Overdrive Radio

Overdrive
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The Overdrive Radio podcast is produced by Overdrive magazine, the Voice of the American Trucker for 60-plus years. Host Todd Dills -- with a supporting cast among Overdrive editors, contributors and others -- presents owner-operator business leading lights, interviews with extraordinary independent truckers and small fleet owners, and plenty in the way of trucking business and regulatory news and views. Access an archive of all episodes of Overdrive Radio going back more than a decade via this link: http://overdriveonline.com/overdrive-radio

  1. 1d ago

    'Our Punjabi brothers': Reflections on 2017 10-4 ELD protests, non-domiciled CDL crackdown

    With this episode for Oct. 5, 2026, we're marking the big 10-4 day over the weekend with a look back at the 2017 ELD mandate protests that would inspire the very founding of the TenFour D.C. truck show and advocacy event on the Mall, just concluded for the '26 installment: https://overdriveonline.com/15836570 With the post that features the podcast at OverdriveOnline.com, find our own Long Haul Paul Marhoefer’s lookback on the D.C. events with a small fleet owner who was there, Mintu Pandher, owner of the Akal Energy fleet and truck stop, headquartered in Wyoming: https://overdriveonline.com/15836627 As Marhoefer noted of the time, the D.C. protest events in particular reverberated well beyond the city -- it was a moment when “good ol’ boy truckers joined forces with drivers from every race and creed to protest the mandate. Groups that hadn’t really spoken much before were in alignment." Smal fleet owner-operator Mintu Pandher was among those speaking for truckers in D.C. that year, his pristine blue 2016 Pete staged outside the White House with a nearby sign that said, simply, “The independent trucker: We will not go away.” Looking back on it, in some ways Pandher sees that protest event not exactly as futile, but possibly mistargeted, as you'll hear in the podcast. Yet there was a clear outcome, and not just of advocacy conducted in Washington, D.C. Way out West in California, the protest showing by Punjabi-American truckers was absolutely huge, inspiring newfound respect with the D.C. event as well, as then-trucker Binda Atwal told us for the Over the Road podcast you’ll hear today, too, originally published in 2020 and hostd by Long Haul Paul. As mentioned: **Coverage of ELD protest outcomes from the time: https://overdriveonline.com/14893319 **Mintu Pander's Akal Energy fleet: https://overdriveonline.com/14893826 **More of the Marhoefer-hosted Over the Road 2020 podcast series: https://overdriveonline.com/tag/over-the-road-podcast

    'Our Punjabi brothers': Reflections on 2017 10-4 ELD protests, non-domiciled CDL crackdown

  2. Sep 29

    Take control of diesel quality: New study reveals huge fuel performance variance across U.S.

    "You've got to do something for your own fuel, or accept the consequences of not." --Howes lead chemist Jed Talbot How do you know that what you’re getting from your neighborhood No. 2 diesel pump is quality fuel? The $6-and-more-per-gallon price isn’t going to tell you much, that’s for sure, and chemist Jed Talbot is on a mission to make sure it’s abundantly clear. For this week’s Overdrive Radio podcast, we're dropping in with Talbot and Howes Products marketing lead Rich Guida for plenty detail about a brand-new diesel study showing wide variance in performance characteristics across the United States. Early this year during the winter period, Howes sent three members of the company's long-running trucking-living-legend Hall of Fame out across the country -- Canada, too -- to collect diesel fuel samples straight from the pump: **Trucker-songwriter Tony Justice, well-known for longtime Overdrive Radio listeners: https://overdriveonline.com/15832127 **Owner-operator Kate Whiting, known for her 1970s pristine W900 "Cherry Pie": https://overdriveonline.com/15542803 **"Trucker Josh" Giesbrecht, likewise an owner-operator with a huge Youtube following himself: https://overdriveonline.com/15670149 Back at the lab, Talbot and team then tested each sample for a variety of characteristics -- cloud point and cold filter plugging point, lubricity, biodesel and water content, flash point. Measurements varied widely. Full results via https://howesproducts.com/blog/article/diesel-fuel-test-what-15-diesel-pump-samples-revealed All samples were labeled No. 2 diesel, yet some should have said something different, according to Talbot. One of the samples had a whopping 6% of biodiesel in it, and should have been labeled B5, for instance, and in terms of water content results weren’t much better, with big implications for wear parts in the fuel system. Fuel filters, too. "Water in fuel, particularly in very tight tolerances," said Talbot, is "like molecular sandpaper. It's not good. It's really abrasive, particularly under pressure," also contributing to microbial growt. "So microbes don't grow in diesel. It won't support them. But if you've got a lot of suspended water now you've got a place for microbes to live all fat and happy." What can you do about it? Listen on for ways to establish a baseline with treatments, in use by a majority of owner-operators in Overdrive’s audience year-round, according our research. "When you think about the journey of fuel from the refinery to when you're pulling the handle," Rich Guida said, "it's on railcars. It's stored in places for a little while. Maybe it sits in warm temperature and then gets gets to a cold temperature and then it's in a truck traveling overland. So there's tons of ways water" and other contaminants could be introduced. Various in lubricity measures, too, while none were truly out-of-spec with an HFRR wear scar above the standard, the variation was huge. In that case, the lower the better. Treatment can help reduce that measure, offering potential for extended life for injectors, fuel pumps, cylinder heads all. "So it really boils down to this," Guida said. "It's kind of a crapshoot with what you're getting. And the best way to avoid that is to, to treat consistently and get into a routine."

