Overdrive Radio

"Any small carrier should belong to something, some sort of trade orgnanziation so they have like-minded people to bouce ideas off of." --Small Fleet Champ finalist Otto Transfer CFO & safety director Kevin Otto Off the top of the podcast this last week of October the voice Minnesota-headquartered Kevin Otto, owner and leader with his wife, CEO Liz Otto, of Otto Transfer, this year celebrating a w...

Today on the podcast, I’m handing the mic over to my esteemed colleague and longtime Overdrive Extra contributor Paul Marhoefer and the many truckers he spoke to out at the 2026 edition of the TenFour D.C. truck show and driver appreciation and advocacy event out on the National Mall. If you missed our coverage of Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administrator Derek Barrs’ appearance for a talk and to...

Off the top of this week's Overdrive Radio edition, a little of the voice of owner-operator Robert Forsyth, not bragging one bit about a very long career that stretches back to the 1970s and his pre-CDL chauffeur’s license, log-truck driving and more. With as many times as he's traveled coast-to-coast over those decades, if he doesn't know how to get to where he's going without a GPS assist, he sa...

With this episode for Oct. 5, 2026, we're marking the big 10-4 day over the weekend with a look back at the 2017 ELD mandate protests that would inspire the very founding of the TenFour D.C. truck show and advocacy event on the Mall, just concluded for the '26 installment: https://overdriveonline.com/15836570 With the post that features the podcast at OverdriveOnline.com, find our own Long Haul Pa...

"You've got to do something for your own fuel, or accept the consequences of not." --Howes lead chemist Jed Talbot How do you know that what you’re getting from your neighborhood No. 2 diesel pump is quality fuel? The $6-and-more-per-gallon price isn’t going to tell you much, that’s for sure, and chemist Jed Talbot is on a mission to make sure it’s abundantly clear. For this week’s Overdrive Radio...

Arbritrary. Capricious. Those two words are a principal basis for owner-operator Jorge Rivera Lujan and fellow petitioners’ challenge to FMCSA’s non-domiciled CDL rule. The rule itself is strongly supported by most Overdrive readers, and the petitioners’ challenge saw significant action in the D.C. federal appeals court last week Tuesday, September 15. Tip of the hat to Overdrive’s own Alex Lockie...

Off the top of the podcast, the voice of Overdrive’s August Trucker of the Month Dee Zeeman, in a business partnership with wife, Bev, in the back office and hauling for now close to a decade now with authority as White Pine Transport. The name’s a combination of a couple different horse farms he remembers from his youth growing up in Utah, and as he tells up top, a name that just worked. Yet for...

Off the top of this Overdrive Radio edition, the voice of Atlantic Logistics CEO Rob Hooper talking about trust, responding specifically to a question about whether all the shipper, broker and carrier friction in today’s freight markets is driving wedges between the relationships. Regular listeners well know what we're talking about -- cyber fraud and identity verificaitons pingpongig back and for...

A tip of the hat off the top of this week’s Overdrive Radio edition to our social media coordinator Jazzmin Campbell, who shared yet another towing mishap occurring in the city of Charlotte, North Carolina. It bears all the hallmarks of a parking-lot trap, the driver reporting a bill for upward of $9,000 in fees after he said he exceeded a time limit at the lot on Sunset Road by about a half hour...

This week’s Overdrive Radio features Overdrive Senior Editor Matt Cole's talk with our July Trucker of the Month. Based just outside Baltimore, owner-operator Jeffrey Crise runs open-deck freight, loading equipment quite often out of the port there and, as Cole wrote in his story late last month, the owner’s smack dab in the middle of a business fresh start: https://overdriveonline.com/15831345 Ca...

For this week’s edition of Overdrive Radio we're picking up with longtime trucker-songwriter and performer #TonyJustice after getting the opportunity last week to share news of the Large Cars & Guitars truck show’s big $14K haul for the Susan G. Komen foundation. That makes $200K-plus given by the show's participating truckers and sponsors to the breast cancer awareness, support, and research advo...

What’s happened to broker transparency? Owner-operators were asking that more than a year ago now, just a few months into the Trump administration, with a late 2024 rulemaking proposal released but no further action then yet taken by the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration: https://www.overdriveonline.com/15746061 In this week’s edition of Overdrive Radio, we bring transparency up because,...

