.facebook.com/share/r/1DXAzYJ5qF/ (Unfortunately, the LoneStar got outrun in that one by a Pete, but I'm certain the experience was nonetheless one to remember.) Listen on for Bruns' trucking career in miniature, and his efforts to build the network in and around Gallatin, Tennessee, these past years for maintenance, for freight and for life and music, too. It's Nashville, after all, where he's now headquartered. Find music from the Singin Trucker via Bruns social profiles: https://www.facebook.com/kevinbrunsmusic/ https://instagram.com/singin_trucker For daily trucking news, visit https://overdriveonline.com or sign up for the daily newsletter for email delivery via this form: https://randallreilly.dragonforms.com/loading.do?omedasite=ov_subscriptions

Off the top of this week's Overdrive Radio podcast is the voice of photojournalist James Year, commenting on an issue he feels holds potential to create alliances where few have existed in American culture and commentary. "In every market you can think there's a lot of disruptions starting to happen," Year said. "and it's one of those cases of strange bedfellows. ... Turns out truckers and actors and all the people that are generally fighting like hell with each other ... turns out they've got a lot in common on this topic." Namely, he's talking about automation, the import technology holds for work opportunity in a variety of fields. In trucking, where that's perhaps most salient -- certainly grabbing the most headlines -- is in the operating of the trucks themselves. The jumping-off point for the podcast is Year's recent short documentary video published via the More Perfect Union video channels. It came with an ominous title, and a video cover image clearly designed to raise a safety specter with respect to unmanned trucks on public roads: https://www.stealingfire.tech/more-perfect-union-documentary The headline? "We chased driverless trucks in Texas. What we saw will scare you." There's no scary crash in the video. There's not even an unmanned, truly “driverless” truck in it. Rather Year, with a professional truck driver with him in a car, followed an Aurora Driver-outfitted truck that to start the trip actually had two operators in-cab late in April. Yet the pitch worked, clearly -- since release three weeks ago the approximately 15-minute video has been viewed nearly 2 million times, according to the Youtube counter. It all followed Year's long photojournalism project for his master's work at Syracuse University. Year now teaches photography in Maryland. Misleading safety marketing isn't just the province of view-hungry video platforms. Look no farther than the messages of autonomous truck developers themselves, in some cases. On the Kodiak Robotics company's website, for instance, the first text block you encounter purports to reveal the safety case for the "Why" behind just what the company is building with its automated driving system. It offers this statistic: “More than 85% of truck crashes in the U.S. were caused by human error.” Whose human error? As any trucker familiar with crash causation stats that exist well knows, the majority of that 85% weren't caused by the error of the professional truck operator. Year's work is less preoccupied with automated vehicle safety than employment and work prospects for the untold thousands of owner-operators and company drivers in the trucking industry today. The often disputed and debunked “driver shortage” narrative and how it plays into the sales pitch for automation is detailed, likewise the history of deregulation and the intense competition that resulted from the 1980s onward, all stories Overdrive readers will be largely familiar with. Year and his subjects assume autonomous tech companies will ultimately allow fleets to achieve real cost savings in safely removing the driver from the cab working on a large number of lanes. If so, what happens to all the individuals who might have otherwise done that work? We've posed it before. Some of the tech companies we've interrogated about it no longer in fact exist, having imploded after investment cash dried up or they made a mistake of one kind or another and spooked whatever investors they did have. Still existing tech companies like Kodiak, like Aurora Innovations and Plus.ai, among others, tend all to stick to the notion that if you're driving today, you'll be able to retire as a truck driver. Yet given fleets' clear interest in helping develop these systems, for owner-operators the better question may be when will we have to compete with them at scale? What's your take? Complete our survey via this link, where you'll find more reporting, too: https://overdriveonline.com/15749195

