At the annual conference of the National Association of Small Trucking Companies a couple weeks back in Nashville, TA Petro Truck Service VP Homer Hogg presented results from his analysis of recent-history fault codes seen by the three leading all-model diagnostic equipment providers. He analyzed codes data to determine the five biggest parts of the trucks those codes were related to. At No. 1, probably no surprise, were aftertreatment-related codes, and his talk featured here then provided an i...
Nov 17, 2023•39 min
This edition of Overdrive Radio features a special spotlight of sorts on what a wild and wooly year it’s been -- for everyone is some way, that's sure, yet no less for Overdrive’s 2023 Small Fleet Champs. As was noted up top of our previous podcast, last week at the National Association of Small Trucking Companies’ annual conference we recognized four finalists as well as several other past semi-finalists, finalists and champs in attendance. Ahead of the presentation Thursday, November 2, Overdr...
Nov 10, 2023•39 min
Today on the podcast we’re featuring Overdrive News Editor Matt Cole’s talk with October Trucker of the Month John Schiltz, nominated for the Overdrive 2023 Trucker of the Year award by his wife and now fully-minted, CDL-holding business partner, Sarah Schiltz: https://www.overdriveonline.com/trucker-of-the-year/article/15637523/owneroperator-john-schiltz-a-keen-eye-on-maintenance The pair run a two-truck fleet as a team and pull alongside each other in a pair of Kenworths (a 1999 W9 and a 2013 ...
Nov 06, 2023•31 min
That's the message in a certain way of the very existence of companies like Forum Mobility, around for just a couple years as a vehicle-charging-services and equipment leasing company. Company regional director Ron Hunt leads the podcast with that very notion, sounding like many an owner-operator in wait-and-see mode around electric-drive tech and battery-charging-infrastructure development. Hunt’s a veteran of the trucking world who got involved with electric-truck start-up Xos Trucks some time...
Oct 27, 2023•32 min
Nashville, Tennessee-based Ken Greff in this edition of Overdrive Radio tells the tale of the early years of his 70-year trucking career in and around trucking, much of it spent in truck sales in Tennessee. Yet Greff got his start behind the wheel far away from the U.S. Southeast in Western Canada, driving and owning trucks in a variety of operations. The podcast excerpts the first edition of a new effort by host and McMahon Truck Centers sales rep Corey Price, who lives due East of Nashville ne...
Oct 20, 2023•35 min
Misplaced priorities, too, according to K&D Transport's Andrew Axelson in this edition of Overdrive Radio: "Instead of limiting the speed on trucks, they should really limit the speed on cars," he said. That where he contends most of the outlandish speed issues on American highways today sits. This round of viewpoints on the FMCSA's move toward a speed limiter device mandate for in-use trucks follows September news picked up via the Department of Transportation’s regulatory calendar update t...
Oct 13, 2023•18 min
In this edition of Overdrive Radio, the clarion voices of the spectacular pair of owner-operators behind Chicago-area-based, two-truck Rita’s Absolute Trucking. That’d be Roger and Rita Wilson, who made a match with marriage in 1998 after separate histories trucking, Rita toting butter up and down the Eastern seaboard, Roger with an OTR history that stretches back to hauling swinging meat in 1970 his first time out over-the-road. Through the 1980s, he worked with a friend in LTL consolidation ou...
Oct 06, 2023•34 min
Owner-operator business services firm ATBS' midyear owner-operator update session September 19 revealed a few different ways the average ATBS client might make up the income loss we’ve seen over the last year and a half -- on average, it’s been an almost 10% decline. In real terms, though, as ATBS VP Mike Hosted notes at the top of this edition, a 1% increase in fuel mileage would get all of that back for the average owner-operator. In short, there are tangible things that can be done to combat ...
Sep 29, 2023•1 hr 14 min
Also in the podcast: Matt Cole live from the Guilty by Association Truck Show in Joplin Missouri in the area around 4 State Trucks there: https://www.overdriveonline.com/custom-rigs/article/15634903/guilty-by-association-truck-show-starts-strong-in-joplin Cole reports from Day 1 at GBATS -- How many owner-operators were at the show? What’s the mood in what’s certainly been a challenging year for so many small-business truckers? Cole spoke as owner-operators were getting parked up at 4 State Truc...
Sep 22, 2023•37 min
K&D Transport third-generation owner/manager Adam Johnson in this Overdrive Radio edition narrates the beginnings of his grandfather’s time trucking with a 1946 Brockway he purchased without the seats to save a little on the price. – It was a different time, and Johnson’s grandfather was back from World War II, where he was a POW for 18 months, Johnson said, a story he told in part attendant to our recent profile of K&D Transport recognition their semi-finalist status in Overdrive's Smal...