    Take control of diesel quality: New study reveals huge fuel performance variance across U.S.

  3. Sep 21

    Lujan v. FMCSA: The non-domiciled CDL ban in court, full oral arguments

    Arbritrary. Capricious. Those two words are a principal basis for owner-operator Jorge Rivera Lujan and fellow petitioners’ challenge to FMCSA’s non-domiciled CDL rule. The rule itself is strongly supported by most Overdrive readers, and the petitioners’ challenge saw significant action in the D.C. federal appeals court last week Tuesday, September 15. Tip of the hat to Overdrive’s own Alex Lockie for this early coverage of the discussions, laying out the reasoning plaintiffs' attorneys utilized to argue the arbritrary and capricious nature of the rule in efforts to knock it down entirely: https://overdriveonline.com/15834913 He's done a voluminous amount of work around the non-domiciled CDL phenomenon since the full extent of those licenses for foreign non-immigrant visitors to the United States became known last year. He did the research, offering this first attempt at a comprehensive public accounting of active non-domiciled lincenses last year: https://overdriveonline.com/15750917 And since then, with FMCSA’s moves to restrict eligibility last Fall, Lockie’s covered in-depth the legal ramifications as challenges emerged from non-domiciled operators themselves, including the named plaintiff on this case in Jorge Rivera Lujan. Regular Overdrive Radio listeners here have heard from Lujan directly, including this past Spring at the Mid-America Trucking Show. The owner-operator is a Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals recipient, and he’s been in the U.S. since he was a child, yet remains a non-citizen. Today on the podcast, sit in on the discussion amongst who argued last Thursday on his behalf, and in defense of FMCSA, before a three-judge panel in the D.C. federal appeals court. We learned a good bit from FMCSA’s attorney from the Justice Department, Simon Jerome, about the history of the non-domiciled CDL rules for non-citizens. Jerome noted the "safety gap" in foreign driving records the agency lived with until last year, when they sought the change after a series of crashes by non-domiciled drivers. Fundamentally, as suggested above, the case hinges on what FMCSA did or didn’t do to adequately justify the rule that strips an estimated 194,000 non-citizen drivers from CDL eligibility. In the podcast, hear the crosstalk in full. It makes for a fascinating window on legal proceedings at work, with the fate of FMCSA’s rule change hanging in the balance. As mentioned in the podcast, a timeline of events that led to the court proceeding last week: https://www.overdriveonline.com/15833346

    Lujan v. FMCSA: The non-domiciled CDL ban in court, full oral arguments

  4. Sep 14

    Reliability, service over 6M-plus miles: Owner-operator Dee Zeeman, Trucker of the Month

    Off the top of the podcast, the voice of Overdrive’s August Trucker of the Month Dee Zeeman, in a business partnership with wife, Bev, in the back office and hauling for now close to a decade now with authority as White Pine Transport. The name’s a combination of a couple different horse farms he remembers from his youth growing up in Utah, and as he tells up top, a name that just worked. Yet for this installment of our Trucker of theYearr contenders’ series of podcasts, we’ll emphasize, of course, that’s there’s much more to a one-truck business than the name. The Zeemans have made real strides as independents in this their second such tour through business following their first in the 1990s. They truly follow through on promises made, doing the hard work and doing it right, in spite of all the challenges the business and life itself throw at them. "We've developed a reputation, and we really try to get stuff there when it's supposed to be there," Bev noted. If there is ever a problem, "we're old-school," Dee said. "We believe in commuinication" early and often. Challenges have been real over what’s been a roughly 6M-mile, 40-plus-year career behind the wheel for Dee since he got his chauffer’s license in the early 1980s. Roughly six years ago, he suffered what would ultimately be a mild stroke, in fact, and attributes a quick recovery, back on the horse in just several days, to more than the fact that Bev got him to the hospital near immediately. "Intestinal fortitude," he said. "I wasn't going to let it get me down. To put it simply, I cowboy'd up and fought through it." It wasn't the first time the pair have worked together through a big life change,as you’ll hear in their story. The Zeemans were named Overdrive's August Truckers of the Month, the recognition putting them in running for the 2026 Overdrive Trucker of the Year award. Read our first feature story about them via this link: https://overdriveonline.com/15833020 Get your own business in the running through the end of this month: https://overdriveonline.com/toptrucker

