Caroline (00:35.97)

Welcome to This Week in Trucking, the podcast that tells you what you need to know for the week in the trucking market. My name is Caroline. I’m here with Gervir. How’s it going Gervir?

Gurvir Singh (00:57.782)

doing pretty good. The weather is getting better, it’s cooler, I’m enjoying it and I think summer is coming to an end. How about you? How’s your day going?

Caroline (01:08.216)

I’m doing well. I’m here in a new space, which is pretty cool at the Grand Rapids Chambers of Commerce. Shout out to them. And how’s your dad doing? Is he out or is his truck still in the shop?

Gurvir Singh (01:21.686)

finally out. He finally took a load yesterday to Georgia. He took his truck to one of those shops where they did something wrong and he ended up spending six weeks at a Kenworth shop. He never told them. He took his truck to this cheaper shop and they did something wrong. But yeah, he ended up wasting about six weeks. More like a vacation at home then.

Caroline (01:23.383)

Nice.

Wow. Well, vacation for him, for somebody else, that might be make or break for a business. That’s crazy that a decision like that can cost you so much. Like going cheaper or going just unknown, maybe not even cheaper, but just dealing with people that you don’t know or can’t necessarily trust to do a good job on your truck can cost you so much.

Gurvir Singh (02:15.638)

Yeah, trucks are complicated these days, Like the new technologies and lot of mechanics don’t know how to work on them, you know? So it’s one of those things. Sometimes it’s great to go to a cheaper mechanic if it’s a simple thing like tires and brakes and stuff like that. sometimes it’s better to go to the actual dealership and just pay a little bit extra. But luckily everything was covered by a warranty. So yeah, he’s good.

Caroline (02:40.312)

That’s good. That’s good news. All right. Let’s talk about diesel prices. So we’re talking about diesel prices today. We’re also going to talk about the freight market and we’re going to talk about some updates in safety. There’s a big safety check next week and a big case that people can learn from. So the on highway diesel fuel price for the nation as of August 19th is 368 .8, which is down from a week ago and down

from this time last year, down from this time last year by 70 cents. So that’s looking really good. I know that rates maybe aren’t looking amazing right now, but diesel is down 70 cents a gallon overall. so that’s actually, maybe the picture doesn’t look so dire for folks right now because costs are also lower.

Gurvir Singh (03:32.226)

Yeah, diesel is so low. I doubt it’s going to stay around here. I don’t expect it to go any lower. I know earlier this year I was saying, hey, can we get to 350? I think this is the closest that we’ve gotten, think, 368. But I think expect diesel to go up a little bit now. It’s come down a lot, 70 cents from last year. last year the freight economy was worse and diesel was bad also. This year at least there’s some relief there. So yeah, diesel is doing decent.

Caroline (04:00.12)

Definitely. Almost down. So this is pretty amazing. West Coast less California. Diesel is down by almost 90 cents per gallon. owner operators, trucking business owners out there, drivers, it’s looking really good compared to last year and even just down from last week a couple of cents pretty much across the board. So what can we say about the freight market this week?

Gurvir Singh (04:27.422)

Yeah, so the freight market before we get into the top freight markets, this time usually is the lowest and the worst in the second half of the year, right? Like post -July 4th, I think mid -July things start to wind down and sort of get slower. August is not a great month for freight post -July 4th. So, and that’s what we’re seeing, Spot market rates have come down.

Caroline (04:38.285)

Mm.

Gurvir Singh (04:55.074)

And if you look at the DAT data, the spot market rates are down across all modes, van, flatbed, and reefer. Rejection rate is currently hovering around 4 .5. In the first two weeks of July, it was around 6 and 1 half. So rejection rate is down about 2%, as expected, by the way. And DAT loads are up from last week compared to this week by about half a percent. But last week we saw a big drop in terms of load count being reduced. So we’re just slightly up from last week, essentially no change. Overall, August is a slow month. Things have gone down a little bit. But I think things overall are looking pretty good for the remaining of this year. I think post July 4th, people are thinking the market is gonna tank. Even be worse than what we’re seeing right now, but it didn’t. It’s still in a decent condition considering that August is usually the slow month. But I think rejection rates are expected to rise between 8 to 12 % by November, December. Again, first two weeks of July, people felt really good about the freight market. Again, the rejection rate was around 6 .5%. Imagine what would happen if the rejection rates hit like 8 or 9%, 10 % as a lot of people are expecting in December.