Sep 15, 2023•29 min
Owner-operator Steven Massat is today headquartered in Addison, Illinois, and leased to nearby small fleet T Max Transportation with quite a special truck. Regular Overdrive readers may well have seen his story at OverdriveOnline.com a couple weeks back now: https://www.overdriveonline.com/trucker-of-the-year/article/15546000/ownerop-overcomes-physical-challenge-for-successful-career There, owner-operator Massat was named August Trucker of the Month, putting him in the running for Overdrive's 20...
Sep 09, 2023•26 min
For this edition of Overdrive Radio, DAT Freight and Analytics' Chief Marketing Officer Jeff Hopper, who’s been with the company now for decades, notes the undeniable spike in double brokering, in identity theft and hop-in, hop-out "take the money and run" and other schemes that has led to a doubling of staff in DAT’s compliance department as well as a host of other in-process security enhancements there: https://www.overdriveonline.com/business/article/15542218/dat-steps-up-fight-against-freigh...
Sep 01, 2023•47 min
Chris Dowdy counts he and his wife, Paula, and their family among the lucky ones. The subject of this edition of Overdrive Radio is one ripped right from the last month or so of a myriad headlines -- the bankruptcy and ceasing operations of Yellow, The LTL giant finally shut after being propped up by an astounding amount of loaned money straight from the U.S. taxpayer in recent years. That followed the business generally struggling financially for many more. The largely union workforce there was...
Aug 25, 2023•26 min
Trucker-songwriter leading light Tony Justice's new "Greatest Shifts" record features six new tracks, five originals plus a fantastic rendition of Jerry Reed's classic "Eastbound and Down," and 14 previously released highlights from four records -- "Apple Pie Moonshine," "Brothers of the Highway," "Stars Stripes and White Lines," and "18 Gears to Life." Those records comprise a decades' worth of music from Justice, excluding unfortunately his first trucking-themed record, "On the Road," for reas...
Aug 18, 2023•45 min
Today we’re peeking through a window onto a conference in its second year and coming up down in Houston, building on a thus-far-four-year journey of one New Jersey-based Rahmel Wattley, host of the 2019-founded Truck N' Hustle podcast. That's right, for this edition of Overdrive Radio, it’s host-to-host, as it were. Truck N’ Hustle, well-known among entrepreneurs of a variety of stripes all around trucking and transportation, pitches to owner-operators and small fleets in a variety of trucking n...
Aug 11, 2023•34 min
She does just about all of it, Crystal Rives, when it comes to the maintenance of her one-truck Texas-intrastate car-haul business. She's put a big emphasis on solid partnerships through the years, whether with a trusted engine/major mechnical shop or a growing stable of customers. That's particularly so since she went out on her own with authority to haul cars in 2016. The move followed almost a decade and a half hauling cars for other companies, work in the Texas oilfield, end dump, side dump,...
Aug 04, 2023•32 min
We ask again: What's the worst stretch of road on your routes? Let's keep a spotlight on where state DOTs should put all those tax dollars -- dial 615-852-8530 to weigh in. Here,something of a lightning round of owner-operator responses to our prior call, put out attendant to the podcast several weeks back about the terrible toll I-40 in Arizona is taking from owner-ops' pocketbooks in repairs. Rougher than a corncob? You bet: https://www.overdriveonline.com/overdrive-extra/article/15540092/ariz...
Jul 28, 2023•9 min
Today on the podcast, the captivating story of a truck -- and its owner-operator, Kate Whiting of Wisconsin. The rig, a 1973 Kenworth W900A, turned a half-century old this year of the Kenworth company's centennial. Whiting piloted the rig, "Cherry Pie," in the 100th-anniversary parade in Chillicothe, Ohio, back in June: https://www.overdriveonline.com/custom-rigs/article/15541257/kenworth-celebrates-100th-anniversary-with-kenworth-truck-parade That's not its only recent accolade, following the t...
Jul 21, 2023•26 min
In today’s early special edition of Overdrive Radio for podcast subscribers, another installment in the Trucking’s State of Surveillance multipart series: https://www.overdriveonline.com/15541635 If you missed Long Haul Paul Marhoefer’s talk with Karen Levy in the previous edition of the podcast, track back to it -- it dropped Friday, July 7, to the Overdrive Radio feed. Levy’s "Data Driven" book, about how the ELD mandate changed the face of trucking in so many ways (magnified longstanding issu...
Jul 10, 2023•1 hr 2 min
For this Overdrive Radio edition, a bit of a special preview of a special report dropping this coming Monday, July 10. It’s called “Trucking’s State of Surveillance” and follows Overdrive’s surveying of our owner-operator, small fleet and company driver readers about remote monitoring- and/or tracking-capable technologies used in the business. We asked readers assess the techs they use -- from smartphones and ELDs to truck and trailer telematics and various permutations of monitoring video camer...
