Overdrive Radio

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...

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...