Welcome to This Week in Trucking, the podcast that tells you what you need to know about the freight market for the week. My name is Caroline, and today we’re going to talk about diesel prices, get a quick look at what the different freight markets look like across the country, and look at a listener comment. If you like this kind of content and you want to get more information and insight into how to better run your trucking business, go ahead and like, and subscribe, and let me know what you think about this shorter version of our podcast in the comments below.

Let’s first take a look at the different spot markets for the week.

 As a reminder, we’re always using the spotter index. This is a measure of profitability per hour. So remember that this actually doesn’t reflect the rate per mile, it’s just reflecting how much you can make in different markets per hour. And that [00:01:00] takes into account all kinds of metrics about profitability.

If you want to learn more, go to spotter.ai. But here it looks like the van market is doing really well out in California, Nevada, and Arizona with a couple of other really hot markets in Idaho and Oregon. Still have pretty strong markets up in the Northern Midwest, in Michigan Minnesota, and North Dakota, but it really is out West.

Today, where we’re seeing the most profitability, you can see that Los Angeles actually increased quite a bit as well as Portland, Oregon, in terms of profitability in the last day. If we look at reefer, we have some hot markets here out West as well in places like Oregon and Idaho, Utah, Salt Lake City looks really good for reefer as well as Ontario and Stockton, California.

Got some really good markets in Sioux Falls, South Dakota, North Dakota, and Minnesota. And here, an island out here in Arkansas. For flatbed, [00:02:00] scattered across the country today, usually we’re looking at mainly the Midwest and Southeast in this region, but we’re scattered in terms of hot markets.

Today looks like out West. You’ve got some good markets in Portland and Seattle, Michigan, Minnesota, South Dakota, as well as some places in Indiana and West Virginia, Tennessee, Memphis looks pretty good. And then out on the east coast, the southern Atlantic coast in North Carolina and South Carolina look pretty good for a flatbed.

We’ll take a look at diesel prices. Diesel prices have been going down week over week and are really far down from where they were last year, particularly in the east coast, midwest, It looks like the biggest drop in diesel prices this week came out of the Rocky Mountain region. And we are still very far below the prices that we were seeing this time last year.

So this is all good news, even though our rates haven’t gone up [00:03:00] as much as we may have liked. The drop in diesel price over time does help carriers it may or may not make up for the increase in costs, in other costs. Compared to last year, lots of people had really high insurance rates that went up this year and this may or may not even it out.

People are also experiencing different ranges of rates across the country and across time. And so this may or may not make up for that fact, but it is good news for trucking business owners when diesel prices go up. Go down and stay down.

Looking at the national spot rates. According to DAT trend lines, we’re looking at pretty flat rates per mile across van, flatbed and reefer. This really hasn’t changed much since August on an average, right? Some people will look at these rates and go, wait a minute, I’m not even getting close to this, or I’m getting way over this, right?

It really varies depending on what kind of cargo you haul. [00:04:00] What kind of equipment you have, what kind of relationships do you have with your customers? Do you have some dedicated lanes? Are you only working on the spot market? So all of this depends, all of those factors work into this average that DAT is able to find.

But typically we would see that we’d get a little bit of holiday relief. Lots of people don’t want to work on the holidays. And because there are fewer people, And fewer trucks out on the road that are available to haul loads, then rates should go up during that time. But a lot of people don’t want to work that anyway, so it might not affect you.

And then we’re coming into the low season of trucking in seasonal terms throughout the year. Most of the time, the first quarter of the year is the toughest time of the year in trucking. So make sure that if you’re able to, you’re setting aside some cash for a rainy day that you can use to get through those tough months and that you’re [00:05:00] setting yourself up for success with good relationships with customers and keeping an eye on what we’re publishing on our podcast.

So you can get even more insight into what strategies you can use to improve your business.

We got a nice listener comment from our last episode with Chase Barber at Edison Motors. So this comment says, fair disclosure, I’m a huge fan of Edison Motors, diesel slash electric trucks. So I’m biased, but my observation is that OTR should stay diesel only city dredge. can be full electric and heavy vocational trucks are the best use case for diesel electric like Edison.

Edison is a huge proponent of common sense right to repair. So their trucks are designed by mechanics using the most practical parts they can find.

I love this comment because I think it really encapsulates what we were talking about with Chase, that there are different technologies out there. Technology is changing so quickly as well. And so there are a lot of really good use cases and ways that [00:06:00] we can implement this technology in different situations, depending on the context but it is difficult to make really complex policy. And so I think a one size fits all for electrifying trucking. It just doesn’t work for the thousands of different contexts that trucks and heavy vehicles are used in. So I agree with this. I think for now, it, that’s what makes the most sense.

Keep OTR diesel, but things that are in cities that are breaking a lot that can take advantage of infrastructure that’s already available or hybrid technology. It makes a lot of sense to implement those technologies and make our environment cleaner and our drivers happier. I’m also a big fan of Edison for the same reason that they’re a big proponent of right to repair. I think that makes an industry better for everyone when you can repair what you’ve bought with the most practical components.

So totally agree with that.

If you want to keep up to date with the trucking industry and what you need to know as a small carrier doing business in this crazy world of [00:07:00] trucking, subscribe to our channel so you never miss an episode.

Thanks and drive safe.