"If you're not going to do it right the first time, don't do it at all. That's what I tell everybody in here." --2024 Small Fleet Champ Paul Rissler In this week's edition of Overdrive Radio, listen in for a tour around the headquarters of Paul Rissler Transportation, current Overdrive Small Fleet Champ, on the old home place for the big Rissler trucking family. Overdrive Editor Todd Dills was there in early May just ahead of Paul's older brother John and younger brother Delton Rissler's Crossroads Truck Meet show at the junction of U.S. 50 and Missouri state route 87 in California. Paul Rissler's one of five Rissler brothers all with some tie to trucking -- in their family, it's clear the fruit doesn't fall far from the tree. In the podcast, Paul details his father and mother's small fleet history right from the spot where it all started for a young Paul, following in his father's footsteps as a small fleet owner. The fleet's ranged over more than a couple decades now from just a few to eight trucks. Paul and Michelle Rissler were right at 6 when they brought home the Small Fleet Champ title belt from the NASTC conference last fall. When we visited in May, things were in a brief moment of flux with one longtime driver moving toward retirement to local work, and another leaving as well. In search of the right drivers to fill those spots, the all-reefer fleet was well-positioned still with steady LTL lanes out of Pennsylvania from consolidator Dutchland Refrigerated, and other customers back toward Missouri from Colorado. Paul and his wife, Michelle (with all three sons Justin, Josh, and Jordan involved in various aspects of the business), have clearly built a fleet that's sustainable, no matter what comes. We start in the company office, then get a look at the main shop and warehouse area for Paul Rissler Transportation, then at the Risslerbilt, LLC, custom truck shop operated now by Josh and outfitted with what might just be the biggest paint booth in the entire state of Missouri. All of it was built by the hands of, and the close bonds between, the Rissler family and close-knit trucking community they've brought along with them on their long run of success. As mentioned in the podcast, small fleets of 3-30 trucks can enter to compete for this year's title belt in Overdrive's Small Fleet Champsionship via this link: https://overdriveonline.com/2025sfc -- deadline: July 31. Find more images from Rissler headquarters and the Risslerbilt custom shop in the post that houses this podcast at https://overdriveonline.com/15748560

"If it continues like it's going, it'll probably be our best year. ... The way it started out and the way it's going so far, it'll be our best year." --Flatbed owner-operator Ollie "Rufus" Morris reflecting on the year thus far May Trucker of the Month Rufus Morris of Youngsville, North Carolina, was sounding a lot like April's honoree and fellow flatbed owner-op George Kincaid reflecting on the year thus far: https://www.overdriveonline.com/overdrive-radio/15745657 Morris is leased today to Material Logisitcs Management out of Pennsylvania, operating from that home base in North Carolina, and was nominated for Overdrive's 2025 Trucker of the Year award by his wife and business partner in the one-truck, two-flatbed-trailer outfit Midnight Rider Transport. We featured Morris late last month in Overdrive Senior Editor Matt Cole's story about the decades of trucking experience behind Morris: https://www.overdriveonline.com/trucker-of-the-year/article/15747142/back-in-biz-owneroperator-rufus-morris-trucker-of-the-month In this week's Overdrive Radio, hear Morris directly in conversation with Cole, walking through his current operation and long history -- this is his second stint as a trucking business owner, after hauling logs in the late 1990s into this century as an owner-operator. Morris hauls flatbed steel, a good bit of it oversize, in a 2004 model Peterbilt 379 he purchased several years back. It's in tiptop shape, shined up and outfitted with plenty in the way of bright parts and lights and just generally well-maintained, delivering all manner of benefits from the pocketbook on down to the scale houses. He takes pride in safety, clearly, the truck too. "Get out there and stay consistent," he advised others on the safety front. "You just can't be in a hurry." Also: "Be proud of what you're doing. Keep maintenance up on your truck. I know they say, 'Chrome don't get you home,' but it does. Believe me." Most of the time crossing scales, Morris said, he's bypassed, the immaculate appearance of the rig he feels playing a big part in that. If your dog bites the inspector, though, all bets are off. (Catch an account of just such an incident in a recent-memory inspection in Matt Cole's story about the Morrises.) Morris and Midnight Rider you can for sure call a little old-school in approach, in some ways, yet he keeps an eye on new ways and new people, too. In today's episode of Overdrive Radio you'll hear from him a clear priority placed on business relationships invested in, cemented over time, a key characteristic of so many a successful trucking business owner. Morris offered this word of encouragement for the next generation coming up behind him: "A lot of people say, 'I wouldn't get into trucking for nothing in the world.' Don't get me wrong, it's dfiferent than it used to be. ... but I won't tell nobody don't get into it. If they want to do it? Trucking's done me good all these years. I can't complain one bit about it. If they've got a dream and want to do it, I'd say do it." Dive into Morris's history trucking: an early business, long experience driving, and the reboot that was inspired in part by Patricia Morris herself after 25 years in real estate. Enter your own business or that of another owner-operator you admire (up to three trucks) for Overdrive's 2025 Trucker of the Year award here: https://overdriveonline.com/toptrucker