    Reliability, service over 6M-plus miles: Owner-operator Dee Zeeman, Trucker of the Month

  5. Sep 6

    Fraud and cargo theft info sharing, White House task force: Freight crime in spotlight

    Off the top of this Overdrive Radio edition, the voice of Atlantic Logistics CEO Rob Hooper talking about trust, responding specifically to a question about whether all the shipper, broker and carrier friction in today’s freight markets is driving wedges between the relationships. Regular listeners well know what we're talking about -- cyber fraud and identity verificaitons pingpongig back and forth between the parties, slowing freight bookings as the opposite, distrust, breeds all around. Our big broker-and-carrier-vetting survey this year saw 66% of owner-operators name principally negative impacts after the rise in carrier vetting platforms specifically. Among them was roughly 1 in every 10 survey respondent owner-operators who called out as principal impact the wedge of distrust increased scrutiny continued to drive between them and brokerage partners. Access the full survey results here: https://overdriveonline.com/15829986 In this week's Labor Day edition of the podcast, a look into the FTR Transportation Intelligence conference, an annual affair last week where late in the day Tuesday a rep from the National Motor Frieght Traffic Association, Joe Ohr, and the one and only Dale Prax, FreightValidate founder and now a strategic advisor to Truckstop.com, joined Hooper for this talk through issues of revenue fraud like double-brokering, increasingly sophisticated cargo theft rings, and what was on everybody’s mind Tuesday that first day of September after Departments of Transportation and Homeland Security announced the new White House fraud task force. Prax gives some background on it from his perspective, and you can read a whole lot more about it from Overdrive's own Alex Lockie’s in follow-on reports: **Initial announcement of CDL school sweeps, and task force: https://overdriveonline.com/15833705 **Targeted schools respond: https://overdriveonline.com/15834186 Prax calls back to 2023 when Vice President J.D. Vance was part of a group of Senators pushing for the idea of a fraud task force as a kind of “cop on the block” to police double-brokering and ID-theft-enabled revenue fraud, cargo theft by fraud, and the many other forms these interstate freight crimes take. Some credit can go to longtime transport attorney Hank Seaton for proferring the very idea of a task force years earlier, and for the current administration for advancing it in the current form: https://overdriveonline.com/15539812 Of course, as Prax also acknowledges, much of the meat of the announcement and subsequent press attention has been angled straight on policing CDL schools and immigration through English requirements and the like. Prax seems to read it as a way to garner more attention to the Dalilah’s Law legislation stalled in Congress and that would codify the FMCSA’s almost total ban of non-domiciled CDLs for non-citizens. The challenge against that rule is set for oral arguments in federal court just more than a week away at this point. Whether it will remain stading hangs in the balance. Yet given Vance’s lead involvement on the task force, and the demonstrated concern expressed by the Senator in past over longstanding cargo-theft and revenue-fraud issues, here's hope we can expect at least more intense prosecutorial footing on those fronts in the coming years. There’s plenty all truckers and other parties in legit freight transactions can do actively, too, as you’ll hear from Joe Ohr in particular in the panel. NMFTA has new threat-reporting and information sharing tools available that are free to participate in, detailed here. **New NMFTA portal: https://nmfta.org/standards/cybersecurity/cybersecurity-resources/nmfta-threat-report-portal/ **Overdrive's guide to cargo theft prevention: https://overdriveonline.com/15769312

    Fraud and cargo theft info sharing, White House task force: Freight crime in spotlight

  6. Aug 24

    Predatory parking-lot-trap truck tows back in headlines: Turn state/local rules to your favor