Caroline (05:49.356)

Is that largely because of the holiday or did something was something happening in the freight market that earlier last month things were looking better?

Gurvir Singh (06:29.922)

Just because of the holiday July 4th, a lot of people want to get everything sort of, you know, out the gate. We’ve also seen a lot of churn, right? Just a lot of capacity loss, right? That has contributed to it. We’re getting slower and slower, by the way, in terms of capacity being lost. We’re still losing capacity, but it’s much less than previous months and last year. Mainly the driver of this, you know, the freight market is being stable and a little bit more inflated than last year. It’s because a lot of capacity has left. We haven’t actually seen a huge increase in loads in the market. I think that will start happening once we see a September rate cuts. Again, it’s expected that the Fed will cut rates in September by about a quarter percent. So we have three meetings left this year. Yeah, interest rates. No. Yeah.

Caroline (07:14.092)

And you’re talking about interest rates right there, right? Like not freight rates, right? Not rate per mile, but interest rates. that’s, that’s pretty good news for everybody. That should stimulate the economy a little bit, and that should mean more loads. Is that kind of the logic behind that?

Gurvir Singh (07:25.164)

Yeah.

Exactly, exactly. So one of the things that we look at is manufacturing index, whether that is going up and increasing. It’s not because a lot of companies and a lot of major corporations are just waiting for the interest rate cuts. Right. I think we’re to see one in September. There’s there’s three meetings in total this year. think September, October and then December. I think we should see about point seven five percent cuts. And that changes a lot for a lot of corporations and manufacturing activity. I think that is the guess that, hey, once the interest rates come down. Every time we get [a decrease in the] interest rate, it’s going to actually increase activity. So could we start seeing more loads in the market? Housing market will start doing better. Manufacturing market would do better. And will that increase the supply of loads? And with the capacity being churned in the last year and a half, two years, and the load count finally started going up, can we expect a real turn? Everybody’s now saying that we are at the inflection point, right?

Whether those are public companies, Freightwaves, a lot of people are stating that we have sort of gone through the worst and things have started moving up. They’re just moving up very, very slowly. Again, a lot of variables. Interest rate cuts are happening, elections, hurricane season. Who knows when can we see like a huge swing going up? But I’m pretty bullish on trucking, I think for the next six months to a year. So let’s see.

Caroline (08:50.42)

All right, let’s see. And let’s check out some of the hottest markets for the top three equipment types. So we’ve got dry van here. Looks like most of the hot markets are either in the Northern Midwest here in North Dakota, Minnesota, Michigan, South Dakota. You’ve got some hot markets here for dry van. And as it has been for about a month now, I would say mostly pop markets in California, Nevada.

but especially Ontario, California, Los Angeles, and then you’ve got a couple of hot markets here in the Midwest as well, Indiana and Montana, as well as Illinois. and then just the Southern tip of Texas. So McAllen Texas is looking pretty hot for the dry van market this week. If we look at reefer, it looks like a lot of hot markets out here. I looked at this at the beginning of the week as well. [We] have a weekly newsletter for people who want to know where the hottest markets are for each of these type of equipment. And so if you’re interested in that, check it out at our website, bobtail .com or write to us at hello at bobtail .com if you want access to that. But you can see some hot markets here in the Pacific Northwest, again on the East or the West Coast and the Northern Midwest in the Dakotas.

We’ve got Michigan, Minnesota, and then some in Illinois, Indiana, and then actually down here south in Arkansas. We’ve also got northern Texas is looking pretty good, north central Texas, Amarillo, and Lubbock, Texas. Florida is very, very cold for both dry van and reefer, as well as pretty much all of the East Coast is really cold right now.

And then if we take a look at flatbed, this is sort of the same story. It looks like some of these markets are actually cooling down and nothing else is really heating up too much. But most of the profitability for flatbed is in some markets in Texas, some markets in the Midwest, and some in the South. So we’ve got Jackson, Mississippi, places like in Kentucky, Tennessee, Southern Indiana, and Montana.

What have you heard from your folks, your friends, your family who are in the industry and have different equipment types? What are they experiencing in the market right now?