At the top of the podcast, crank it up with a rare breed of a Caterpillar diesel in an on-highway truck, the V8 3408 motor in livestock hauler Troy Bolin's 1979 Peterbilt 359, a 302-inch-wheelbase unit we got a close look at out at the Crossroads Truck Meet early last month in Missouri: https://www.overdriveonline.com/15747179 Tap that link or listen on to hear its story here, too, with its 6/4 two-stick tranny and 66-inch Double Eagle custom sleeper put behind the original daycab-ordered Pete when it was brand-new by Huck Huckaby. But the bulk of this week's podcast features another owner-operator brain trust in the Trucking Solutions Group, long a regular conference-call meet-up between a bevy of owners aimed at business improvement through sharing experience. The TSG has routinely for several years lent us all a window into their decades of combined experience at the Mid-America Trucking Show, where Landstar rep Bob Bailey moderated this panel discussion with TSG members focused on questionable choices and successes. They called it "Failing to Succeed," acknowledging there's a whole heck of a lot all of us learn from our own, and others', failures. Owner-operator and TSG current Chairman Joel Boelman set up the discussion with a slide that showed a chart with two columns. On one side, a variety of "questionable choices" and on the other things various owners have done they'd do again and/or recommend to others. "Questionable choices" discussed range from use of a factoring service for load payments, a change in carriers for leased owners, and working with a dispatch service to holding onto a wide variety of trailers too long and getting tied up with time in "overanalysis." The decision to change carriers was also on the "would do again" side of the ledger, along with purchase of an aerodynamic truck, the switch from company driver to owner-operator, and a variety of tried and true, and some novel, practices to recommend. Voices you'll hear in the podcast include, in addition to owner-operator Boelman: Independent owner-operator Mark Heggestad Team owners Stephen Halsted and Sandra Goche. Failure is an opportunity, ultimately, to learn from mistakes made, illustrated in so many ways throughout the TSG discussion. As mentioned in the podcast: **Small Fleet Owners of 3-30 trucks can enter to compete in Overdrive's Small Fleet Championship through July: https://overdriveonline.com/2025sfc **Overdrive's own biz-improvement Partners in Business library: https://overdriveonline.com/pib **Trucking Solutions Group's website: https://truckingsolutiongroup.com

Here's hoping the Memorial Day long weekend's been a safe one for you. Today on the Overdrive Radio podcast, a special treat in the work of our own longtime Overdrive Extra contributor Long Haul Paul Marhoefer: https://overdriveonline.com/14865330 Marhoefer spent time at the Mid-America Trucking Show with a man who's been well on his way toward a status of custom-truck royalty, you might say, these last several years. His name is Tim Eacret, proprietor of Iowa-headquartered EZ Pete Interiors, a custom truck upholstery business whose legacy stretches back in history to the work of Eacret's father, Daniel Laverne Eacret, and his own early and long auto-upholstery work. Sadly, Daniel passed in 2023, and Eacret honors his memory in the conversation with Marhoefer that follows here, detailing the big custom build that really got the dedicated truck upholsterer's business going full bore dedicated to custom rigs. Find EZ Pete Interiors here: http://ezpete.com/ More, too, in Long Haul Paul's story about Tim and his wife and business partner, Tricia: https://overdriveonline.com/15746914 As mentioned in the podcast: **T.J. Kounkel's project 2018 389: https://www.overdriveonline.com/pride-polish/article/14897010/2019-gats-best-of-show-limited-mileage-combo-the-joker-gets-last-laugh **Marhoefer's story about the legacy of Scot Marone, longtime organizer of the Wheel Jam Truck Show coming up soon: https://www.overdriveonline.com/overdrive-extra/article/15745088/the-wheel-jam-truck-show-staying-alive-with-the-village **Tales of two lease-purchases: https://www.overdriveonline.com/equipment/article/15738011/a-tale-of-two-leasepurchase-experiences-truck-ownership-exit

This week's edition of the Overdrive Radio podcast features C.W. Express small fleet owner Steve Wilson, reigning Small Fleet Champ in the 11-30-truck division after a bit of a growth spurt for the fleet followed Wilson's brush with death in 2022. The team he'd built around the dry van fleet sustained while he was in hospital for the better part of that entire year, and in the aftermath has only continued to not just sustain, but excel, on dedicated lanes for a central broker in Avenger Logistics. Wilson's up to near 20 trucks and drivers today, and doesn't have all his freight eggs in that single basket, as you'll hear in today's podcast, with customers in his area helping build lanes loaded both ways -- in one case out to Arkansas and back to the Louisville, Kentucky, area, where he's headquartered in Sellersburg, Indiana. The podcast amounts to a tour around C.W. Express headquarters on Avco Boulevard in Sellersburg, right off I-65 and purchased and moved into in 2023, marking a significant upgrade to the former location. Wilson, a wear-all-the-hats small fleet owner for decades, continues to build out support for C.W.'s trucks and drivers with deft delegation, too, particularly on the time-consuming maintenance side of the business. He's added an expert lead mechanic you'll hear hear who oversees the operation and a younger diesel tech, Clayton Higdon, to provide an assist and a well for education and growth, no doubt. Listen on for an update with reigning champ Wilson and C.W. Express.

