Overdrive Radio

Year 2025 was a rollercoaster downhill for Overdrive March Trucker of the Month Greg Labosky., headquartered in Connecticut. Coming off gains made during a relatively steady 2024 in the 2017 Freightliner purchased used several years prior, and with a semi-finalist nod in the Trucker of the Year competition, mechanical breakdowns yielded tens of thousands' worth in repairs. Copious downtime, too, o...

"I think we're really there, where we've finally got tailwinds instead of headwinds." --ATBS Vice President Mike Hosted, speaking in this edition of Overdrive Radio about market fundamentals owner-operators face in 2026, despite the ongoing fuel shock. In this week's podcast, we’re tracking back through the full audio from our Partners in Business coproducer ATBS’s twice-annual updates charting tr...

“Owner-operators want tools, small fleets want tools, to be able to do these things. And it’s not that they’re necessarily trying to save money, usually, but they want to save time.” –Tyler Robertson, founder of Diesel Laptops, on the success of his business providing software/hardware to truckers for self-help in the diagnosis-and-repair process Irmo, South Carolina-headquartered Tyler Robertson,...

"Carriers have been vetted to death. ... For 20 years, carriers have been vetted, vetted, vetted. And brokers have not. There's no entry-level audit, no checking in every year like the carrier has to do. The carrier has a responsibility and an ability to start asking questions." --Dale Prax of Freightvalidate Asking questions, that is, to fully "vet the brokers," noted Prax, freight fraud watcher,...

"If you're really concerned about safety numbers, we want zero fatalities, we want all these things to happen ... we have to train people, we have to pay people, and we have to give them a safe place to rest. That's the first three things we should be doing, and until we do that, we're never going to fix highway safety. It's never going to get better." --Owner-Operator Independent Drivers Associat...

The answers to the question in the title here came rapid-fire, and with certainty, from reps of six different state agencies with oversize and overweight permits responsibilities, amid much laughter from the assembled at the Specialized Carriers & Rigging Association's transport symposium last month. To tally the answers up: four definitive 'No's, one 'Absolutely not,' and just one 'Doubtful.' Off...

It’s been some kind of a year and more for Hell Bent Xpress owner Jamie Hagen. The South Dakota and Michigan-headquartered fleet he’s built from one truck over many years is back to 10 all-Mack power units after some reduction in the last, difficult year. Hagen was among Overdrive’s Small Fleet Championship finalists a couple years back. Along with past Small Fleet Champ Jason Cowan of Silver Cree...

Off the top of the podcast this week, the voice of February Trucker of the Month Adam Mackey, headquartered in Mustang, Oklahoma, about his "Aftersolo" Youtube channel where's been documenting his journey through owner-operated trucking since 2022. Named after his dog, Solo, whom he'd sadly lost around that time, Aftersolo features plenty in the way of DIY care he's put into the Freightliner Colum...

In this week's edition of the Overdrive Radio podcast, catch the address delivered by, and Q&A with, Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration chief Derek Barrs at the annual transportation symposium of the Specialized Carriers and Rigging Association, held last week in Birmingham, Alabama. Barrs touches on quite a lot, including the last-week-introduced Dalilah Law that might cement the FMCSA’s...

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 discussion...

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 des...

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...

"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 introductio...

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...

"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 ke...

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 performa...

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...

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 M...

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...

"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...

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...

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...

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...

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,...

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...