    A tip of the hat off the top of this week’s Overdrive Radio edition to our social media coordinator Jazzmin Campbell, who shared yet another towing mishap occurring in the city of Charlotte, North Carolina. It bears all the hallmarks of a parking-lot trap, the driver reporting a bill for upward of $9,000 in fees after he said he exceeded a time limit at the lot on Sunset Road by about a half hour -- mind you, during the big winter storm that hit the city with record snowfall back at the tail end of January. Judging by the reporting from the Charlotte TV station that had the story first, it’s unclear where exactly on Sunset Road in North Charlotte the lot in question was, but it’s certainly not the first time we’ve picked up on towing and botting shenanigans in that city and surrounding areas: WSOC-TV's report: https://www.wsoctv.com/news/local/charlotte-trucker-hit-with-9000-bill-after-exceeding-parking-limit-by-30-minutes/7IFIEUXET5GLXFZMQCTK4T7DY4/ Tow companies in nearby Gastonia, N.C., to the west and south of Charlotte may well have originated the region’s parking-lot-trap dynamics, where in past booting was quite common: https://www.overdriveonline.com/14894396 Just last year, the state of North Carolina explicitly banned the booting of commercial vehicles, regular readers will remember, yet private-tow tactics for parking enforcement clearly remain available to towing companies: https://overdriveonline.com/15749716 2025 Small Fleet Champ semi-finalist Mark Ledford’s small fleet early this year experienced a similar incident in Charlotte he and his driver were able to work their way out of utilizing the very terms of Charlotte’s towing ordinance: https://www.charlottenc.gov/cmpd/Community-Involvement/Local-Ordinances If the lot or the tow company in question violates signage and other regs there, that could be a very simple way out of an incident with involvement of the authorities -- if the truck hasn't already been towed, of course. And listen on for small fleet owner Robbie Turnage’s story of a tow gone bad -- and how he was able to, similarly, turn state law in Pennsylvania to his favor. Turnage’s tale is part of the roundtable conversation we conducted just prior to the 2025 Small Fleet Champ awards presentation at the National Association of Small Trucking Companies annual conference last year. We’re right in the middle of the 2025 entries research and judging round -- with announcements coming soon of the full slate of semi-finalist small fleets, certainly an exemplary, diverse group of owners this year. For now, dig into this conversation with Turnage and his Turnage & Sons milk-tanker fleet, Scott Denmark and Scott Cruthis of Thomasville Funiture Xpress, Wes Oberman of Oberman Logistics, and the small fleet named for and owned by Clifford Hay. As mentioned in the podcast: **Overdrive’s guide to beating back outrageous tow invoices: https://overdriveonline.com/15737212 **Our Small Fleet Champ updates with all of the owners featured in the re-air portion of the podcast from November 2025: https://overdriveonline.com/small-fleet-champ

    Predatory parking-lot-trap truck tows back in headlines: Turn state/local rules to your favor

  7. Aug 17

    From 'Hot Shootin' to true driver support: Owner-op Jeffrey Crise's second run toward a small fleet

    This week’s Overdrive Radio features Overdrive Senior Editor Matt Cole's talk with our July Trucker of the Month. Based just outside Baltimore, owner-operator Jeffrey Crise runs open-deck freight, loading equipment quite often out of the port there and, as Cole wrote in his story late last month, the owner’s smack dab in the middle of a business fresh start: https://overdriveonline.com/15831345 Care to guess how the "Crise" last name is pronounced? He and Overdrive Editor Todd Dills had a bit of a laugh over that this past weekend as he worked to put this episode together. It's not like "crease," but another familiar word. Jeffrey "Cries," like a baby. Yet owner-operator Crise is nonetheless quick with a little chuckle remembering his first decade-plus-long run at a small fleet. Plenty others got a little bit of a laugh out of his company name and insignia on the doors during that first run at a small fleet. "People loved it," he said of the Hot Shootin's Haulin logo, Yosemite Sam featured prominently, on the sleeper of his units. The name of the biz nodded to his start with an F450 hotshot more than a decade ago, growing to five units and drivers at its high point before tough conditions drove him to shutter the operation just a couple years ago now. Today he’s back to hotshot flatbed work, pulling himself mostly with a Ram 3500, but likewise a Pete 579 now with a driver employed and at the wheel. His drive to push toward trucking success responds to improving conditions he felt he could see after just eight months away from the road. He could have retired, he said, but past failures didn’t sit well with him -- he knew opportunity was knocking when freight markets looked like they were turning in 2025. And Crise had learned plenty along the way, of course, maintained freight contacts with both familiar brokers and direct customers in the interim, all built on past performance -- bedrock on-time delivery and consistent communication, he stressed. If you take one thing from owner-operator Jeffrey Crise’s experience, here's hope that particularly the multi-truck current and aspiring owners can really feel the energy behind a top goal of his -- to truly serve the drivers. Serve them better than he did with the prior version of his fleet. He’s feeling good about prospects for that this year, he said. There’s stll time to get your own business, or that of another owner you admire, in the running for the Trucker of the Year award 2026. We’ve got three more Trucker of the Month semi-finalists coming through October. Make a nomination, or enter your own 1-to-3-truck business, at https://OverdriveOnline.com/TopTrucker