"This year, if it goes like it has this past month, it'll be phenomenal." --George Kincaid In this week's edition of Overdrive Radio, an audio window on our feature story about flatbed-pulling owner-operator George Kincaid's one-truck business, written attendant to the Quinwood, West Virginia-headquartered Kincaid getting the April Trucker of the Month nod from Overdrive: https://www.overdriveonline.com/trucker-of-the-year/article/15743659/trucker-of-the-month-george-kincaid-and-the-power-of-positivity You can nominate your own trucking business -- or that of another deserving owner you admire -- via this link: https://overdriveonline.com/toptrucker Kincaid's deserving, for sure, with a sharp handle on maintenance with a decidedly do-it-yourself approach. What's more, a whole lot can be said for doing something that you love, as he puts it, and a positive outlook on his life and work has been part and parcel of his success. Love of trucking has been with him since he was a kid when he and his younger brother both grew up with an eye toward exactly what they wanted to do when they were men. "It's pretty much what we always wanted to do growing up -- drive a truck," Kincaid said, and "have one with our own name on it." Dive into Kincaid's story, but also that of another owner, John Rissler, whose Horse and Buggy Express trucking business out of California, Missouri, morphed into the Horse and Buggy Accessories chrome shop he operates now out of the Crossroads Shopping Plaza at U.S. 50 and Missouri 87, home of the annual Crossroads Truck Meet show: https://overdriveonline.com/15745021 We spent the day out at the Crossroads May 3 for this year's show, and sat down with Rissler to hear its history, stretching back four years now to the time he and another brother, Delton Rissler, decided to build a new headquarters there. What's it like to be the proprietor of a small fleet, a chrome shop with Missouri and Pennsylvania locations, and a truck show all at once? Well it never comes without a hitch, Rissler said. Soon as we sat down for the talk, his phone rang, as it would throughout our conversation. This call he had to take, though, from the man who was ferrying show attendees from the car parking area up to the show on a hay-ride-set-up flatbed trailer toted by an old farm tractor that had developed a pretty significant oil leak, as it turned out. A hitch indeed, yet they would overcome. Hear more in the podcast.

In this week's edition of Overdrive Radio, we're looking back at the long run of the W900 model from the Kenworth Truck Company. The W900's coming sunset has been among the biggest equipment news of the year -- uncovered ahead of the Mid-America Trucking Show, where the company unveiled the launch of the W900 Legacy Edition special series to close out the model's run. Kenworth plans are to build a final 1,000 units of the W900 for customers through next year. If you missed the video walkaround of the very first one built, find it at this link: https://overdriveonline.com/15742576 On the podcast this week we'll run through details of the Legacy Edition, likewise delving into the history surrounding the W900, with two Kenworth reps: Kyle Kimball, Kenworth director of marketing, and Jamin Swazo, company marketing communications director. The model itself certainly has built a big legacy with untold numbers of truck owners through well more than a half-century run of production since its 1963 introduction. According to Jamin Swazo, the company's not aware of any uninterrupted "longer runs out there in any automotive history for a single model," he said. Dive in with Kyle Kimball and Jamin Swazo in the podcast, answering the question on the mind of any prospective owner of one of the final production units of Kenworth Legacy Edition -- or a new standard W900, still available itself for order through … well, find the answer in the podcast. Also there, hear Kimball and Swazo's answers to another pressing question I've heard from a few Kenworth fans among owner-operators -- whether they'd yet seen anyone add old-style can external breathers to a W990. Both also detailed their outlook for the W990 as a platform for custom-equipment builders and other owners, and efforts to showcase the successor model at the Mid-America Trucking Show. There, Kenworth showcased a vintage W900A and MHC Kenworth's Joplin, Missouri, dealer location's custom treatment of the W990 pictured at this link: https://overdriveonline.com/15744843

