A trade group is suing to strip California and New York of the power to issue commercial driver's licenses entirely. Plus: $3/mi is now breakeven, DOT wants to rate every carrier, routing guides are falling apart, and more.
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"We're basically in the center of the United States. As middle as you can get. Every class one railroad comes through Kansas City. It makes it very unique."
Four Midwest states set all-time diesel records yesterday. Plus: Texas is going after five CDL mills, a man paid truckers $9,000 a load to haul cocaine, California just opened the door to driverless trucks, and more.
Happy Hump Day. Four Midwest states set all-time diesel records yesterday, and the only fix is happening in a meeting room in Beijing today. We break it down in today's feature story.
Plus:
🎓 Texas Is Going After Five CDL Mills. Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton sent civil investigative demands to five trucking schools, alleging they told non-English speaking students that English proficiency wasn't required to complete their programs, advertised training timelines as short as 20 days, and falsely claimed to be certified. The five named are: CDLCall.com in San Antonio; EP Texas Trucking School in El Paso and Odessa; Fast Track CDL in Garland; Lindenwood Education System in Arlington; and Trucker Certified across four Panhandle locations. Paxton's office noted that graduates from these schools feed directly into the DFW and Houston freight markets.
🚛 Man Paid Truckers $9,000 a Load to Haul Cocaine. Luis Manuel Castillo Garcia, a 52-year-old Mexican national living illegally in Laredo, was sentenced to nearly 13 years in federal prison after recruiting commercial truck drivers to haul cocaine in hidden compartments, paying $9,000 per load. Law enforcement seized two trucks on back-to-back days in March 2025, uncovering 50 kilograms in hidden compartments. Two months later, a traffic stop caught one of his recruited drivers with another 18.5 kilograms in a duffel bag. Total seized: 65 kilograms, with a street value of over $1 million. Laredo is the busiest commercial land port in the country, and apparently, also where you go when you need a CDL holder who needs $9,000.
🤖 California Just Opened the Door to Driverless Trucks. California's DMV released regulations in late April giving autonomous heavy-duty truck makers a formal path to commercial deployment in the state for the first time, ending years of restrictions that pushed AV testing to Texas. The bar is high: 500,000 miles of testing before commercial deployment, with 100,000 of those required inside California. The Teamsters called it "reckless" and vowed to fight it in court. The AV companies called it long overdue. Texas is still where most autonomous trucks run commercially, and that isn't changing this week, but California just stopped being the state that said no.
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Four Midwest states set all-time diesel records in a single day on Tuesday.
Indiana hit $6.12 per gallon, Illinois $6.11, Michigan $6.09, and Wisconsin $5.87.
Refinery outages in Illinois and Indiana are compounding the Hormuz-driven supply shock, which means the Midwest is getting hit twice. The national on-highway diesel average reached $5.639 for the week of May 11, roughly $2 above where forecasters said it would be at the start of the year.
Kentucky's governor declared a state of emergency this week, cut fuel taxes 10 cents per gallon, and activated price-gouging laws with diesel already at $5.37 statewide before the latest surge.
Why it’s spiking: The Strait of Hormuz has been closed since May 5, choking roughly 20% of global oil flows. Trump rejected Iran's latest ceasefire proposal Sunday, calling the situation "on life support," sending Brent crude up 3.5% to $104.88 a barrel. There is no domestic fix for a closed strait.
Trump-Xi wildcard: Trump is in Beijing through Friday, meeting Xi Jinping, with Iran and Hormuz as the primary agenda items. China is Iran's largest crude buyer and has real leverage over Tehran. If Beijing agrees to use it, analysts estimate reopening the strait could drop diesel prices 25 to 60 cents per gallon relatively quickly, assuming Midwest refinery issues stabilize alongside it. That is a meaningful but uncertain if.
Answer to QOTD: 61%
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🦭 The Internet Found a Carrier Owner Who Threw a Rock at a Seal. Igor Lytvynchuk, owner of Transridge Inc. out of Kent, Washington, was detained in Hawaii after a video surfaced of him throwing a rock at an endangered monk seal. His carrier profile got 142,000 impressions overnight.
🥛 Protein Powder Is Running Out. Whey protein prices are up more than 50% since January, with some suppliers sold out through year-end, threatening the supply chains behind Premier Protein, Dymatize, and the protein-fortified everything trend hitting every grocery aisle.
⛽️ UPS & FedEx Just Piled On More Surcharges. Both carriers added per-pound international fuel fees of 20 to 32 cents this month, with ground surcharges rising 26.7% in Q1.
✈️ Air Cargo Jumped 30% Last Month. Spot rates for air freight surged 30% in April, driven by tariff front-running and Hormuz disruption pushing importers off ocean lanes.
📊 Hub Group Still Can't Close Its Books. An accounting error is pushing further financial reporting delays at the publicly traded logistics company.
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A trade group is suing to strip California and New York of the power to issue commercial driver's licenses entirely. Plus: $3/mi is now breakeven, DOT wants to rate every carrier, routing guides are falling apart, and more.
"We're basically in the center of the United States. As middle as you can get. Every class one railroad comes through Kansas City. It makes it very unique."
S&P is cautiously optimistic about the freight recovery, but it still kept RXO's rating below investment grade. Plus: the Strait is set to reopen, Volvo pulls the safety driver, the U.S. goes after cheap trailers, and more.
The World Cup kicked off, and Amazon decided to become forklift certified. Plus: the Fed could spoil freight's party, C.H. Robinson in crosshairs again, the World Cup is a freight problem, and more.
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