🎣 Who Is Liable?

Happy Thursday. Here is what's trending on social media about freight this week.

Trending Market Rate Lanes Presented by Triumph

Trending on X: Aurora + McLane Go Fully Driverless in Texas

Aurora Innovation, the autonomous trucking company behind the self-driving system now operating on US highways, has been on a roll this month.

After last week's partnership with Iowa-based carrier Hirschbach, they just announced another with McLane. Their share price is up 78% over the last 30 days and 40% over the last 5 days alone.

• Fully driverless commercial hauls are now running Dallas to Houston after a 3-year pilot, logging 280,000+ autonomous miles.
• The hybrid model keeps human drivers on local delivery. Aurora owns the middle mile.
• Hirschbach + McLane in the same month means this is a commercial rollout, not a pilot program.

"They are real, they are here, they are moving freight without humans, and there will be more of them tomorrow." — Kevin Rutherford, Let's Truck

The "will it ever happen" crowd went quiet this week.

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Trending on LinkedIn: The Chart Only Goes One Direction

DAT's Dean Croke posted the rate numbers this week. Seven straight weeks of flatbed gains, dry van pushing multi-year highs, and reefer holding a 22% premium over last year.

• Flatbed hit $2.69/mile in Week 18, a seven-week growth streak that has added $0.38 to the national average and brought rates within $0.05 of the all-time record set in June 2022.
• Dry van sitting at $2.00/mile, up 25% year over year, with the Midwest alone handling nearly half of all national load volume.
• Total broker-posted spot rates hit an all-time high the week ending May 1, running 32% above the same week last year.

Roadcheck week runs May 13-15, which historically tightens capacity further as carriers reduce exposure to inspections.

Comments pushed back. Carriers are pointing out that operating costs are climbing right alongside rates (insurance, maintenance, driver pay), and that the margin picture is messier than any rate chart suggests.

Trending on Reddit: Nobody Wants to Talk About How Shippers Load

CrossDockCHI, a Chicago-based cross-dock operation, posted about a restack fee dispute on r/FreightBrokers.

• Pallets were sitting loose in the middle of the trailer, with nothing to secure them. The load shifted before the truck even hit the interstate, and by the end, the driver was docked pay while the shipper who loaded it that way faced zero consequences.
• The top comment went straight at the fix: photo-document every load condition at pickup with timestamped trailer photos, and build load-secure terms directly into your broker agreements so that when sloppy loading is documented, the restack fee lands on the shipper instead of the driver.
• Someone dropped 49 C.F.R. § 392.9 into the thread, which requires drivers to verify cargo is properly secured before departure. The replies point out that sealed trailers make that regulation practically impossible to enforce.

The post ended with: "Why do we keep pretending this industry runs on anything other than passing the buck down the line until it lands on whoever has the least power?"

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Trending on YouTube: Super Ego Has 26 DOT Numbers

Trucking Made Successful, a trucking industry YouTube channel with 142K subscribers, dug into the carrier network connected to Super Ego.

• CBS identified 26 US DOT numbers linked to Super Ego and sent the list to CAB, the Central Analysis Bureau, which rates carriers for insurance purposes. Of the 13 that were still active, 11 had three or more safety categories in alert status, and eight had five categories sitting above the federal intervention threshold.
• Using Tritime Transport LLC as the starting point (one of the carriers Overdrive connected to Super Ego) the channel pulled the safety profile: 93% on safe driving, 98% hours of service, an estimated ISS score of 99 out of 100, meaning inspectors are essentially guaranteed to pull them over.
• Tritime alone had 1,849 connections to other companies by equipment VIN, and just five of its strong links accounted for 331 total crashes, nine fatalities, and 164 injuries across 991 reported trucks.

The load history for Tritime showed many brokers and shippers who put freight on these trucks.

The video ends with: when a carrier with scores like these gets into a fatal crash, how much of the liability belongs to the broker who hired them, knowing exactly what the numbers looked like?

Freight Meme of the Week