This week on Overdrive Radio we track back to the Mid-America Trucking Show and the big news for the trucking community from podcast sponsor Howes. The Howes Hall of Fame added its 12th member when it honored Mother Trucker Yoga proprietor and fitness and wellness coach Hope Zvara at the show. You heard part of Zvara's story when she was featured here on Overdrive Radio in conversation with Long Haul Paul Marhoefer a couple years back: https://www.overdriveonline.com/overdrive-radio/podcast/15448049/the-qualityoflife-benefits-of-movement-introducing-hope-zvara There, queried about the scourge of anxiety, depression and other mental health ailments throughout America, she asked a simple question -- "What's if it's not a mental health crisis? What if it's a movement crisis?" In that podcast, and here, she detailed her step-by-step program for fitness through basic yoga techniques drivers can do in-cab, around the truck, at points throughout a day for an approachable journey toward better physical health. Mental health, too. Zvara well knows the connections between the two and isn't shy of stressing them routinely with those she works with. She's combated mental stressors of various natures in her own life, using yoga practice toward that end. And she's now worked with an untold number of individual truck drivers to help them achieve their own goals. We got a little tutorial in her brand of “no mat necessary" yoga at the start of the Trucking Solutions Group's talk in the East Hall out at MATS on the final day. She led attendees through a series of stretches aimed simply at relieving the neck and upper-body tension so many of us face after a long day at the wheel or, in my case, typing away at the desk. Today on the podcast, hear the audio of Zvara's instruction on that mini-routine at the tail end, and otherwise buckle up for her story of helping truckers help themselves in health and wellness. And though Zvara's program is designed for simplicity, she's also well aware it's not exactly a simple matter for any of us. Hear how yoga and general phyiscal well-being got her through her own crisis, and into the work for which she's now honored as the latest member the Howes Hall of Fame. Nominate a deserving trucking industry participant for the Hall yourself, and browse all so honored todate, via https://howesproducts.com/hof Find Hope Zvara's Mother Trucker Yoga effort at this link, where today you can download a free guide to 11 helpful stretches: https://mothertruckeryoga.com

In this week's edition of Overdrive Radio, drop into our conversation with OOIDA Executive Vice President Lewie Pugh at the Mid-America Trucking Show. Pugh was fresh off a whirlwind round of a whole lot of other talking himself, including a MATS-opening breakfast panel discussion you heard here a couple weeks back, then prior to that on Wednesday the week of the truck show in the halls of Congress where he joined a panel of trucking and other industry reps to talk through significant issues ahead of the highway bill reauthorization due next year. Pugh made headlines for his urging of federal reps to get a handle on the scope of so-called “non-domiciled CDLs” issued to residents of foreign countries by states here in the U.S. for work OTR or in other industries on a temporary basis. It's an issue that's risen to prominence this year as attention to it has increased. It's but one of the issues Pugh addressed in Congressional testimony, likewise in what follows in the podcast, yet one we heard about also from trucker Teresa Brittain in the wake of MATS. English proficiency violations used to be treated by the Comercial Vehicle Safety Alliance of inspectors and industry as an out of service violation, yet when CVSA removed that out of service violation about a decade ago now, FMCSA subsequently relaxed guidance on how to enforce the violation itself. Paired with some DOT changes for states around non-domiciled CDLs that happened later, it seems to have gotten simpler for foreign country residents to come into the country to work over the road with a CDL. How many such people are working in the U.S. today? Nobody can really answer that question, as has been evident from Overdrive's Alex Lockie's ongoing reporting around the issue: https://www.overdriveonline.com/15741322/ Brittain flagged the importance of the English language proficiency regs, though, particularly when it comes to roadside inspections. She noted a conversation at MATS she herself had with Kentucky state truck enforcement about the issue. “How does any state law enforcement officer do an inspection on the truck if the driver cannot follow instructions to inspect it?” she asked. Inspectors told her essentially they can't inspect such an operator's truck, she said, “for their own safety. They told me they give 15 minutes after the initial request for the driver to contact their company and provide driver's license and required paperwork, then just let them go if the paperwork is compliant.” No inspection for the truck. Considering such dynamics, Terea Brittain then quipped, “Next inspection, I'm speaking Martian!” OOIDA along with some from the law enforcement community petitioned CVSA to return English proficiency to the out of service criteria, and CVSA's spring Workshop event is but one week away. Pugh noted owner-operators might stay tuned for any news on that front in the coming couple of weeks. Also in the podcast: RaceTrac Travel Centers Marketing Manager Nick LaFalce details growth in his company's mostly Southeast regional network of truck stops in what was once mainly just a fuel-stop network for automobile drivers. Since 2018, the RaceTrac company's been expanding high-flow diesel options and acquiring land to even add parking options within the network. As mentioned in the podcast: **Recent coverage of the parking issue: https://overdriveonline.com/15742614 **Detail from recent Congressional hearing: https://overdriveonline.com/15741287 **More from MATS: https://www.overdriveonline.com/t/4372607

