FMCSA launched a new carrier registry three weeks ago to stop freight fraud — zero new carriers have been registered since. Plus: PepsiCo is running 41 driverless trucks, peak season and a shrinking driver pool, cameras know where your carriers have been, and more.
Freight AI pilots succeed. Production deployments often don't. Augment CEO Harish Abbott on the change management gap — and what ops leaders need to do before the tech even matters.
The freight boom arrived. For some carriers, it arrived too late. We explain why in today's feature. Plus: real gouda fellas, satisfactory doesn't mean safe, LTL is waking up, and more.
Plus, a cabless autonomous truck just raised $24M, non-domiciled CDLs rules need clarifying, CSX posts a 26% profit jump while watching the UP-NS merger closely, and more in today's newsletter.
TGIF. Q1 earnings season is in full swing, and every major carrier is telling the same story: ugly quarter, better exit rate, and rates are moving.
Plus:
Correction: Ryan Transportation and Spot Inc. were erroneously placed in the 2026 New Faces section of Wednesday's brokerage rankings feature. To be clear, both are well-established brokerages that have appeared on the list for multiple consecutive years. We regret the error.
🤖 Humble's Cabless Autonomous Truck. Humble Robotics just emerged from stealth with a $24 million seed round and a fully electric, cabless autonomous freight vehicle called the Humble Hauler, designed from the ground up for a world without drivers. Unlike Aurora and Kodiak, which operate hub-to-hub and hand off to human drivers at city limits, Humble is going all the way to the loading dock. Whether Humble's $24M is enough to prove it out against Aurora's 250,000 driverless miles is the real question, but the cab was always for the human. Remove the human, remove the cab.
🚨 Non-Dom CDLs Are Back? Overdrive's Alex Lockie posted a story Thursday that caught the trucking internet off guard: the U.S. State Department has reversed its ban on visas for commercial truck drivers, and nine states previously put on enforcement pause, including Texas, Minnesota, and New Jersey, have been recertified to issue non-domiciled CDLs again. North Dakota issued 132 Class A CDLs in just 10 days after getting cleared. But this isn't a rollback. The old loophole of getting a CDL with just an Employment Authorization Document and no verified driving history is gone. Now only H-2A, H-2B, and E-2 visa holders qualify, CDLs are capped at one year, and all transactions must be done in person. FMCSA estimates the eligible pool drops from roughly 200,000 non-dom CDL holders to about 6,000 nationwide.
🚂 CSX Posted a 26% Profit Jump and Watches Its Back. CSX earned $807 million in Q1 2026, up from $646 million a year ago, hauling 3% more shipments while cutting expenses 6% to $2.2 billion. Intermodal volume led the way, up 6%, with CSX citing tighter trucking supply and direct truck conversion as the driver. The railroad raised its full-year outlook to mid-single digit revenue growth. But on the earnings call, analysts pressed CEO Steve Angel directly on what happens to CSX if the UP-NS merger creates a coast-to-coast railroad controlling roughly 43% of U.S. rail freight. Angel's answer: stay focused, keep executing, mergers take years.
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Knight-Swift just posted a net loss of $1.3 million for Q1 2026. Adjusted EPS came in at $0.09, a 64% miss against the original Wall Street consensus of $0.25, before the company pre-announced a guidance cut last week.
And that's good news for the freight market. Here's why.
Four one-time headwinds piled up at once:
CEO Adam Miller called them "largely transitory," and said the weather disruption actually brought an "upside" by exposing market tightness that accelerated the pricing environment. The stock ticked up in after-hours trading.
KNX wasn't alone. Nearly every carrier that reported Q1 earnings this week told the same story: ugly quarter, better exit rate.
The pattern across all four: January and February were rough. March turned. Q2 looks better.
KNX has upgraded its contract rate target from low to mid-single digits at the start of the year to high single to low double digits in a single quarter.
Early bid results show volumes holding steady or growing while achieving mid-single-digit rate increases, better than the same period last year, when chasing lower prices still produced volume losses.
About 70% of KNX's business is currently in bid. The repricing is already underway. It just hasn't hit P&Ls yet.
Rate increases will start flowing through late Q2, build materially in Q3, and compound into Q4. For context on how seriously KNX means this: they're projecting Q2 profits nearly five times higher than Q1.
Brokers still operating on spot-era contract assumptions should expect the repricing to land hard in Q3. The time to negotiate is now, not after the summer.
Finding freight isn't the problem. Finding profitable freight is. Most dispatchers are sorting through noise when they should be booking.
PCS TMS with Cortex AI ranks every load by margin, scores backhaul potential, and cuts the guesswork — before your dispatcher commits to the wrong one.
🅿️ Truck Parking Club hits 5,000. Truck Parking Club crossed 5,000 locations across 49 states. For carriers hunting overnight parking, the network just got harder to ignore.
🚛 Werner goes deeper. Werner is expanding its asset-based intermodal operation into Mexico, doubling down on cross-border capacity at a time when most carriers are watching tariff chaos from the sidelines.
📋 FMCSA's CLP exemption. FMCSA granted an exemption allowing a carrier's commercial learner permit holders to operate without a CDL driver in the passenger seat.
🌐 USMCA's China problem. The USMCA review is zeroing in on how much Chinese manufacturing has quietly embedded itself in Mexico's supply chains — and whether that kills the nearshoring story brokers have been banking on.
⚖️ Tariff refund lawsuits. FedEx, UPS, and Oakley are facing lawsuits over how they handled Trump tariff refunds to importers. The allegation: they kept money that should have gone back to customers.
🧅 Florida man, onion thief. A Florida man is facing federal charges after allegedly stealing a truckload of onions.
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FMCSA launched a new carrier registry three weeks ago to stop freight fraud — zero new carriers have been registered since. Plus: PepsiCo is running 41 driverless trucks, peak season and a shrinking driver pool, cameras know where your carriers have been, and more.
Freight AI pilots succeed. Production deployments often don't. Augment CEO Harish Abbott on the change management gap — and what ops leaders need to do before the tech even matters.
The freight boom arrived. For some carriers, it arrived too late. We explain why in today's feature. Plus: real gouda fellas, satisfactory doesn't mean safe, LTL is waking up, and more.
Here's your weekly roundup of what’s trending across the freight industry on X, LinkedIn, Reddit, and YouTube.
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