HDT Talks Trucking

Where is the next generation of trucking leaders coming from? HDT editor-in-chief, Deborah Lockridge, discusses HDT’s annual Emerging Leaders awards and talks to three of our past honorees about their views of trends and issues facing trucking, including what fleets and the industry can do to recruit and encourage young leaders like themselves. This episode features discussions with Olivia Young,...

There have long been allegations of employee misclassification in the trucking industry, especially among companies that abuse the lease-purchase contractor model. But aside from those examples, there is ample case law around the country suggesting any subcontractor performing work that is ostensibly the same as the contracting entity must be declared an employee. That calls into question this ind...

Are truck owner-operators trucking entrepreneurs, or poorly disguised employees? HDT’s editors dig into the issue of employee misclassification, California’s effort to crack down on it, and what that could mean for trucking. We’ll explore autonomous trucks: What will they mean for drivers? Is the technology ready? Our editors will share maintenance lessons learned at this year’s Technology & M...

The entry-level driver training requirements were a long time coming – and now they’re going to be even longer, as the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration announced a two-year delay just days before the new regulation was to go into effect Feb. 7. On this episode of HDT Talks Trucking, we have three people with a stake in the ELDT program, and they aren't happy that it's been pushed back....

Once the final deadline for mandatory electronic logging devices came and went on Dec. 18, 2019, you might have thought that was the end of the story. Everyone’s now on ELDs, fleets are compliant, everything’s good, right? But plenty of issues remain unresolved and plenty of questions remain unanswered. In this episode of HDT Talks Trucking, Mike Ahart, VP of regulatory affairs at Omnitracs, says...

We’ve written a lot about electric trucks over the past five years or so. Yet there’s still a lot we don’t know about how they’re going to work in real-world fleet operations. How will we integrate them into our fleets? How much will they cost? How much will we pay for electricity compared to diesel? Will we be able to maintain our productivity and still run at a profit? Every subject we bring up...

There’s been a lot of recent activity on the drug-testing front in trucking: The debut of FMCSA’s long-awaited Drug and Alcohol Clearinghouse, a doubling of the percentage of drivers who must be randomly tested, and increased interest in alternatives to traditional urine testing. How is the legalization of marijuana in many states affecting the drug-testing of trucking’s safety-sensitive workers?...

It seems that hardly a week goes by here at Heavy Duty Trucking that we aren’t reporting on something related to electric trucks, so we’re digging into the electric future in this episode of HDT Talks Trucking. Podcast host and Equipment Editor Jim Park and HDT Senior Editor Jack Roberts share their experiences driving and reporting on various electric trucks over the last several years. You’ll al...

What can trucking companies do to improve their safety records? Under the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration's Compliance, Safety, Accountability program, fleets live and die by their CSA BASICs in the Safety Measurement System. CSA considers nearly everything a fleet does, from roadside violations and crashes to compliance audit results. It doesn't take much to slip down into the risky c...

Listen to a preview of what's to come on the HDT Talks Trucking podcast! HDT Equipment Editor, Jim Park, gives an overview of what topics the podcast covers, as well as a sneak peek with clips from season one.