Gurvir Singh (11:29.143)

Yeah, mixed feelings. think a lot of them feel that things have gotten better this year and they are noticing things are getting a little bit better and that’s not a lot, but they’re just experiencing small improvements, right? They love our newsletter, a few carries that I’ve spoken to, you they love that they’re able to see which markets are hot. yeah, most of the circle that I have are in Dryban and Reefer.

They’re feeling a little bit optimistic. But a lot of them were under a lot of stress, Like this was, they didn’t have much of a runway left. Surviving these last two years were pretty tough and a lot of the savings are gone from people. So also it was a bit concerning that, hey, things need to really start improving like now or in the next few months for them to sort of survive in this business, right? People especially that have been in the business for a long, long time and hopefully we see that improvement soon. But overall optimistic, that was a good thing.

Caroline (12:35.126)

Awesome. All right. Well, let’s get into some of the stories that we wanted to share today. Why don’t you go first, Skirvir? I think you’re going to share about some safety issues that came to light for a carrier earlier this week.

Gurvir Singh (12:53.056)

Yeah, I wanted to share the story because as a trucking company owner at one point running a fleet of trucks, I knew I had drivers that, I mean, at that time we were using paper logs, right? And people used to change log books to deliver a load or get a little bit, one extra load a week, try to get one extra load in the week to earn a little bit more cash. But now we’re in the world of e -logs, right? ELDs and everything gets tracked. And this particular owner… from Westfield Transport pled guilty to falsifying driver logs that was linked to a 2019 crash that killed seven motorcyclists. And now at that point, things really quickly change to a criminal activity. And now there’s a potential prison and a jail time. I mean, he’s looking to face about 15 years.

And the thing that it reminded me of was that sometimes we don’t think about these things when we’re sort of changing logs. I know there are logs out there that you can change, even today. There’s always going to be hacks in the industry. But I kind of want to just put it out there that be careful. If something like this happens, such a horrific event, you are just not facing a financial penalty. This could literally mean that

You could potentially go to jail and prison for a really long time if something like this happens. And at that time when we’re doing it, we’re worried about that extra thousand bucks, 1500 bucks, 2000 bucks. But the consequences can be huge if something like this happens because when there’s an accident and if there’s a death that is involved, whether it’s the state, the authorities will look at everything.

Caroline (14:22.829)

Right.

Gurvir Singh (14:43.746)

From the driver’s text messages. Was he on the phone? Was he on TikTok, Instagram? What was the phone data telling us? What are other people telling us? What is the ELD data telling us? Was the ELD data altered? I mean, everything is looked at in a very detailed way. And you just don’t wanna be involved in something like that, right? Especially when a death is involved. So lessons for trucking companies in this is make sure you have strict compliance. Make sure you’re not authorizing…any falsifications of logs in any way. Even if you’re instructing your dispatcher to do it, you will be held responsible, not your employee, right? Make sure you have transparent operations, make sure you talk about these things and tell your drivers why it’s important to run legal. This is again to protect them as well. Make sure you have driver monitoring and those kinds of technologies available if you’re running a bigger fleet. Make sure you’re focusing on training and awareness.

And ethical practices, right? Because if something like this happens, you know, it really opens you up for every single detail in the operation. So this was a story that I wanted to share and bring it up with everyone, especially for folks that are running fleet of trucks, of how one thing can lead to a really drastic and a devastating situation. And now, you know, this guy’s facing potentially up to 15 years in prison.

Caroline (16:03.296)

Right. And if you have all of those things in place, you might not be able to a hundred percent stop a tragedy from happening, but you might be able to stop a tragedy from growing and, you know, tragedy on top of tragedy on top of tragedy. Right. So people lost their lives. It’s already a tragedy, right. And, there’s already an enormous impact on that community and enormous impact on families.

Don’t make it worse than it’s going to be because accidents can happen to anyone. Like you can be the safest driver in the world and it can still be, you can still have a tragedy happen. And, and if you don’t have everything in line, another thing on top of logs is your drug and alcohol compliance. That is super important. Very first thing that happens in an investigation after an accident is

Gurvir Singh (16:45.25)

Yeah, 100%.

Caroline (17:02.86)

Were they on the clearing house? Was the driver in the clearing house? Did they have any logs or issues against them in that clearing house before you hired them? Did you do that check? Are they registered in your drug and alcohol program, testing program? So.