This week's edition of Overdrive Radio is another in our series highlighting contenders for 2025 Trucker of the Year, with Overdrive Senior Editor Matt Cole's talk with Virginia-headquartered two-truck straight dump owner-operator business Dice Mayhem's Trucking, headed up by owner-operator Hunter Hubbard and her husband, Tim. Hunter's just about six years into truck ownership herself, her husband a good bit longer, yet clearly she's harnessed a quality that current reigning Trucker of the Year Alan Kitzhaber sees in all successful people when it comes to business. As he put earlier this year in his “Plan for better business,” authored for our Overdrive Extra blog, “99.9% of success is desire.” That is, those who have a clear case of the want-tos, ultimately, probably will do whatever it is they set out to accomplish: https://www.overdriveonline.com/15712314 Cue Hunter Hubbard's own advice for any aspiring truck owner when it comes to success in business for themselves. "If you have your mind set to do it, go for it. Nothing's stopping you but yourself, and the worst thing you can do is fail. But at the end of the day, nobody wants to fail. You're going to figure it out one way or another." Some days will be awful, but "you'll sit back a month down the road, two months down the road, and be like, 'that was rough, but hey we're still here.' You just gotta keep digging on it." As she well acknowledges, challenges will present themselves day-in, day-out, but those who keep digging will get through to the other side. Clearly, Hubbard herself has been one of those sorts these last years in business. "I might be a little stubborn sometimes," she said. She and Tim have built a steady base of customers for their two-truck straight dump business in and around their Virginia home base, weathering an array of their own customer challenges in recent years when a buyout of one of their main customers and integration of the two business left their own trucking company in an uncertain position for hauling work, given the company's small size. Last year, she pivoted to a certain extent, with purchase of an older Peterbilt tractor, utilizing mechanical prowess with a new shop, too, to get it in working order and standing up a new, one-truck business for livestock hauling regionally: Dice Logistics. Yet dump work remains the Hubbards' bread and butter, and the seasonality of both businesses continues to inspire the occasional second-guessing of their commitment to niche specialization. They could be hauling food, which always has to run, Hubbard notes, telling her story to Cole in this episode. They could be, that is, but "I didn't really choose that route. Everything's seasonal, everything depends on the weather," she said. "You just wait it out." They're doing more than just waiting, that's sure. As also mentioned in the podcast: **Matt Cole's two-part feature on ways to save on insurance at renewal: https://www.overdriveonline.com/15740305 **Learn how you can put your own or another owner-operator business in the running for the 2025 Trucker of the Year honor, with a chance to win a new seat from sponsor Bostrom Seating and Commercial Vehicle Group: https://overdriveonline.com/toptrucker

In 2024, finally, as regular Overdrive readers will know, owner-operator income was up on a year-over-year basis. ATBS Vice President Mike Hosted makes that abundantly clear in this week's edition of Overdrive Radio, featuring the business services firm's March 25 update offering an economic outlook for the year ahead as well as lessons within the benchmarking data ATBS dervies from its tens of thousands of owner-operator clients' performance. If you missed our report from the session as MATS got under way, find it via this link: https://overdriveonline.com/15741374 The small boost in average income is certainly a first in what's been an exceedingly tough three and more years now as freight demand's declined, revenues and income falling for many owner-operators as costs just rose through much of the period. The 2024 income gain also comes despite even further rates and revenue declines last year, a sure sign that successful owners are tightening the operation, increasing fuel efficiency to reduce costs as much as possible. Today in the podcast, we essentially let the tape roll on Hosted's presentation. You can follow along by downloading Mike Hosted's slides via this link, or watch the Youtube version up top or on Overdrive's Youtube channel to listen along with the presentation of the slides. Download all the slides from Hosted's presentation via this link: https://www.overdriveonline.com/15741380 Yet another bit of positivity to emerge from the ATBS session had to do with the spot market, particularly for flatbed freight, in year 2025 so far. The moves up and down in the spot indices Hosted sees as particularly valuable as near-term indicators of demand in the market. Though the positivity there is tempered by a big degree of uncertainty made even bigger by the President's tariff announcements this past week, if the surge in flatbed freight and demand seen so far this year doesn't just prove to be a result of a kind of importers' pre-buy to beat a variety of tariffs on goods coming across U.S. borders, we could be headed in a longer-term positive direction. Recent trucking market performance recalls Gary Buchs' advice around freight, around customer identification and the time to strike, likewise when some measure of a kickstart might truly arise. It came back in late September 2024, before elections' outcomes were known, and following the fed's moves to begin to ease off the cost of borrowing with interest rate cuts. Buchs advised to set a calendar reminder for 4-6 months out from the time of the fed's cuts. “Odds are,” he said, “that is about the time business will change, as it takes time for companies to have confidence" to place orders, others to respond to those orders with their own confidence, "and the cards begin to fall and make things move....” Here we are, four-to-six months on. Looking at the stock market since the Trump tariff announcement last week we can't say business confidence is 100% the rule. Yet flatbed freight's been moving up, as noted, and a couple weeks back dry and reefer rates and volumes finally joined in. Maybe Buchs was right on the timing. And maybe in the freight economy, things are in fact changing for the better. ATBS is coproducer with Overdrive of the comprehensive Partners in Business playbook for owner-operator careers, start to finish, now in a new online content library format. Browse the new playbook: https://overdriveonline.com/pib