    From 'Hot Shootin' to true driver support: Owner-op Jeffrey Crise's second run toward a small fleet

  8. Aug 11

    AI in the driver's seat? Tony Justice v. Suno, Large Cars & Guitars history, $200K charitable haul

    For this week’s edition of Overdrive Radio we're picking up with longtime trucker-songwriter and performer #TonyJustice after getting the opportunity last week to share news of the Large Cars & Guitars truck show’s big $14K haul for the Susan G. Komen foundation. That makes $200K-plus given by the show's participating truckers and sponsors to the breast cancer awareness, support, and research advocacy group over Large Cars' brief five-year history: https://overdriveonline.com/15831558 Everybody loves a big novelty check presentation, right? In case you missed it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3y-t6j0YfA8 Tune in for history of the long road toward launching the Large Cars show, consistently bringing upward of 100 trucks participating, thelast two years at the iconic Bristol Motor Speedway in Tennessee. Charitable donations aren’t the only reason Justice has been in the news at OverdriveOnline.com in recent weeks, though. He's now the lead plaintiff in a lawsuit independent recording artists like himself are bringing against the Suno AI-generated-music platform. The Justice v. Suno case alleges copyright infringement, essentially, in the process of scraping recordings to store and train the company's AI models on. Approached by attorneys, Tony Justice didn’t immediately come to the decision to get out front in the fight, but he’s clearly dedicated now, watching his trucking-music income from streaming dwindle with the proliferation of AI-generated songs flooding listening platforms. "We have tech and corporate America coming in and trampling on the little guy," he said. "Anytime I'm in a position to use my voice to fight for the little guy, I feel like I need to do that." Listen here further to Justice's reasoning, it’s not hard to let your mind wander to something closer to the center of the trucking -- just how good so-called AI is or can or will get at driving the trucks themselves. Companies like Kodiak and Aurora and so many others have trained self-driving models on the roads today, with drivers' help, in hopes to bring full automation to the task -- "AI" to your seat at the wheel. "This is how we live. This is how we support our families," he said. "We've gotta fight for it. There's too many times you hear" people complaining about this or that, but "when it comes time to do something about it, everybody goes quiet. ... People need to put in an effort doing something about it, and standing up." Justice speaks to his own motivation in the suit here, but it dovetails with trucking, too. How long before significant numbers of drivers are displaced is anybody’s guess. We’ve seen recent cases of pro drivers voicing concerns on those and other, safety grounds directly to the U.S. Department of Transportation and Congress, too. In short, the effort to raise the alarm is getting hotter: https://overdriveonline.com/15828271 Justice is clearly motivated to take up the cause of fellow independent artists like himself, on the road to protecting that talent he’s got. As his comments suggest, though, more truckers might soon be motivated to do the same with theirs. As mentioned in the podcast: **Phillip Couch's "New Testament" custom Freightliner: https://overdriveonline.com/15817421 **Justice v. Suno: https://overdriveonline.com/15830530 Subscribe to Overdrive's daily newsletter or weekly Pride & Polish newsletter for trucking news and analysis, and some of the best in custom rigs at truck shows around the country: https://bit.ly/overdrivesubscribe 77bfae20-999a-11f1-b7b7-c5a46ed3a0e3

    AI in the driver's seat? Tony Justice v. Suno, Large Cars & Guitars history, $200K charitable haul
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3.8
out of 5
27 Ratings

About

The Overdrive Radio podcast is produced by Overdrive magazine, the Voice of the American Trucker for 60-plus years. Host Todd Dills -- with a supporting cast among Overdrive editors, contributors and others -- presents owner-operator business leading lights, interviews with extraordinary independent truckers and small fleet owners, and plenty in the way of trucking business and regulatory news and views. Access an archive of all episodes of Overdrive Radio going back more than a decade via this link: http://overdriveonline.com/overdrive-radio

Information

  • Creator
    Overdrive
  • Years Active
    2013 - 2026
  • Episodes
    500
  • Rating
    Clean
  • Copyright
    © All rights reserved
  • Show Website
    Overdrive Radio

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