Gurvir Singh (17:19.554)

Yeah, did you get the drug test done within 24 hours after the after the driver was involved and actually you’ve got to know compliance rules and regulations because You know, especially when there’s so many attorneys and legal sides involved They’re looking for one screw up right even though let’s say let’s just say that in this case the falsifying box actually did not lead to to an accident right maybe with something else but still they’re gonna find that reason…

Caroline (17:23.381)

After an accident.

Gurvir Singh (17:48.318)

This is the cause actually, right? And it’s all about who’s gonna argue what point in the court, right? And you just don’t wanna be putting yourself in that legal liability, right? So you wanna have everything, if you have everything in order, then you’re much more safer. At least you’re preventing any prison time, right? And it’s a financial sort of a question then. But no, these things are really, really important.

Caroline (19:10.648)

Yeah, so definitely compliance, super important. We have a really good episode. Actually, not of the podcast, but it was an event that we did with Sandeep Singh, who has a company called Deep Compliance. He’s an expert on compliance, ran compliance for a big carrier for a long time, and now has his own company advising carriers on compliance. Definitely go check that out. We will link it in the description. And something else to keep in mind for next week is that there is going to be an inspection blitz by the CVSA. So this is next week is break safety week that takes place every year, usually in the last week of August. And they are focusing on brake lining and pad condition.

Obviously they’re going to check everything. So it’s going to be just a normal inspection, but there’s going to be sort of heightened awareness of the inspectors on brakes and lining and pad condition. So one of the most frequent violations of out of service violations is brake systems. And it’s really important that drivers and owners of companies have this locked in all of the maintenance that they need to have done on brakes because it can put you out of service really quickly if something is going wrong. I wonder if you have any experience with these inspection blitz happening when you owned a carrier or a

Gurvir Singh (20:51.746)

Yeah, I used to be scared because it can really affect your scores and which affects your insurance. A lot of the times we’re like, hey, we’re going to park this week. We’re not going to go out because a lot of the times, you know, they’re looking for reasons to kind of even your you’re almost close and stuff, you know. Yeah, they got their numbers and I’m sure they have their quotas and stuff. So a lot of the times, you know, we would like obviously weeks before, like at least a week to 10 days before we’re telling our drivers that, hey, this is coming up. We’re doing the inspections ourselves. If you’re going to be out on the road, sometimes you can’t afford, especially these days to park your trucks. But you want to make sure you’re getting ahead of this and getting prepared for this. Talk to your fleet managers if you have them. If you are the fleet manager and you’re the owner, then do those inspections yourself. And know about the regulations and what they’re going to be looking for in terms of your brakes and tires and everything. I want to make sure you get those things in order. Because out of services can be expensive. Not immediately, but when the renewal comes on insurance, you can see a 10%,

That’s how you pay for bad safety record. It will never bite you right at the moment, right? It’s just another violation. It’s just a piece of paper. But when that renewal comes, it does cost you a lot. So you want to make sure that you’re thinking of that. know, human psychology, we don’t really care about the cost down the line, right? Hence, we tend to make these mistakes, you know?

But that’s one thing that a trucker should keep in mind. Am I preventing future costs from going up? And this could definitely lead to that.

Caroline (22:21.856)

Yeah, absolutely. All right, let’s get into one of our listener comments that we had last week. We had a video that we shared with Adam Wingfield where I was interviewing him about all things trucking, small carriers, advice for them. He had a lot of really great things to share. One of the things that we got to talking about was autonomous technology. And I’m not just talking about autonomous driving vehicles, although we did talk about that as well.

But Adam had a really interesting perspective on this. He is of the mind that autonomous driving is going to take a very, very long time for the technology to actually get to a place where it’s going to be safe and effective to have autonomous vehicles. And that autonomous technology is actually better adapted to situations with more controlled environments. So he was talking about yards, yard jockeys, loading docks, things like that.

that actually lends itself pretty well to automation because they’re much more controlled environments without a ton of traffic going past, right? You don’t have individual vehicles or other drivers to worry about or as many other drivers to worry about necessarily. And someone commented on our video, nope, all of this autonomous technology, you’re just asking for trouble when you expect a brainless machine to do a job that requires

brain function and human judgment. wondering what your perspective is on this, Gervir, what are you thinking about when you see the news coming out about autonomous technology and trucking or logistics industry in general?

