In this edition of the Overdrive Radio podcast, drop in with three operators for a panel discussion held at the Mid-America Trucking Show last month. The discussion was aimed at showing all the ways these three have done what once might have been unthinkable -- get to, and pass, the 10-miles-per-gallon mark in a Class 8 tractor-trailer hauling freight. They included a man longtime Overdrive readers will well be familiar with -- 2007 Overdrive Trucker of the Year Henry Albert, running independent...
Apr 21, 2023•46 min
Happy Friday before Tax Day! Got those filings done? One suspects the answer is yes for our guests on today's edition of Overdrive Radio, Tim Pulli and his wife, Shelley Puzek-Pulli, our March Truckers of the Month: https://www.overdriveonline.com/trucker-of-the-year/article/15380625/path-to-profits-through-continual-adjustment-pulli-express The Chicago-area-headquartered owner-operators today run two trucks of their own and with another owner-operator leased on. They’re in the competition for O...
Apr 14, 2023•26 min
If you haven’t checked in at OverdriveOnline.com lately, get over to the Partners in Business section for our newly-updated, 2023 edition of the owner-operator business guide of the same name: http://overdriveonline.com/pib Weighing in at a grand total of 140 and more pages this year, the Partners in Business manual covers owner-operator business from start to finish, all the way from the basics of business planning before start-up to going independent, growing a small fleet and prepping adequat...
Apr 12, 2023•47 min
The freight spot markets are undeniably tough right now, that's sure, with rates continuing their slide for vans and reefers nationally in the last week, and profitability strained for all manner of independent owner-operators and small carriers with authority. Yet Adam Wingfield, whose talk early on the last day of the Mid-America Trucking Show Saturday, April 1, makes up the bulk of today's Overdrive Radio edition, wanted to make clear to all the owners in the audience a central message: "You'...
Apr 07, 2023•1 hr 8 min
With an FMCSA regulatory update session just concluded at MATS, one thing that stood out was that the agency didn't mention a plan to advance a rulemaking around its safety rating system for motor carriers. FMCSA Associate Administrator Larry Minor, however, speaking to the specialized carriers' Specialized Transportation Symposium just a month ago, revealed potential to begin a rulemaking process to possibly change the system as early as this year. Should the three-tiered Satisfactory, Unsatisf...
Mar 31, 2023•41 min
With truck-show season fast upon us, Long Haul Paul Marhoefer takes the mic for this week's Overdrive Radio edition as the Mid America Trucking show's set to commence on Thursday, March 30th. There will be the pageantry and the pomp, the polish and the shine. Influencers, thought leaders, and micro-celebrities. (Oh my!) But you know what Marhoefer looks forward to the most? It's the war stories. It's the accounts you hear while you're waiting on a table to open up at a steakhouse, or maybe while...
Mar 24, 2023•30 min
Owner-operator Andy Freeman, headquartered in Richland Center, Wisconsin, hauls in a 2014 Freightliner 122SD pulling a much newer Trail King RGN mini-deck, outfitted for what are mostly oversize loads on the hook. Overdrive Radio caught up with Freeman in Orlando, Florida, on the site of the Specialized Carriers and Rigging Association’s annual Specialized Transportation Symposium. Freeman, leased to Landstar now for many years and hauling most aviation-related freight -- “airport to airport,” a...
Mar 17, 2023•44 min
Owner-operator Chris Smith, one half of the team that is Dreamline Trucking, is today headquartered in Crossville, Tennessee. His trucking career follows a beginning far from U.S. shores across the pond in continental Europe, the Middle East and where his family's originally from, Britain. As regular readers will know, he and the other half of the Dreamline team -- Ruth, his wife and business partner -- were Overdrive’s Truckers of the Month for February. Follow this link if you missed Overdrive...
Mar 10, 2023•44 min
For this edition of the podcast, Mark Karnes tells the story of the petition that the Cobra company put to the Federal Communications Commission some years back to allow the use of FM rather than just standard AM in CB Radios. With the petition granted in 2021, Cobra is now out with AM/FM dual-mode versions of all of its most-commonly-used models. Karnes, a vice president with Cedar Electronics, Cobra's parent company, notes the transition from AM-only radios to dual modes won't happen overnight...
Mar 03, 2023•24 min
Louisiana-born-and-raised longtime operator Edward Jackson has been running for Overdrive's 2022 Small Fleet Champ John McGee Trucking since the operation was but a project of owner-operator McGee and a just a couple other employed haulers. These days, McGee "has a whole lot more on his plate," Jackson told me, testament to the small fleet's strong growth to around 20 trucks the last several years. Jackson and I were bumping and jostling about in the cab of one of McGee's late-model Macks on our...