Back from the Mid-America Trucking Show in Louisville, Kentucky, this Overdrive Radio edition kicks off continuing coverage as all of us here at Overdrive spent the show fanning out across convention center grounds to cover just as much as possible. The fruits of that labor you've seen just a small sampling of to date, the lot of it collected with the MATS tag at OverdriveOnline.com: https://www.overdriveonline.com/t/4372607 Today we drop back to the very beginning of the show for an 8 a.m. Thursday, March 27, panel discussion that set the issues stage for the remainder of the event. It was moderated by Brent Hutto, longtime Chief Relationship Officer at Truckstop and now a senior advisor for the load board as he's joined the staff of the Truck Parking Club company. You'll hear a variety of voices in the panel discussion, touching on freight market dynamics, small business struggles and ways to overcome, predatory towing, parking, fraud in the brokered-freight marketplace, cargo and payment theft and so much more. Panelists included: **Jason Cowan, leader of 45-truck Silver Creek Transportation, as Overdrive's Small Fleet Champ in 2021, since which plans for growth have come to fruition. **Hell Bent Xpress owner Jamie Hagen, whose all-Mack fleet operates out of a South Dakota headquarters and which was one of two finalists in the 3-10-truck division of the Small Fleet Championship last year. **Jessica Dotson, co-owner-operator of Dotson Transportation with her husband **Tyler Johnston, Mercer Transportation's director of operations **Lewie Pugh, Owner-Operator Independent Driver's Association executive vice president As mentioned in the podcast: **Overdrive's recent insurance renewal-related feature: https://overdriveonline.com/15740305 **Post-crash litigation series: https://overdriveonline.com/15287415 **Tow companies dominate DOT listening session: https://overdriveonline.com/15678174 **Overdrive's revamped Partners in Business start-to-finish playbook for owner-operator careers: https://overdriveonline.com/pib

In this Overdrive Radio edition, big news: We're releasing today our brand-new Partners in Business playbook for owner-operator business, start to finish. The 2025 reboot of the PIB program is a total revamp designed with the decidedly mobile professional trucker in mind. You can access it today at https://overdriveonline.com/pib For more than two decades, Overdrive's Partners in Business, coproduced with owner-op business services firm ATBS, has focused on training and continuing biz education. Today, you'll find a brand-new format for all of the content that last year made up the 100-plus-page manual -- and plenty in the way of new updates. For this year's release, PIB goes from a single-download format to a much more dynamic online content library, easily accessed on any smartphone, tablet or laptop or desktop computer. The reorganization collects valuable tactics and strategies for long-term profitability in eight categories, charting the journey of owners from start-up all the way through to retirement: 1. The “Starting Line” section details the choice of business structures, motivating factors for different individual owners, and plenty to think about in terms of business and goal planning, choosing a freight niche, a motor carrier to lease to, and/or how and why to take another route altogether. 2. The “Equipment and Maintenance” category pulls on Overdrive and ATBS resources along with the accumulated knowledge of so many of our industry-participant contributors over the decades to detail the ways to acquire the best equipment at the most-favorable terms, down and dirty PM and repair tactics, and much more. 3. The third, “Business Management” section offers a wealth of insight on tracking costs, revenue and profits; building those profit and loss statements; and paying yourself for better business health analysis and load planning, among many other subjects germane to both beginners at the start of an ownership career and seasoned veterans in need of a business refresh. These three sections contain more individual parts than the remaining five, and there's a reason for that. They represent the bedrock foundation on which owners throughout history have built their success. The remaining five sections in large part will be pretty self-explanatory when you see their titles, and all is aimed at a self-help assist for owners to, long-term, better enjoy the fruits of long labor put into the business. That last bit's a nod to the title of Part 2 of Overdrive Trucker of the Year Alan Kitzhaber's “plan for better business” authored for Overdrive and published right around the time we announced Kitzhaber's big win in January. He's looking ahead to being able to retire quite soon, actually, after more than three decades trucking, mostly as an owner-operator. He'll be parking his truck amongst the rest of you at MATS this year, and I'm honored to be able to help host him at the show. If you won't be there, keep tuned for much more from him and other longtime owners in our show coverage. Truth be told, all of us here at Overdrive lean on those among you who engage with us for ideas worth sharing, a lot of Partners in Business itself in fact made up of the accumulated wisdom of those in the readership who've shared their expertise with us over the decades. Here's huge appreciation for all of you. Run through the new PIB at https://overdriveonline.com/pib As mentioned in the podcast, here's the registration link for ATBS's live update scheduled for March 25 charting 2024 owner-op income performance: https://register.gotowebinar.com/register/3349075480558501214 And keep tuned for our MATS coverage later this week and certainly in the weeks to come here: https://www.overdriveonline.com/t/4372607 Also in the podcast: MATS-preview retreads from three interviews from the last several weeks with Jamie Hagen, Hotels4Truckers.com proprietor Dan Fuller, and trucker-songwriter Tony Justice.