Gurvir Singh (24:05.122)

Yeah, I mean, I’ve experienced some of this technology. I don’t know if this person has used to GPT and other things. And I mean, these are pretty amazing technologies. They’re only going to continue to get better. Right. yeah, I mean, I’m with technology. I think you’re going to see some tasks that humans do right now go away because some of these AI tools can just do it better. And by the way, know, autonomous trucking is also partially, you know, AI. A lot of it is actually AI that does this self -driving. So yeah, I disagree with this person and I’m always gonna side with technology because it improves over time and it only gets better. I also agree with, I think the applications where you’re gonna see it initially is going to be yards in very controlled environments, Loading docks, I think you’re already seeing some by the way. I’ve already seen some videos of loading docks where…

You already seen this in warehouses. There’s like total robots in a warehouse that sort of shifts the products and load the trucks. Those are easy to do in a very controlled environment. It doesn’t require regulation. The thing why I think it’s going to take time for trucks to like fully self -driving trucks is because you got to get all 48 states on board. What if Pennsylvania doesn’t allow and Maryland does, right? And you got to go through Pennsylvania to deliver a load. I think there’s, it’s going to be a regulatory issue.

Caroline (25:19.724)

So you think it’s more of a regulatory issue than a technology issue.

Gurvir Singh (25:30.146)

And that’s what’s going to take the longest and technology wise it’s an issue as well again with lot of these technologies getting it 90 % right is easier getting it 95 % right is easier to the extra 5 % always takes a like long time Right. It takes actually much much longer to like really perfect the technology But I don’t doubt I think it’s gonna continue to get better and better. Maybe we’re I don’t know the times like maybe we’re 20 years away Maybe we’re 10. We were 30 40 years away. I can’t comment on the time, but I know it’s gonna take a lot. But it’ll get there eventually.

Caroline (26:05.41)

I think you’re right. And I think the question is always, okay, what is possible now versus what is going to be possible in the future and when that’s going to be possible. So think what this person is saying is that the technology isn’t there yet to do this completely autonomously. You need human beings in the yard. You need them at warehouses. You need them at docks to make judgment calls that autonomous technology can’t make. And I think that that’s true, but I also think that they’re not mutually exclusive. I don’t think that you have a hundred percent autonomous machines. And from one day to the next, you have all manual and then all autonomous. And it’s the same thing that we’re seeing with autonomous vehicles. I don’t think that it’s going to change from one day to the next where you have complete autonomy of a vehicle, just driving downnthe highway. I don’t think that that’s realistic. I think it’s much more realistic that this autonomous technology get incorporated into existing assets over time. And I think you’re going to see that.

Gurvir Singh (27:10.786)

Yeah, you’re gonna see things like driver assist. Like a truck still can do a lot of it, like 80 % on its own, but then you’ll just have a driver in there to sort of monitor. Let’s see what happens at that point. Yeah.

Caroline (27:22.232)

Right, and that percentage is going to change. Right? I mean, you already see, to some extent, the shift from a manual transmission to an automatic transmission is part of that trajectory. Right? And so if before, in a manual truck, you were doing 100 % of the labor and the truck is just useless without the driver making decisions about it, now maybe we’re at 20 % autonomous, 80% driver, [which] has made that job a lot easier, has made that job a lot more comfortable and more accessible to a lot of different people. And I think you’re just going to see that percentage shift over the next 50 years, maybe until it gets closer to a hundred.

Gurvir Singh (27:54.583)

I think generally people like to reject the technology, especially in trucking. Like, yeah, that can happen. I used to have a driver who was like, yeah, I’m not driving an automatic truck. I’ve been used to manual for such a long time. Then he drove it for like six months and he’s like, yeah, I like this better. And now you see a lot more automatic trucks than manual, right?

But yeah, think it’s like you said, it’s very similar to that at slowly. It’s gonna happen slowly. It’s not gonna be overnight. It’s not like tomorrow the jobs are gonna be gone. It’s gonna happen gradually over the next 30, 40 years.

Caroline (28:37.548)

Right. All right. Well, thanks for joining me again, Gurvir. I’m excited to keep talking about these and exploring these topics with you every other week. And we have some really exciting interviews coming up that are going to get published in a couple of weeks here. So look out for interviews with people like DIY Semi and Victor Newton from the Box Truck channel.

Gurvir Singh (29:03.882)

Awesome, excited. Everyone, have a good week. I’m bullish on trucking. Stay positive. Things are going to get better in the next few months. And drive safe if you’re out there. Be safe on the roads.