Feb 24, 2023•26 min
The last couple weeks have been a bit heavy for several of us here at Overdrive, since learning of the passing of an operator we knew who took his own life. It's a difficult subject to know how to approach, to communicate, and one Overdrive Extra contributor/longtime hauler Clifford Petersen notes still comes with a stigma attached to it that make it all the more difficult. Namely, and more broadly, we're talking about mental health, and just how to be an effective means of support for all with ...
Feb 20, 2023•43 min
Owner-operator Kelvin Schmidt, Trucker of the Month for January in Overdrive's 2023 Trucker of the Year program, didn't come to a formula for enduring success without a tour through the proverbial school of hard knocks, as it were. In today's edition of Overdrive Radio, hear his own account of his start as a flatbed-pulling hotshotter in a one-ton dually, his stumbles through other trucks and growing "as bad as an accountant" focus on costs, revenue and profit per-trip to keep a guiding hand on ...
Feb 10, 2023•37 min
In this week's Overdrive Radio, drop back into more from host Todd Dills' November run with Oakley Trucking-leased owner-operator John McCormick out of Robards, Kentucky, near Henderson. Regular readers and listeners will recall the prior podcast, where we dug into McCormick's Pride & Polish-winning 2021 Kenworth, christened "Bandit" given its paint scheme’s resemblance to the Snowman’s rig in the 1970s classic movie Smokey & the Bandit. There, we heard plenty about just how that rig got...
Feb 03, 2023•33 min
We’ve got a bit of a special edition of Overdrive Radio for you this week. There’s a guest host of sorts, who’s going to walk us through a conversation with Chace Barber, cofounder of Edison Motors. If Barber's name sounds familiar, you may have read Overdrive Executive Editor Alex Lockie’s reporting of some of what Barber’s been doing with a diesel-electric concept that’s similar to the way locomotive work. The system features effectively an on-board diesel generator serving only to charge in t...
Jan 27, 2023•35 min
With today's edition of Overdrive Radio we’re going to drop into conversation with a man who’s been making a name for himself around the Atlanta-area trucking community the last decade or so while building a small fleet -- Mike Nelms, owner of Keep Trucking Transportation. The 20-or-so-truck fleet pulls reefers and dry vans with a mix of brokered and direct business, made up mostly of owners leased on, including many owner-operators. Mike Nelms has just a few trucks of his own. Nelms has brought...
Jan 20, 2023•31 min
In a previous edition of Overdrive Radio, News Editor Matt Cole dug into the American Transportation Research Institute's close look at the life-cycle emissions associated with the production and operation of diesel, battery-electric and hydrogen-powered trucks. As noted in the very title of that past episode, the research in some ways cut through the politics and PR that surrounds electric-vehicle technology, showing such vehicles would be no true "zero emissions" panacea when production-associ...
Jan 13, 2023•31 min
This time a year ago, well before the extent of the coming year's cost-inflationary pressures were fully known, owner-operators delivered mixed signals for the coming year of 2022, though 65% predicted income to be better or about the same as prior year 2021. This year, the script has most certainly flipped on the 2023 outlook, with 61% looking out and seeing worse or level conditions to come. Among commenters reflecting the near-majority fearing worse conditions ahead was one who, though fuel p...
Jan 06, 2023•23 min
Another day, another year nearly in the books -- here's our annual Overdrive Radio year-in-review. Thanks for hanging in with us through yet another big year for trucking as an owner-operator, one with absolutely huge challenges, for sure. We’ll hear about a lot of them again today. But hopefully, by the end, there’s something that sparks a new idea, or urges you on to completion of an old goal with new rigor, with new vigor. 2022 was a big one for Overdrive Radio, too -- thanks to longtime cont...
Dec 30, 2022•1 hr 20 min
And so much more, no doubt. Here’s a big Merry Christmas to everybody to start off this week’s edition of the Overdrive Radio podcast. We drop in on quite an experience Overdrive Executive Editor Alex Lockie had just a little more than a week ago at the Danbury, Connecticut, stop on the Wreaths Across America convoy tour from Maine down to Arlington National Cemetery for the big central wreath-laying event. It's but one among thousands around the country at veterans’ cemeteries designed to pay r...
Dec 23, 2022•16 min
When 11 years ago Overdrive first talked with Jared Flinn, operating partner of the BulkLoads.com load board specializing in bulk freight, that business was at the two-guys-in-basement stage, following Flinn’s work trucking himself a little, then managing logistics for a big commodities outfit. He comes to the BulkLoads.com project with a passion to serve small fleets and owner-operators, the 1-5-truck carriers that he notes in today’s Overdrive Radio podcast are the board’s primary customers (i...