Jul 07, 2023•39 min
This week on Overdrive Radio, we reintroduce June’s Trucker of the Month, Debbie Desiderato, in conversation with our own Overdrive News Editor Matt Cole. Cole’s story about Desiderato’s long trucking career is live as of earlier this week at the website: https://www.overdriveonline.com/trucker-of-the-year/article/15541324/independent-debbie-desideratos-keys-to-trucking-success Today, we’ll hear parts of that in Desiderato’s own words. She’s built considerable value with the do-it-yourself appro...
Jun 30, 2023•36 min
Asked by Overdrive News Editor Matt Cole for the stretch of road they felt could be described as the absolute worst in the nation, all but one owner-operator at Shell Rotella's SuperRigs show two weeks back in Wyoming didn’t flinch in singling out I-40 in Arizona. Others are calling it the absolute worst they’ve ever seen. Danville, Virginia-based owner-operator Joey Slaughter, who runs the route routinely on cross-country step deck hauls, was the man who brought this subject to our attention th...
Jun 23, 2023•21 min
With this Overdrive Radio edition for June 16, 2023, points of view on the absolute necessity of respecting the needs for work-life balance for your personal sanity, and for the success of your business. That balance can be particularly elusive for independent owner-operators, as Silver Creek Transportation owner Jason Cowan well knows -- he spent much of his early career in those shoes with just a single truck himself, and in some ways balance might elude those of you who fit that bill more tha...
Jun 16, 2023•1 hr 5 min
'Strike when the market's cold' -- it might be a maxim for the outlook on small business for Overdrive May Trucker of the Month Matthew Karr, coming off an excellent profit year hauling fuel leased to Quality Transportation out of Halltown, Missouri: https://www.overdriveonline.com/trucker-of-the-year/article/15448529/owneroperator-matthew-karrs-fuel-hauling-hustle-pays-off Now's the ideal time, as he details in this podcast, to go back out on his own to do things entirely his way, keeping a pas...
Jun 09, 2023•36 min
This edition of Overdrive Radio touches on a area of long-well-founded concern for owner-operators. That’s the importance of, when possible, fighting the stains on the motor vehicle record that can come in the form of tickets for moving violations of all types. Pay the fine, and it’s like pleading guilty and doing the proverbial time. A "conviction” will be paid for in a myriad ways beyond just the cash fine: higher insurance rates, marks on your company’s CSA SMS profile and its scoring, possib...
Jun 02, 2023•40 min
'Owner-op business, start to finish' -- it could be the motto to describe Overdrive's annual coproduction with business services firm ATBS of the Partners in Business manual: http://overdriveonline.com/pib And it was the broader topic of this talk with the great Red Eye Radio host Eric Harley at the Mid-America Trucking Show, on the occasion of the 2023 PIB book's release, now available for download via the previous link. The talk includes Overdrive Editor Todd Dills and longtime contributor and...
May 26, 2023•55 min
Truck show platform personalities come and go, but Hope Zvara's mission to improve truckers' quality of life with a program that leans on small, incremental changes in their daily routines continues to gain traction. Founder and CEO of Mother Trucker Yoga, Zvara's the author of "Trucking Yoga: Simple Fitness for fhe Long Haul," a book in which Zvara gives us an unvarnished account of how her own struggles with addiction and depression drove a personal need to get healthy. "I've struggled with de...
May 19, 2023•38 min
This week on the Overdrive Radio podcast, a bit of a double feature. We'll hear from General Transportation and ART Trucking's Jason Decker. Regular Overdrive readers will recall reporting on some of Decker’s talk at the Mid-America Trucking Show back in March that was something of a rallying cry for a “whole of trucking” battle approach to the fight against double brokering, leaching money from the freight markets through fraud as it is: Rates are bad enough already, it’s sure, as Decker emphas...
May 12, 2023•40 min
A natural inclination for frugality is a winning quality for most anybody in the world today, and no doubt for an owner-operator. That's one of the central qualities Jay Hosty, our Trucker of the Month for April, put dead center of his now 41-year-long history of success as an owner-operator in trucking. As Overdrive News Editor Matt Cole wrote in our profile of owner-operator Hosty last week, he got his start in trucking as an owner pulling containers around New Orleans, Louisiana, at the young...
May 05, 2023•46 min
This Overdrive Radio podcast edition drops into our talk with Charlotte, N.C.-based owner-operator Deron Salmon about his brand-new Truck Networking application for iPhone and Android devices -- Truck’N for short. It's available now for a 14-day free trial with monthly subscription thereafter. Iphone: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/truck-networking/id1606433569 Android: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.semnexus.apps.truckn.truckn The app’s origin story stems from a void Salmon fe...
Apr 28, 2023•30 min