Since the original April 2024 airing of this edition of Overdrive Radio, our own research has underscored small fleet owner Surinder Gill's contention that the federal minimum bond requirement for brokers should vary in size, depending on the size of the broker's book of business. Nearly half of all 2026 respondents to Overdrive's survey expressed a similar view, and the vast majority felt the cur...

Independent and step deck-hauling owner-operator Ruben Dotto, headquartered in central Florida, was Overdrive’s Trucker of the Month for June. He's most certainly seen positive pressure rise on brokered rates, particularly for the heavy-equipment and machinery side of his outbound-from-Florida business this year. Good in the short term, for certain, but no matter the market conditions Dotto's pois...

"The set-up packet didn't even contain a contract. ... [and] would come back and would get thrown into a manila folder, thrown into a file and forgotten, and you were using the truck." --Roar Logistics Senior Manager Scott Filipetti on many brokers' carrier set-up processes in the days of yore What brokers call "carrier onboarding” has certainly evolved mightily from the process Roar Logistics' Sc...

Off the top of the podcast this week, a personal invite to all the small fleet owners in the audience to take this final month to get into the competition that is Overdrive's Small Fleet Championship. Time is ticking down fast to the July 31 deadline to compete to be one of four finalists who will net a trip with us to the annual conference of National Association of Small Trucking Companies in Na...

This week in Overdrive Radio, a sitdown talk with Tennessee Highway Patrol Lieutenant Christopher Brooks I recorded during the first day of Roadcheck in May. You may have heard parts of the conversation in the video two weeks back that centered on one of Roadcheck's primary focus areas in remote electronic-logging-device manipulation, chameleon carriers and all that’s happening at federal and stat...

An extra-special edition of Overdrive Radio this week, handing the mic over to our own Long Haul Paul and, with the narration this week for the scene out at Large Cars & Guitars last month in Bristol, Tennessee, another of Overdrive's own in regular contributor Bobbi McGee. Her story will be live early Monday, June 22, 2026: https://overdriveonline.com/15828174 There at the truck show, three drive...

In this week's Overdrive Radio podcast, dig into Overdrive Senior Editor Matt Cole’s talk with Colorado headquartered 5S Express owner-operator Ron Schreiner, leased to Pejsa Family Transportation pulling the company’s tankers out of the oilfield on mostly short dedicated runs. Schreiner’s got many decades of experience that started with a 1950s family business he got involved in growing up in the...

In this week's edition of the Overdrive Radio podcast, dig into issues of safety responsibility in the brokered-freight world after the Supreme Court’s May ruling removing a key defense many brokers have used in state courts to deflect civil lawsuits for “negligent hiring" after a crash. The short of it for potential impacts: More brokers are certain to need to be able to readily defend their case...

In this week's podcast, Truckstop.com founder and CEO Scott Moscrip tells the story of his return to an active management role in the company after the prior CEO's removal and company board's insistence he retake the wheel. Since that happened, roughly a year ago now, "we started trimming at the top," he said. "About 80% of Truckstop's leadership was let go within about six months of me being back...

With this week’s edition of the Overdrive Radio podcast, hear our talk with Black Sheep Express three-truck owner-operator and "problem-solver" Sam Kelly, headquartered in Mississippi and Overdrive's April Trucker of the Month, putting him in the running as a semi-finalist for our Trucker of the Year award for 2026: https://www.overdriveonline.com/15823428 If you or your small fleet, up to three t...

Owner-operator and Overdrive 2025 Small Fleet Champ Wes Oberman's mostly-open-deck Oberman Logistics business makes good on growth goals with a transparent promise to owner-operators leasing there: 15% of the gross for costs, no insurance chargebacks. Since his big win last fall in the 3-10-trucks division, the owner-operator's moved to 13 trucks, including his own 2026 Kenworth T680, by virtue of...

Bit of a public service announcement for the bulk of this week’s edition of Overdrive Radio. FMCSA Office of Registration director Ken Riddle emphasizes just what owners with motor carrier authority need to do by May 14 this week to prep for the agency’s long-awaited new registration system, called Motus. Maybe you'd also been wondering just what was so important about the May 14 deadline in the a...

Just how likely is any given owner-operator to be inspected during the next installment of the Roadcheck inspection event? It's slated for May 12-14 next week, and if the 2025 event provides a roadmap, your chance is about 1 in 5. Just post-Roadcheck last year a few thousand of you weighed in with answer to the question shown in a chart you'll find at https://overdriveonline.com/15824079 21% of po...