This week's edition of Overdrive Radio starts with a brief part of "Truck Stop," earmarked by today's guest for a special place in his heart the last time we hosted him. That'd be trucker-songwriter Tony Justice, who back then in 2023 spoke to the inspiration the song took from Justice's mother's long work at a couple of different East Tennessee truck stops you'll hear him mention in today's podcast. Yet it's with a bit of heavy heart, here, that we get this edition rolling, given Sharon Justice passed in November last year. It's no small number of truck drivers -- and one trucking magazine editor at least -- that were touched by her life, that's sure, Tony Justice and his late father chief among them. "She felt like she was still taking care of dad," Justice said, noting how much Momma J, as she was known to so many, loved the work she did over the last nearly two decades of her life. "You wouldn't find a cleaner shower on the interstate, or a more warming smile to meet you when you walked into the door." Fellow trucker-songwriter Bill Weaver, Justice said, summed it up best once noting he didn't "know anyone who was called Momma by so many different people." Tony Justice is back on Overdrive Radio this week for a bit of preview of his big headlining concert upcoming next week Friday, March 28, at the end of the day at the Mid-America Trucking Show in Louisville, Kentucky. Find more about MATS happenings via the collection at this link: https://www.overdriveonline.com/t/4372607 If you're unfamiliar with Tony Justice's music, know that for a decade and a half and more now it's been nothing if not steeped in his life over-the-road, joined in the journey by his wife and chief promoter, Misty Justice. For many years he trucked with Everhart Transportation out of Greeneville, Tennessee, among others prior, yet these days enjoys not having to deal with shippers and receivers so much behind the wheel of his own tour bus. And if you've not seen Tony Justice live, get ready for a spectacle at MATS, that's sure. He performs with a crack group of players, and it's always a great show. Dive into a conversation with Justice that touches on plans for the big show with Colt Ford at MATS March 28, the Justices' huge Large Cars & Guitars Truck Show event in East Tennessee in May (at a new location this year), and the legacy of Momma J, the late Sharon Justice.

The voice you'll hear at the top of this Overdrive Radio edition is that of Overdrive's February Trucker of the Month Kenny Wingate. Clearly, he knows of what he speaks when he invokes the feeling -- "nothing like it," he said -- that he associates with best of trucking as an owner-operator, running your own game when times are good. It's part of what drove him to take the leap back from company work he was doing to launch his Southpoint Exchange businss with one truck and his own authority in 2019. He's up to two trucks today, headquartered in Auburndale, Florida: https://www.overdriveonline.com/trucker-of-the-year/article/15738560/how-truckings-supposed-to-be-done-meet-kenny-wingate He's the proud owner of two sharp Peterbilt 579s and stainless reefers, and he's been focused throughout the company's relatively short six-year history on business brass tacks, building a team around him for freight with regular brokers, many of whom he's known going back decades. Likewise on the accounting, bookkeeping and general business management side of Southpoint Exchange, and he's set up for further growth after a lifetime spent trucking, as you'll hear in the podcast. He's 55 years young today and relishes that long history in the business, though many of the men he learned from, and some of those he came up with in trucking, have passed on. Magnanimous in manner, clearly on top of his game as a business owner, Wingate is also nothing if not grateful for all the help of those who came before him. He told the story of a recent encounter of an old friend at a dock. "Our generation is starting to be few and far between ... The other day I run across a gentleman I probably hadn't seen in 25 years, and we trucked together," Wingate said. "We sat down on an old wooden bench at the back of our trailers while we were getting loaded" remembering all those who came before but also "we just laughed, man, and just cut the fool, and it felt good. It felt good to see somebody that you trucked with years ago, you know, when when things were a little different." At once, most of the folks the two men asked each other about were gone, he said, or at the very least off the road for good for health or other reasons. Wingate, 55, stays grateful for his own longevity, and looks ahead to the future and opportunities to build better business with Southpoint Exchange. In the podcast, hear that perspective but also just how two-truck Southpoint Exchange is getting the work done with dedicated freight on lanes between Florida and Northern Ohio. After being nominated by one of his customers, he's officially in the running for our 2025 Trucker of the Year award, which you can enter yourself or nominate another owner via https://overdriveonline.com/toptrucker