Dec 16, 2022•32 min
Owner-operator Angelique “Tornado” Temple's one-truck Tornado Transport business, based out of Beaverdam, Virginia, follows a two-decade-plus career as a company driver hauling bulk liquid hazmat, much of it spent with Atlantic Bulk Carrier. If her name sounds familiar, it could be for a couple reasons. She sits on the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration's 2021-established Driver Advisory Subcommittee, for one. For two, she's the latest inductee in the Howes Hall of Fame recognizing wort...
Dec 09, 2022•35 min
In this edition of Overdrive Radio, drop into a dry-bulk run in the Working Bobtail, 2015 & Newer category-winning rig in Overdrive's 2022 Pride & Polish competition, owner-operator John McCormick's 'Bandit' 2021 Kenworth W900L. It's the Oakley-leased owner-operator's bread-and-butter haul back and forth between Cresline Plastic Pipe in Henderson, Kentucky, near the McCormick home in Robards, and Westlake Chemical’s PVC complex in Calvert City. Hooked to one of two Mac pneumatic tank tra...
Dec 02, 2022•31 min
This edition of Overdrive Radio picks up where Overdrive News Editor Matt Cole left on in his reporting from mid-late October around truck-involved crash statistics in the four years prior to, and the four years after, implementation of the FMCSA's electronic logging device mandate, which began in earnest right at the end of 2017: https://www.overdriveonline.com/csas-data-trail/article/15301876/crashes-injuries-and-fatalities-up-posteld-mandate As many listeners and Overdrive readers have likely...
Nov 25, 2022•27 min
Now Lansing, Michigan-based operator Toby Bogard is on a mission. That mission is multifold, as you’ll hear in today’s edition of Overdrive Radio, where we catch back up with the driver, now hauling for Heartland Express after about a year and a half away from the road. Bogard’s return to the road follows a million-plus-mile career prior, and he's newly involved in efforts to push along an idea for something of a feel-good movie narrative about the life and times of a trucker, framed by his last...
Nov 18, 2022•27 min
In this edition of Overdrive Radio on Veterans Day, we’re going to get a bit of look at how the nation, and the trucking business, remains a bulwark for opportunity no doubt in part attributable to servicemembers’ many sacrifices through the decades gone by. We’ll hear from Slava Sobetki, co-owner of the Chicago-area-based Taurus Auto Group car-haul fleet, and who Overdrive profiled as well just yesterday as part of a package of stories that digs into a few relative newcomers to the Transportati...
Nov 11, 2022•28 min
Hank Seaton, with the Seaton & Husk law firm, spoke at the National Association of Small Trucking Companies’ annual conference a couple weeks back about what he called Fraud Prevention and Supply Chain Protocol. He offered what he feels is a possible preventive fix to the crime of double brokering when misrepresentation is involved. In today's edition of Overdrive Radio, drop into a long talk with Seaton about somewhat simple steps carriers, brokers and shippers working together can take to ...
Nov 04, 2022•46 min
In this Overdrive Radio edition, dive into parts of the awards ceremony for Overdrive's Small Fleet Championship, held Thursday, November 20. From a tribute to the great boxing and wrestling ring announcer Michael Buffer to announcement of the competition's winners, the podcast drops most importantly into a roundtable discussion with all four competition finalists. Overdrive Radio host Todd Dills teed it up with a question: What's been your biggest business challenge of the past year or two, and...
Oct 28, 2022•47 min
With customary Overdrive Radio host Todd Dills out at the conference of the National Association of Small Trucking Companies' annual conference today in Nashville, he turns the mic over to contributor, trucker and songwriter Long Haul Paul Marhoefer, who will introduce a trucking-radio personality you may or may not have heard of before who Paul feels is bringing something of a sense of wonder back to trucking radio That’d be none other than Jimmy Mac, host of Dave Nemo Weekends on the Sirius XM...
Oct 21, 2022•28 min
In this edition of the Overdrive Radio podcast, we drop back two weeks in time to the site of the Mayberry Truck Show in Mt. Airy, North Carolina, where despite rain threatening from remnants of Hurricane Ian, scads of owners and operators showed out in force for the second annual event at the home location of Bottomley Enterprises. Our own video editor Lawson Rudisill was out at the show, and, given fairly recent news of negative GDP growth in both the first and second quarters -- one favored r...
Oct 14, 2022•25 min
Former CVSA president Steve Vaughn, currently vice president of field operations for PrePass, stressed asking the tough questions about technology and all the infrastructure put in place to support it when it comes to roadside inspections and over-the-air communication from the truck to law enforcement. Getting answers to those questions, some of which he details in today's edition of Overdrive Radio, will be absolutely key to making any possible rulemakings around electronic ID something indust...
Oct 07, 2022•30 min
